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Article
Knowing Individuals:
Fingerprinting, Policing,
and the Limits of
Professionalization in
1920s Beijing
Daniel Asen1
Abstract
This article examines the adoption of modern fingerprinting in early
twentieth-century China through a case study of the Fingerprint Society,
an association affiliated with the Ministry of Interior’s police academy
that was active in 1920s Beijing. The members of this association viewed
fingerprinting as both a technique that could be used to demonstrate China’s
adoption of globally accepted standards of policing and justice and a body
of academic knowledge that could form the basis for a would-be profession
of fingerprinting experts. While the Fingerprint Society ultimately failed
to accomplish its profession-building goals, its activities nonetheless shed
light on an early moment in the history of new identification practices
in China as well as on dynamics that have shaped the global history of
fingerprinting as an area of modern expert knowledge located ambiguously
between policing and science.
Keywords
professions, policing, science, Republican period, Beijing
1Rutgers University–Newark, Newark, NJ, USA
Corresponding Author:
Daniel Asen, Department of History, Rutgers University–Newark, 323 Conklin Hall,
175 University Avenue, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.
Email: daniel.asen@rutgers.edu
847646MCXXXX10.1177/0097700419847646Modern ChinaAsen
research-article2019
2 Modern China 00(0)
On November 1, 1923, the national police academy of the Republic of China
was decorated with festoons and flower arrangements for a celebratory
event.1 Instructors and students of the Advanced School for Police Officials
警官高等學校 had gathered with members of the public and journalists to
commemorate the founding of the Fingerprint Society 指紋學會, a profes-
sional association affiliated with the school’s program in fingerprinting.
Established two years earlier, this program had already trained over 90 gradu-
ates in a modified version of the Henry system of fingerprint classification, a
system for recording fingerprints used as the basis for identification registries
in police agencies across the British Empire and elsewhere around the world,
including in the identification office of Shanghai’s International Settlement.
A second class had already been enrolled, and this new group of students
comprised the bulk of the Fingerprint Society’s membership.
Much as in other countries during this period, officials in 1920s China
were beginning to reimagine policing as an occupation requiring formal edu-
cation and “scientific” methods such as those associated with crime scene
investigation, police laboratories, and new methods of individual identifica-
tion (Goddard, 1930; Cole, 2002: 199–200; Alder, 2007; Burney and
Pemberton, 2016: 103–13; Lévy, 2008: 20; Westney, 1982: 323–24, 334–36).
During the 1930s, students of Berkeley police chief August Vollmer (1876–
1955) who were employed in police education and administration under the
Nationalist government would play an important role in promoting this new
model of professional policing in China (Wakeman, 2003: 192–204). The
Advanced School for Police Officials was an earlier example of an institution
that was dedicated to developing Chinese policing along these lines.
Fingerprinting was introduced into the school’s curriculum in 1921 as part of
this effort to provide specialized training and technical knowledge to the offi-
cials who would staff China’s modern police agencies.
In a series of speeches in the afternoon of the Fingerprint Society’s com-
memorative event, the officers of this association voiced their hope that fin-
gerprinting would see greater use in China. As they were well aware, inked
impressions of hands and fingers had long been used in China as a form of
signature on agreements and other documents requiring certification by indi-
viduals, a practice that continued into the Republican period.2 Officials of the
recently fallen Qing Empire (1644–1911) had also relied upon written descrip-
tions of convicts’ fingerprints as a means of identification, alongside tattooing
and the recording of other identifying information (Waley-Cohen, 1991: 112–
14). Members of the society viewed these long-standing practices as evidence
that China had “discovered” the antecedents of modern fingerprinting many
centuries earlier, a claim that appeared in some contemporary accounts of the
history of fingerprinting that were written in European languages as well (Pan,
Asen 3
1922a; Wang Longzhang, 1926; Laufer, 1913). Nonetheless, they understood
their own form of fingerprinting knowledge (associated with the modern neol-
ogism zhiwen 指紋) to be a field that had originated in Western countries and
Japan and, even in the 1920s, remained lamentably underdeveloped in China
(Xia, 1924b). The solution, in their view, was not simply to promote the train-
ing of police officials in fingerprinting, a goal already being pursued by the
Advanced School. Rather, it was to develop fingerprinting as an area of spe-
cialized academic knowledge that, ideally, would be utilized by a professional
cadre of credentialed experts with authority over the identification work car-
ried out in Chinese police agencies.
There has been much scholarship on the rise of new legal, medical, and
other professions in early twentieth-century China. Much of this work has
focused on such groups’ establishment of professional associations and edu-
cation, assertions of authoritative knowledge and expertise, attempts to
enshrine professional privileges and protections in law, and struggles to
define boundaries of professional authority against competitors (Xu, 2001;
Johnson, 2011; Ng, 2014; Culp, U, and Yeh, 2016; Asen, 2016). Scholars
have also examined the histories of groups that played important roles in
particular occupational fields yet did not (or, usually, could not) pursue the
varied strategies that lawyers, physicians, medico-legal scientists, and other
groups used to assert authoritative professional status in urban China’s chang-
ing economy and society. Old-style midwives, commercial publishing house
staff editors, and judicial officials’ forensic body examiners were three exam-
ples of groups that carried out essential tasks yet did not achieve modern
professional authority within the divisions of labor in which they worked
(Johnson, 2011: 93–102; Culp, 2016; Asen, 2016). This is not to say that such
groups lacked specialized knowledge and skill or that the importance of their
work remained unrecognized. It simply means that these groups did not rede-
fine their areas of work as exclusive jurisdictions only accessible to those
with particular forms of expert knowledge, education, or credentials.
The rise and fall of the Fingerprint Society during the mid-1920s repre-
sents a case in which a new occupational group (police fingerprint experts)
attempted to redefine its area of work in these ways, as a modern field of
professional knowledge and expertise. Compared to many other occupational
groups in early twentieth-century urban China, the members of this associa-
tion seemed well equipped to accomplish these goals. The Fingerprint Society
had connections at the Ministry of Interior and the Advanced School, an insti-
tution that contributed to the growth of its membership in the form of new
trainees. From their position as police academy students and instructors, the
members of this association were also able to create the kind of “abstract
professional knowledge” that such groups typically use to define the scope of
4 Modern China 00(0)
their professional jurisdiction and legitimize their expertise (Abbott, 1988:
52–57). In the end, while the Fingerprint Society did produce and dissemi-
nate a large body of such knowledge, their goal of creating a new profession
endowed with a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis other policing institutions was
never fulfilled. Rather, the career paths of the association’s members played
out within a national policing infrastructure that did not share their goal of
professionalizing identification work. Throughout the rest of the 1920s and
1930s fingerprinting remained the task of police officials who did not share
the kind of professional identity and aspirations that had so motivated the
members of the Fingerprint Society.
