Reworking Blood Typing in Republican China: Medical Practice, Ethnic Knowledge, and Popular Culture, 1918-1948

This article examines how knowledge of blood types was localized in China between 1918 and 1948. I argue that blood-type knowledge was not passively transplanted from the West, but actively reconstructed in response to local medical needs, nationalist discourse, and existing cultural frameworks. The article develops this argument along three lines. First, although blood typing entered modern hospitals and proved useful for transfusion medicine, its wider implementation remained constrained by uneven institutional capacity and limited state reach. Second, Chinese researchers used blood-group distribution studies first to compare Chinese and Western populations and later to investigate regional and ethnic diversity within China, thereby helping to construct a biological narrative of the Chinese nation centered on historical mixture rather than racial purity. Third, blood-type temperament theory circulated as a form of popular science and resonated with vernacular practices such as physiognomy and fortune-telling. Taken together, these developments show how scientific modernity in Republican China was reshaped through negotiation with local institutions and cultural expectations.