The history of this association reveals an early moment in which Chinese
fingerprinting experts began to explore certain fundamental questions that
have remained relevant long after the 1920s and continue to be important
today. These include, for example, questions about the scientific basis and
validity of fingerprint identification, the ability of fingerprint examiners to
identify one individual to the exclusion of all others, and the implications of
the mass application of biometric identification for state-society interactions,
sovereignty, and individual rights.3 For this reason, examining how the mem-
bers of this association articulated a new professional identity for themselves
and defined a new field of professional knowledge can shed light not simply
on the unique social, intellectual, and political dimensions of their profes-
sion-building project, but also on dynamics that have shaped the history of
fingerprinting in China and globally for over a century.
Police Professionals
The introduction of modern fingerprinting practices in early twentieth-cen-
tury China was deeply shaped by the country’s domestic and international
political situations.4 The early twentieth century was a period when China
suffered numerous infringements of sovereignty under Western and Japanese
imperialism even as it maintained its own national government, a condition
that is often characterized as “semicolonial.”5 The new Republican political
system established following the collapse of the Qing faced additional chal-
lenges that included the fragmentation of domestic political power. For offi-
cials and political elites of the late Qing and early Republican period,
reforming China’s policing and judicial institutions was an important element
in the government’s response to these crises. By the early 1920s, China’s
criminal justice system had already undergone over a decade of reform meant
to establish a new court system based on continental European and Japanese
models (Xu, 2008: 25–53). In Beijing as well as other areas that had already
established modern judicial and policing institutions, criminal cases were
Asen 5
now handled by new-style police, procurators, and judges, who investigated
crime and pronounced sentences in ways that incorporated old and new judi-
cial practices and norms (Neighbors, 2009; Ng, 2014; Asen, 2016). Nothing
less than Chinese sovereignty was at stake in these developments. Since the
last years of the Qing and into the early Republic, it was widely hoped that
reforming China’s judicial and policing practices would compel the foreign
powers to give up their extraterritorial legal privileges while making Chinese
governance compatible with globally recognized judicial and policing prac-
tices that signified “civilized” status (Xu, 2008: 26, 28–32; Lam, 2010).
The Advanced School grew out of a decade of initiatives to establish
modern police education in Beijing (Hu, 1989 [1929]: 463–82; Han and Su,
2000: 234–43, 497–502). These began with the Japanese-run Police
Academy 警務學堂, established in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising
(1899–1901) with support of the Qing, and continued into the Republican
period with a series of other police schools (in reality, reorganizations of
existing school facilities) that were meant to train patrol officers and police
administrative staff. The Advanced School was different from these earlier
schools in its higher entrance requirements, which were inspired by conti-
nental European models of police education. Enrollees had to have gradu-
ated from a school of law and politics or another police or military academy.
The idea of establishing a school that could produce “specialized talent in
policing” 專門警察人材 of a higher professional and academic caliber
seems to have originated with Wang Yangbin 王揚濱, who was head of the
Ministry of Interior’s Police Administration Department at the time (Hu,
1989 [1929]: 474). Wang formulated plans for the school with Li Shengpei
李升培, another ministry official who had served as both dean and instructor
in one of the earlier Beijing police academies, as well as Hu Cunzhong 胡存
忠, who had taught at the earlier school as well. In September 1917 the first
two classes of students began a three-year training program in policing prac-
tice and administration, with a heavy emphasis on knowledge of the law.6
Over the next decade, twelve classes of students—over twelve hundred
individuals—completed this program (Anonymous, 1934b: 299–300).
Following their graduation, almost eight hundred of these students were dis-
patched to police agencies across the country for practical training and
employment as patrol officers and detectives, police administrative staff,
chiefs of local police agencies, and instructors and administrators in police
academies and training programs.7 It bears emphasizing that the goal of the
Advanced School was to train an elite group of personnel who could admin-
ister China’s emerging modern police infrastructure. The high entrance
requirements and specialized nature of the school’s instruction would have
meant that the program’s graduates had obtained a much higher level of
6 Modern China 00(0)
formal education than did most of those who served as Chinese police during
this period. Patrol officers in Beijing, for example, might have received short-
term training following recruitment, but their credentials to serve as police
were primarily based on physical condition and knowledge of the local area,
not formal education (Ding, 2013: 51–52). More comparable to Advanced
School graduates would have been the officials who staffed Beijing police
headquarters, who generally had graduated from a police academy or received
a formal education in politics and law (49–50).
The Advanced School began to offer training in fingerprint identification
in 1921 as part of an effort to supplement its three-year program with shorter
courses of study in certain technical fields that were relevant to modern polic-
ing. Aside from fingerprinting, these initially included electricity (including
electricity-based urban infrastructure such as streetcars, lighting, and tele-
communications), architecture and civil engineering, and the use of police
dogs.8 According to Tian Xuechun 田學純, a graduate of the school who
became active in the Fingerprint Society, the impetus to establish the pro-
gram in fingerprinting should be traced back to Minister of Interior Zhang
Zhitan 張志潭 (who served in this position from August 1920 to May 1921)
and Wang Yangbin, who was still serving as head of the Ministry of Interior’s
Police Administration Department. These two officials proposed including a
program in fingerprinting because, according to Tian, they understood that
all countries use fingerprinting to assist in government administration and
judicial affairs, thus bringing harmony to the state, and they fervently believed
that the current political situation [in China] should be cleaned up, and also
aspired to put the judiciary into good order. (Tian, 1924d: 論說, 2)
Ranging from one-and-a-half to two years in duration, these specialized pro-
grams would run concurrently with the school’s original three-year program.
In the end, the fingerprinting program proved to be the longest lasting of
the four. The three other programs only saw one class of students graduate,
after which they were discontinued. The fingerprinting program, by contrast,
trained three classes over the 1920s, producing over three hundred graduates
(Hu, 1989 [1929]: 476–80; Chen, 1935: 88; Anonymous, 1934b: 299–300;
Xia, 1935 [1922]: Liu Bangji preface, 10; Xu, 1933: 20). Much as in the case
of those who graduated from the Advanced School’s more general program,
the graduates of the fingerprinting program obtained a level of formal educa-
tion higher than that of many who were serving in Chinese police agencies.
Aside from learning techniques of identification, the students also studied
criminal law, detection, judicial policing 司法警察, and police laws (Hu,
1989 [1929]: 477). This training was also quite different from the modes of
Asen 7
fingerprinting instruction that were most common in the United States during
this period. The University of Applied Science (later renamed Institute for
Applied Science) in Chicago, for example, offered popular correspondence
courses on fingerprinting and, in Simon Cole’s (2002: 195) words, “portrayed
fingerprinting as an easy avenue to professional status for young people with-
out a college education.” American fingerprint examiners tended to rely on
apprenticeship-based training or simply studied on their own, a situation that
resulted at times in questions about the quality of the expertise that they had
acquired (Grieve, 1990; Cole, 2002: 204–5, 210–11). The Advanced School’s
program represented a very different vision of how to inculcate knowledge in
this field and, it would seem, who the ideal candidates for such expertise
were. That the writings of this program’s graduates were peppered with con-
cepts and phrases from classical Chinese texts (if not written largely in terse
classical language) gives a sense of the high level of education and even
erudition that they possessed.
Partway through their training, the first class of students in this program
organized an association that they called the Fingerprint Society. As the stu-
dents explained when putting this organization on file with the Beijing police,
in taking this step they had “gathered together like-minded colleagues in
order to study the academic learning associated with fingerprinting, further
an understanding of the field, and promote its implementation” (Fingerprint
Society, 1922b). As revealed on the pages of the association’s journal and in
its actions, the goals of the Fingerprint Society were even more ambitious
than this and extended to promoting the creation of new national institutions
and laws meant to support the development of fingerprinting in China. That
the Advanced School initially supported the formation of this association is
indicated by the fact that its first slate of officers and honorary presidents
included two Advanced School instructors (Xia Quanyin 夏全印 and Hui
Hong 惠洪, discussed below) as well as Wang Yangbin and Hu Cunzhong,
whose earlier efforts had led to the establishment of the Advanced School and
to the project of police professionalization that it supported (Fingerprint
Society, 1922a).
Semicolonial Circuits
Despite these illustrious beginnings and lofty ambitions for the development
of Chinese fingerprinting, this association ran into difficulty almost immedi-
ately. Following the general practice in the Advanced School, the fingerprint-
ing program’s graduates were dispatched to police agencies in the provinces to
gain practical experience. While this dispersion of trainees accorded with the
mission of the Advanced School to bring about police reform at a national
8 Modern China 00(0)
level, it had the unintended consequence that, following their graduation, the
first class “scattered like the stars and the association’s affairs ceased without
a trace” (Anonymous, 1924b). This initial setback in the progress of the asso-
ciation can be explained by the fact that its goals of building a community of
fingerprinting experts and promoting their professional activities and interests
were secondary to the Ministry of Interior’s own goal of pushing forward
national police reform through the training and distribution of police person-
nel, a point that is worth keeping in mind when considering the association’s
eventual fate. A second class of students was soon being trained, however, and
the Fingerprint Society was reinvigorated under the leadership of instructor
Xia Quanyin. This was the development that was being celebrated at the com-
memorative event held at the Advanced School in November 1923. Given that
Xia would so decisively shape the trajectory of the Fingerprint Society and the
early history of modern Chinese fingerprinting more generally, it is worth
briefly examining his background, how he came to the Advanced School, and
the impact that he had on this emerging professional community.
Xia Quanyin was originally from Luhe, a county near Nanjing. It is ironic
given Xia’s involvement with the Advanced School that there is no indication
that he himself received training at one of the police academies that had been
established in Beijing or elsewhere in the early years of the Republic. Rather,
Xia seems to have attended the Wusong Merchant Marine School 吳淞商船
學校, graduating in 1916 at the age of about 22 sui.9 A year or so after that, Xia
went to north China, where he found employment with the Beijing police and
served on the staff of the Judicial Department of police headquarters, an office
that handled various matters pertaining to criminal investigation and trials in
the city (Tian, 1924d: 論說, 2; Xia, 1935 [1922]: 自序, 16).10 In December
1918, Xia received an assignment from Beijing police commissioner Wu
Bingxiang 吳炳湘 to go to Shanghai along with Hui Hong, another member
of the Judicial Department’s staff, to study fingerprinting in the Identification
Office of the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), the British-controlled police
organization that administered public order in the International Settlement
(Xia, 1935 [1922]: 自序, 16). It is likely that Xia and Hui were chosen for the
assignment in part because of their knowledge of English.
Xia and Hui were sent to Shanghai as part of a broader exchange of per-
sonnel that was initiated by the SMP. Shanghai was one of the first five
Chinese treaty ports that were established under the Treaty of Nanjing fol-
lowing the Opium War (1839–1842). Under the provisions of a series of sub-
sequent agreements, large zones of the city were placed under the jurisdiction
of the International Settlement and French Concession, which maintained the
authority to police these territories. At this time, the SMP was seeking
Chinese police officers to serve as sub-inspectors who could supervise the
Asen 9
large number of Chinese personnel who worked in the SMP’s lower ranks
(Anonymous, 1919a; Anonymous, 1919b; Shanghai Municipal Council,
1920: 47a; Bourne, 1929: 29–30, 33–34). Putting a certain number of Chinese
in these mid-level positions was part of an evolving “synarchy of practice,”
in Robert Bickers’ (2000: 177) words, that defined the working relationship
between the foreign leadership of the SMP and the large number of Chinese
on whom it relied, but also tended to view as untrustworthy and vulnerable to
anti-foreign and communist “agitation.”11 Xia and Hui went to Shanghai
along with six “top-class graduates in policing” 警務優等畢業生—possibly
individuals who had graduated from one of the police academies preceding
the Advanced School—who were sent to fill these positions (Anonymous,
1919a). They received short-term training from the SMP as a peripheral part
of this arrangement, as did two officers from the fire brigade of the Beijing
police. Upon their return to Beijing, Xia and Hui were appointed as instruc-
tors in the Advanced School.
Xia Quanyin’s influence on this program was significant. Students learned
the fingerprint classification system that he himself had developed on the
basis of the Henry system created by British colonial official Edward R.
Henry (1850–1931) and his assistants Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra
Bose.12 The main innovation of Henry and his assistants was to create a sys-
tem for describing the total profile of a person’s ten fingerprints that could
form the basis for an indexed registry, thus making it possible to efficiently
organize large collections of fingerprint cards. Using this system or one of the
other fingerprint indexing systems that were being developed at the time,
police officials could search their card collections for the ten-print profile
associated with a person whose identity was unknown or in question. Officials
could then confirm the person’s identity through further inspection of the
information contained on the matching cards that were retrieved from the
file. Using modern fingerprint identification to its fullest meant maintaining
large collections of such records.
This regime of identification was different from the one that had been used
by officials under the Qing to document identifying information about con-
victs. Under this earlier system, officials had been required to record con-
victs’ dou 斗 and ji 箕, a dual classification of fingerprint patterns, popular
within Chinese society more broadly, that distinguished between circular or
spiral-shaped patterns and those that had an asymmetrical or crooked form
(these categories were subsequently translated into the “whorls” and “loops”
of modern fingerprint classification) (Waley-Cohen, 1991: 112–14; Xia,
1926d; Xia, 1935 [1922]: 210). According to Joanna Waley-Cohen, officials
could identify an escaped convict by comparing the sequence of dou and ji
appearing on the ten fingers with the information that had been recorded in
10 Modern China 00(0)
advance, as well as by matching other information about physical appear-
ance, including tattoos. Under this system, fingerprints served as markers of
identity to the extent that the written description of these patterns could be
compared with the fingers of a living person. This method did not utilize a
searchable registry of fingerprint cards, nor did it involve procedures for
documenting minute ridge characteristics of the kind that form the basis for
modern fingerprint identification practices.
Following its initial use in Bengal in the mid-1890s and then throughout
India, the system devised by Henry and his assistants was implemented in
England as well as other parts of the British Empire by the first decades of
the twentieth century (Breckenridge, 2014: 77–82, 88). The Henry system
and its variants were also used in the United States and other countries and
colonies throughout the world (Cole, 2002: 224–25). This was the system
that was used by the SMP (Anonymous, 1915: 397). In adopting this system,
Xia and other members of the Fingerprint Society thus became prominent
Chinese proponents of a practice that originated in the British Empire and
was brought to China by the foreign-administered police force of Shanghai’s
International Settlement. In their desire to assert national sovereignty by
developing Chinese fingerprinting, the members of this association drew on
the very same techniques that had been used to enforce the legal and politi-
cal privileges of foreign powers in China, a pattern that is apparent in the
histories of policing and public hygiene as well (Lam, 2010; Wakeman,
1995: 60–77; Rogaski, 2004).
Xia Quanyin’s role in introducing fingerprint identification to China dur-
ing this period went beyond his instruction at the Advanced School. Xia also
assisted the Beijing police and courts by collecting and examining finger-
prints in cases involving homicide and theft, examining questioned docu-
ments in civil cases, and using fingerprints to verify the identities of suspects.
In criminal cases, one of the most commonly used procedures was to com-
pare finger impressions that had been discovered at a crime scene with the
fingerprints of everyone who worked in that household or business, a process
that often exonerated employees. For example, when bundles of wire were
stolen from an electric lighting company located in Beijing’s Legation
Quarter in late August 1924, the Legation Quarter’s police sought Xia’s assis-
tance (Xia, 1926a). Fingerprints discovered at the scene were compared with
those of the company’s workers, none of which were a match. Given that,
according to Xia’s subsequent account of the case, the “foreign manager” 洋
經理 had suspected from the outset that the culprit was an employee, the use
of fingerprints had made it possible for “these innocent 37 workers to cast off
suspicion,” thus averting a possible injustice. Xia’s work in such cases was
covered in the newspapers, including Beijing’s Morning Post 晨報 and World
Asen 11
Daily 世界日報 and Shanghai’s Shenbao 申報, thus raising his public profile
as well as that of fingerprinting more generally (Xia, 1924a; Anonymous,
1925; Anonymous, 1927; Huang, 1929).13
It was against this backdrop that Xia became president of the Fingerprint
Society as it was being reconstituted with the enrollment of a second class of
fingerprint trainees at the Advanced School. In retrospect, it is difficult to dis-
tinguish Xia’s own activities and accomplishments from those of the associa-
tion. If it were not for Xia’s casework, his connections with police officials in
the city and in the Ministry of Interior, and his skillful use of varied media to
promote himself and his services, it is likely that the Fingerprint Society would
have been much shorter-lived and much less publicly visible than it was.
Xia’s influence on the activities of this association is especially apparent
in the emphasis he placed on the production of knowledge—formal, aca-
demic in flavor, and authoritative—about fingerprinting. Xia’s own Academic
Learning of Fingerprinting 指紋學術 (1935 [1922]), a primer that explained
his classification system, was used in the Advanced School’s instruction and
very clearly set discursive parameters for the articles appearing in the soci-
ety’s journal, which was called Zhiwen zazhi 指紋雜誌 (or The Finger-Print
Magazine in its accompanying English title). This journal also included
accounts of cases handled by Xia and others under a section titled simply
shiyan 實驗, a word that could mean “practical experience” or the “practical
verification” of a particular claim or matter (today it simply means “experi-
ment”).14 The point of using this word, which also appeared in the title of a
published collection of Xia’s (1926e) own cases, was to show that this collec-
tive experience, embodied in cases, had already demonstrated the value of
fingerprinting for China.
Fingerprinting as Science
One of the most common claims in the writings of the Fingerprint Society was
that fingerprinting should be viewed as a field of academic knowledge.
Described variously as involving “academic learning” 學術 or as being a “spe-
cialized subject” 專門學科 or a “science” 科學, fingerprinting was also viewed
as a field informed by “principles” 原理 and “theory” 學理 that were worthy of
study and elaboration, much like other fields of formal academic learning
(Anonymous, 1924a: 附錄, 1; Anonymous, 1924b; Tian, 1924a: 附錄, 8; Chen,
1926: 59, 64). Such characterizations would have been familiar to fingerprint
examiners (and handwriting identification experts) in the United States, who
also portrayed their areas of expertise as being “scientific,” thus implying that
their techniques were based to some extent on academically validated knowl-
edge (Cole, 2002: 198–99, 215–16; Mnookin, 2001: 1788–1801). The cover of
12 Modern China 00(0)
the American professional journal Finger Print Magazine, for example, carried
the subtitle “A monthly journal devoted to the science of finger print identifica-
tion,” a characterization of the field’s authoritative epistemic status that appeared
often in its pages.15
We find a deeper elaboration of fingerprinting as a “scientific” field in a
piece by Advanced School graduate Pan Tianhui 潘天慧 (1922) that was
published in the first issue of the society’s journal. The article, titled “The
Reason That Fingerprints Are All Different,” grew out of Pan’s curiosity
about why a person’s fingerprints are commonly assumed to be unique to that
individual, as well as about the relevant “physiological principles” 生理上之
原理 that could explain this phenomenon. The idea that “everyone’s [finger-
prints] are different” 人各不同, which appeared in this piece and in the other
literature of the Fingerprint Society, was the Chinese-language equivalent of
an assumption (or “mysterious truism,” in Simon Cole’s [2002: 199] charac-
terization) that has played an important role in legitimizing fingerprint iden-
tification in the United States and elsewhere for over a century.
Pan’s article provided two answers to the question of why fingerprint pat-
terning is unique to the individual. The first was simply that “of all the things
in the natural world, there are none that are completely identical to each
other” (Pan, 1922b: 研究, 1). Pan illustrated this point by an anecdote about
an unnamed Western naturalist who instructed his son for three years by hav-
ing him examine leaves taken from plants of the same species over and over
again. The son’s conclusion that in nature “everything is different from one
another” 各各不同—that is, that no two natural objects are identical—was
the intended lesson. Pan then applied this principle to fingerprints, noting that
the human body is also one of the things found in the natural world. Given that all
things in the natural world are different from one another, the human body’s
physiological makeup 人體生理之組織 will also be this way. The fingerprints that
are part of the human body’s physiological makeup are different even more so.
By “physiological makeup,” Pan seems to have meant the anatomical
structure of the body in addition to its physiology, topics that were discussed
elsewhere in the association’s writings (Chen, 1926).16 Pan’s use of “physiol-
ogy” in this way was not idiosyncratic. Others in the society also invoked
“physiology” as the scientific discipline with greatest bearing on fingerprint-
ing. This way of describing the scientific status of the knowledge underlying
fingerprint identification reflected the particular way members of the associa-
tion narrated the history of fingerprinting as a field. They consistently traced
this history back through a succession of figures who are familiar to the his-
tory of fingerprinting in the West, including Edward R. Henry, Francis Galton
Asen 13
(1822–1911), William Herschel (1833–1917), Henry Faulds (1843–1930),
and, at its origins, Johannes Evangelista Purkinje (1787–1869) (Tian, 1924d:
論說, 2; Li, 1924b: 研究, 4; Wang Jiangsheng, 1926).
The Czech Purkinje was a pioneer of experimental anatomy and physiol-
ogy (with broad scientific interests beyond these fields) who described and
classified the patterning of ridged skin on the fingers as part of his research
on the anatomical organization and physiology of the skin (Studnička, 1936;
Cummins and Kennedy, 1940). By invoking Purkinje and his “physiological”
approach to explain both the historical origins of fingerprinting and its disci-
plinary status within the sciences, members of the society were implicitly
arguing for the scientific status of their own professional knowledge. Works
on fingerprinting in Europe and the United States also afforded Purkinje an
important status in the history of fingerprint identification, even though his
original nine-pattern classification did not, in any real sense, anticipate the
developments that made fingerprinting a practicable tool of identification
(Cummins and Kennedy, 1940: 344n10; Cole, 2002: 77–79).
Returning to Pan Tianhui’s article, we thus find tendencies that are simi-
lar to those of American proponents of fingerprinting who, as Cole (2002:
213–14) notes, tended to invoke “a vaguely articulated natural law” that
supposedly guaranteed the principle of uniqueness on which fingerprint
identification rested. Members of the society explained and justified this
principle in other ways as well, and these resonated with claims about the
authority of fingerprinting that were being made elsewhere in the world.
They commonly noted that members of the same family or race 種族—that
is, persons who were ostensibly genetically related—did not have similar
fingerprints, and also that two identical fingerprints had never been discov-
ered throughout the decades in which the technique had been used (Chen,
1926: 62; Li, 1924b: 研究, 4; Liu, 1926b: 33). In the third issue of the soci-
ety’s journal, a graduate of the fingerprinting program’s third class named
Liu Rihua 劉日華 (1926c: 18) noted that in the 103 years since the birth of
modern understandings of fingerprints—that is, since the completion of
Purkinje’s thesis that touched on this topic— “no two people with identical
fingerprints have been found throughout the entire world.”
These ways of understanding the supposed individual uniqueness of finger-
print patterning had parallels in the literature on fingerprinting in the United
States and elsewhere. Pan’s second explanation, by contrast, was more spe-
cific to the Chinese context. This explanation, which Pan characterized as hav-
ing been deduced within the intellectual milieu of philosophy 哲學, rested on
an excavation of the meaning of zhiwen, the modern Chinese word for “finger-
print,” which is composed of the characters zhi 指 (finger) and wen 紋 (Pan,
1922b). The latter, Pan explained, has the meaning of wenli 紋理, striated or
14 Modern China 00(0)
lined patterning of the kind that appears on jade and other natural objects as
well as on fingerprints. Pan’s argument about the individuality of fingerprints
hinged, however, on the meaning of li 理, which etymologically informed this
specific notion of patterning. While li has various meanings, such as the pol-
ishing of jade, its deeper philosophical meaning was Pan’s main concern. In
expounding upon this meaning, Pan cited the definition given by the eigh-
teenth-century scholar of Han Learning Dai Zhen 戴震 (1724–1777): “Li is a
name given to the examination of the minutest details with which to make
necessary distinctions. This is why it is called the principle of differentiation
分理. In the case of the substance of things, we call it ‘fiber in muscle’ 肌理,
‘fiber in flesh’ 腠理, and ‘pattern and order’ 文理.”17
From the article’s subsequent discussion, it is clear that Pan was empha-
sizing one meaning of li in particular: that each and every thing has a particu-
lar “principle” that makes it what it is.18 By invoking Dai Zhen’s definition of
this concept, Pan was specifying that such principles were inseparable from
(and observable in) the concrete things that exist in the world, one of the
points that Dai was making in his critique of the received (post-Song) Neo-
Confucian metaphysics. Pan elaborated on this concept further by mention-
ing the idea, supposedly drawn from the modern discipline of physics 物理
學, that all material things are distinguished at the most fundamental level by
their different “arrangements of molecules” 分子排列, itself a manifestation
of their differing principles (li).19 For Pan, this roundabout line of reasoning
justified the claim that fingerprints, like all things in the world, were unique
at a fundamental (perhaps even metaphysical) level.
Much as Joan Judge (2015: 20) has noted for the early Republican period
Funü shibao 婦女時報 (Women’s Eastern Times), a publication that con-
structed “women’s experience” as a new object of intellectual and commer-
cial interest, the society’s journal was also characterized by a “diverse mix of
linguistic registers,” juxtaposing pieces written in terse classical language
with essays and other pieces written in the vernacular. Much as in Pan
Tianhui’s invocation of the weighty concept li (principle), other authors also
demonstrated their knowledge of the classical written language in various
ways. In the most rudimentary examples, some authors used classical phrases
to underscore the particular points that they were making. Xia Quanyin, for
example, used the phrase “People’s minds are different, just like their faces,”
from the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, as a foil in his
criticism of the idea that one could identify individuals on the basis of out-
ward appearance (fingerprints were, of course, the only reliable way of doing
this) (Xia, 1935 [1922]: 1; Meng, 1926: 16).20 Some presented passages
drawn from classical texts as evidence demonstrating China’s long history of
interest in fingerprint and palm patterning (Pan, 1922a; Wang Longzhang,
Asen 15
1926). All of the writings in the journal were, of course, filled with terms
drawn from the new scientific, legal, and political vocabularies that had been
recently introduced into Chinese, largely through Japanese mediation.
That these discussions drew on varied sources of intellectual and cultural
authority reflected the complex intellectual atmosphere of the early
Republican period, a moment in which the texts, concepts, and ways of
knowing associated with China’s early modern elite intellectual culture were
being challenged but also engaged by those who promoted new academic
disciplines and new ways of legitimizing knowledge, including modern sci-
ence (Judge, 2015; Hammerstrom, 2015). It is important to remember that
one did not need to have an understanding of the anatomy and physiology of
the fingers’ ridged skin or of why fingerprints are supposedly unique to carry
out identifications in legal cases or in other applications of the technique.21
Rather, producing formal knowledge on these topics was itself a way for
members of the Fingerprint Society to frame their occupational expertise in
relation to prevailing cultural concerns and values, a strategy that is generally
followed by modern professions (Abbott, 1988: 184–95). In this instance,
this would-be profession legitimized its authority by appealing to new scien-
tific disciplines such as physiology and physics, language and concepts
drawn from China’s older early modern intellectual culture, and, as we will
see now, discussion of the pressing political questions for which the wide-
spread implementation of fingerprinting might provide a solution.
Fingerprinting Applied
Much as in late nineteenth-century Egypt and Siam, elites in early twentieth-
century China viewed the implementation of modern forensic practices such
as fingerprinting as a way of strengthening the country’s state apparatus and
asserting sovereignty (Fahmy, 1999; Pearson, 2018). An early example of
this thinking appeared in an article by instructor Hui Hong (1922) in the first
issue of the society’s journal.22 Hui suggested that establishing fingerprinting
in China would improve the country’s judicial capabilities in various ways:
officials could use fingerprints to identify and punish recidivists, deter crimi-
nal acts (given criminals’ awareness of the presumed efficacy of fingerprint-
ing), investigate crime more efficiently, and generally improve the quality of
the evidence used in Chinese legal proceedings. If the Chinese judiciary
could be improved in these ways, it would strengthen the argument that for-
eign countries should give up their extraterritorial judicial privileges. Thus,
Hui (1922: 社說, 1) suggested, establishing fingerprint identification would
make it possible to bring an end to an area of foreign involvement that was
preventing China from enjoying “the right to independently manage all of the
16 Modern China 00(0)
persons and things in its territory,” a basic requirement of sovereignty 主權
as this concept was commonly understood.
The administration of justice was not the only area of Chinese governance
that would be improved with the use of fingerprinting. We find discussion of
the broad uses of fingerprinting beyond criminal investigation and the judi-
ciary in draft regulations, discussed further below, that members of the
Fingerprint Society submitted to the Beijing government on several occa-
sions. With these proposals, they hoped to persuade officials to regulate the
practice of fingerprinting at the national level, thereby promoting the use of
this technique and creating a demand for the knowledge and expertise that
they were gaining at the Advanced School. Such regulations contained provi-
sions for standardizing both the fingerprint classification systems used
throughout the country and the ways such expertise would be integrated into
Chinese police agencies. They also specified the various applications for
which these identification practices might be used, and it is here that we can
gain an understanding of how members of this association envisioned the
ideal or fullest use of fingerprinting. Much like proponents of fingerprinting
in the United States and elsewhere during this period, members of the
Fingerprint Society believed that fingerprints could become “a civilian iden-
tifier used in all aspects of daily life and social interaction,” a project that, as
Cole (2002: 197–98) suggests for the United States, “reflected progressivist,
technocratic efforts to bring about a more orderly, and hence more efficient,
more just, and more prosperous, society.”
One set of such regulations was drafted by Tian Xuechun (1924c), whom
we have already encountered as an active member of the Fingerprint Society
and a chronicler of its history. According to Tian’s draft regulations, finger-
printing could be used broadly and in ways that far surpassed the scope of
existing Chinese uses of hand and finger impressions. Some of these appli-
cations were administrative in nature. These included the use of fingerprints
to license the proprietors of certain businesses, to register births and collect
census information, and to identify those who violate police regulations or
other administrative rules. The judicial applications of fingerprinting would
have been more familiar than these, and included using fingerprints in crimi-
nal investigation, as an incontrovertible signature on police interrogation
statements or court depositions, and, of course, as a way of verifying the
identities of detainees or prisoners. The regulations identified other uses
beyond these as well: fingerprints could be used on contracts or other docu-
ments as a way of preventing counterfeiting or other forms of fraud or to
verify the identities of those who were eligible to vote, who were taking
qualifying examinations, or who had been recruited into government or mil-
itary service (附錄, 9–11).
Asen 17
Some of these applications were already being used in China during the
1920s. Fingerprinting saw increasing use in prisons in Beijing and elsewhere
during this period, even though this work was handled by the judiciary and not
by police officials (Dikötter, 2002: 84, 212–13; Wang, 1917 [1915]: 61–62;
Xia, 1924c). Finger impressions were also given on contracts as well as other
kinds of agreements and documents, an informal practice within Chinese soci-
ety (including among literate people, not simply those who were unable to
sign their own names) that long preceded the introduction of modern finger-
printing. This customary practice yielded unexpected benefits when Xia
Quanyin or others were asked to evaluate the authenticity of such documents.
They could easily compare the finger impressions given on the questioned
document with samples taken from the signatories (Xia, 1926b; Xia, 1926c).
Other uses of fingerprinting were relatively uncommon during the 1920s, cer-
tainly less common than they would become during the 1930s and 1940s. In
one application that was closer to the kinds of expansive uses of the technique
envisioned by members of the Fingerprint Society, fingerprints were used to
verify the identities of those taking the Advanced School’s entrance examina-
tion. In an operation overseen by Xia and his students, the fingerprints of more
than 350 enrollees were taken over successive days of testing in May 1926.
This yielded four cases in which a test candidate had tried to perpetrate fraud
by having another person complete the test in his place.23
One finds in the writings of the Fingerprint Society a definite sense that
broadening the application of fingerprinting in China would transform state-
society relations in a positive manner—specifically, in the direction of a func-
tioning albeit vaguely defined constitutional order. There was a convergence
between these discussions of fingerprinting and the new political vocabulary
of constitutionalism, citizenship, and statism (i.e., the idea that the state itself,
not the ruler or otherwise, was a distinct political entity and fundamental
source of sovereignty) that had been developing in Chinese intellectual circles
since the late Qing (Zarrow, 2012). In another piece that appeared in the soci-
ety’s journal, for example, Tian (1924b) further elaborated on the various cat-
egories of “rights” 權利 that would be safeguarded if fingerprinting was
carried out broadly.24 By using fingerprints to verify the identities of registered
voters as well as those seeking office in elections, Tian noted, one could safe-
guard the “right to participate in government” 參政權 by ensuring the integ-
rity of elections. “Property rights” 財產權 would likewise be protected with
the extensive use of fingerprints on contracts given that this would prevent
fraudulent claims made on the basis of counterfeit documents.
The Fingerprint Society (and, for that matter, the Advanced School) did
not follow a single orientation or approach toward questions such as how the
state should be organized or what its ideological foundations should be.
18 Modern China 00(0)
Police training at the school during the early and mid-1920s was less ideo-
logically regimented than it would become during the Nanjing decade, after
the Nationalist government began to integrate Nationalist Party ideology into
the school ethos and curriculum (Han and Su, 2000: 732–42). Generally, one
might characterize the political position of the Fingerprint Society as advo-
cating the creation of a kind of “biometric state,” to borrow Keith
Breckenridge’s term, in the sense that fingerprinting would be fundamental to
the structure and functioning of the state, its interactions with society, and the
sources of its authority, all of which would be oriented toward republican
constitutionalism.25 Of course, these discussions about the political implica-
tions of fingerprinting were theoretical, and largely concerned with the kinds
of relationships that could exist between the state and a society comprised of
biometrically identifiable individuals.26 These proposals also rested upon a
highly idealized understanding of the benefits of fingerprinting for the
Chinese state, one that took into account neither the challenges and costs that
would actually be involved in placing Chinese governance on a biometric
basis nor, crucially, the extent to which the diminished national government
of the mid-1920s might be willing to support such ambitious plans.
The Limits of Professional Autonomy
Thus far we have been examining how the Fingerprint Society used its writ-
ings to explore the “scientific” foundations of fingerprinting and the potential
for new identification practices to strengthen the Chinese state. The
Fingerprint Society also urged the national government to establish finger-
printing as a legally and institutionally distinct profession within China’s
emerging infrastructure of modern police agencies. These efforts, which
focused on the promulgation of a national law that would regulate the prac-
tice of fingerprinting, mirrored those of other professional groups such as
lawyers and physicians, who also attempted to secure official endorsement
for their particular areas of expertise as well as regulations to protect their
professional interests. In a study of the interactions between urban profes-
sional associations and the Chinese state during this period, Xiaoqun Xu
(2001: 15–16) has suggested that such relationships were generally charac-
terized by “interdependence.” Professionals in law, medicine, and other fields
contributed essential expertise to the running of modern state institutions
(and the handling of other societal and economic roles); at the same time,
they relied on the state to create and enforce laws that would recognize their
expert status, expand the demand for their expertise, and suppress purport-
edly unqualified competitors. How willing the national government was to
support the Fingerprint Society’s agenda of professionalization thus emerges
Asen 19
as an important question for understanding the possibilities that actually
existed for the members of this association to establish a more exclusive
jurisdiction for themselves over police identification work.
On several occasions, members of the society tried to persuade the
Ministry of Interior to issue such regulations. Early on, according to Tian
Xuechun’s (1924d: 論說, 2) account, Wang Yangbin and Hu Cunzhong
drafted a set of such regulations, but “unexpectedly the administration was
overthrown, the cabinet resigned, and Minister Zhang Zhitan and Department
Head Wang subsequently left the scene.” The officials who succeeded them,
Tian continued, “just stuck to established practices and were not willing to
follow new ways, and so the implementation of fingerprinting was com-
pletely forgotten about.”27 At some point during their training, the first class
of students also proposed a set of draft regulations to the Ministry of Interior
(Fingerprint specialization student representatives, 1922). These regulations
included provisions for establishing a Central Fingerprint Bureau that would
“oversee the fingerprinting-related matters of the entire country” as well as
departments, attached to provincial and county-level police agencies, that
would handle local identification work. These offices would be staffed by
graduates of the Advanced School’s program, thus implying that there would
be a degree of standardized training at the national level as well as a sustained
demand for the graduates’ expertise in local police offices. These regulations
were not adopted, however, nor were those included in subsequent appeals to
the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Justice (Tian, 1924a; Liu, 1926a).
The government also declined to endorse the society’s proposal for the cre-
ation of a license for fingerprint examiners, a development that ostensibly
would have elevated their status in relation to other police officials who
lacked this professional credential (Liu, 1926b).
The mid-1920s were, of course, a time when the national government
faced paralyzing factionalism and bureaucratic dysfunction, repeated changes
in cabinet-level leadership, financial insolvency, and inconsistent relations
with regions beyond Beijing (Houn, 1957; Nathan, 1976). The new constitu-
tional political system that was partially implemented under the Qing (and
that subsequently formed the basis for the Republic of China) had already
been rendered ineffective with the regional militarists’ seizure of power and
the subordination of the formal political process to their interests and con-
flicts. This disintegration of the post-Qing political order occurred at pre-
cisely the moment when members of the Fingerprint Society were developing
their greatest professional ambitions. The Beijing government was clearly
invested in supporting national police reform by training class after class of
Advanced School students and then dispatching them to police agencies in
every region of China, including the Northeast (Manchuria), the lower Yangzi
20 Modern China 00(0)
region, southern and central China, and even as far west as Xinjiang
(Anonymous, 1933).28 Yet, even as it continued to support the training of
students at this school, including three classes of students in the fingerprint-
ing program, the government declined to endorse the society’s vision of an
institutionally distinct profession staffed with credentialed experts and girded
by nationally promulgated regulations.
Given these setbacks, one finds in the society’s writings a sense of disappoint-
ment and even disillusionment. In a piece discussing the various ways fingerprint
identification might benefit state and society, for example, Xu Dingming 許鼎銘
(1926: 14) noted that despite the apparent usefulness of this technique, “those
who understand this in China are few and far between, which is truly lamentable!
Even though the importance of fingerprint identification for the government is
well known, no one has been able to promulgate fingerprinting regulations or put
them into effect. Is this not to the detriment of the judiciary?”
A similar sentiment appears in a piece by Hou Zhongyang 侯仲陽 (1926)
arguing, like many other pieces in the journal, that fingerprinting was supe-
rior to other identification techniques such as photography (which only cap-
tured a person’s appearance at one moment) or the comparison of samples of
handwriting (which, in Hou’s estimation, was hardly useful in China given
the population’s low level of literacy). Hou’s verdict when considering the
question of how fingerprinting had progressed in China, however, was that
“one cannot help but to sigh deeply!” Hou continued,
Not only do the authorities not promote fingerprinting, but they are also not
willing to fully make use of those fingerprinting personnel who have already
benefited from their studies. Those who practice this technique have become
disheartened and can do nothing to remedy the situation. Thus I cannot help but
cry out in grief for the future prospects of fingerprinting! (28)
Although a number of such personnel had already been trained at the
Advanced School, an achievement that Hou credited to the skill and dedica-
tion of Xia Quanyin, this did not guarantee that their expertise would be
valued. Thus, as Hou admitted,
My own way of thinking about it is that the fact that we pursue our studies is more
important than the question of whether the authorities actually make use of
fingerprinting. If we can always strive to do better in our studies and deeply pursue
our learning, then even if it is not used, there will still be a worthy result. (28)
Hou’s disappointment and that of others came from the perception that
national government authorities were not supporting the institutional develop-
ment of fingerprinting, an issue that was inseparable from their own professional
Asen 21
ambitions. It did not stem from a lack of employment opportunities for graduates
of the Advanced School. Some of the graduates did indeed find employment in
China’s small number of police identification offices. Graduates Xu Hui 徐慧
and Meng Zhiqi 孟誌奇, for example, became advocates of Xia Quanyin’s fin-
gerprint classification system during the 1930s amid debates about which system
was most suitable for China. Both were employed in the fingerprinting unit of the
Capital Police Bureau in Nanjing, where Xia Quanyin became chief of detectives
(Anonymous, 1934a: 112, 115). At the same time, many of those who went
through this program became detectives, police administrative personnel, or
instructors in police training programs, serving in positions that were ostensibly
not dedicated to fingerprint identification. While this outcome hardly fulfilled the
vision of specialized fingerprint offices that had been set out by the society, it was
nonetheless congruent with the goal of the Advanced School to ensure that
Chinese police officials possessed specialized training and formal knowledge.
In mid-1928, the Advanced School came under the authority of the
Nationalist government following the Northern Expedition, an event that ini-
tiated a decade of party-led state-building before the outbreak of the Second
Sino-Japanese War. At this point, the fingerprinting program established in
1921 was discontinued and the Fingerprint Society precipitously disappeared
from the scene.29 The Advanced School would remain in Beijing (renamed
Beiping with the establishment of the Nationalist government’s capital in
Nanjing) until early 1934, when it was finally relocated to Nanjing (Han and
Su, 2000: 733). Those who were involved with this school continued to pro-
mote the development of academic knowledge about policing as well as the
specialized training of police personnel. A new organization, the Advanced
School Schoolmates’ Association 警高同學會, was soon created to advance
these goals. Much like the Fingerprint Society, this association published a
journal, Modern Police 現代警察, which was heralded as the “only publica-
tion devoted to research on the academic learning of policing” 研究警察學
術唯一之刊物 (Xiandai jingcha [1933] 1, 1: front matter). The way finger-
printing was covered in this journal, however, suggests an understanding of
this field’s disciplinary status that was quite different from that which the
society had advocated. Rather than being the subject of its own journal (and,
in the society’s greatest ambitions, its own professional institutions) finger-
printing appeared in Modern Police as one subfield among many of the gen-
eral knowledge possessed by police professionals.
Conclusion
The impact and legacy of the Fingerprint Society were mixed. While most of
the proposals of its members were not adopted, they did anticipate subsequent
22 Modern China 00(0)
developments in the history of Chinese fingerprinting in striking ways. In ret-
rospect, this association clearly represents a moment in which long-term ten-
dencies toward expansion, formalization, and standardization in Chinese
fingerprinting saw their earliest formulations. Nationalist authorities’ push to
“unify” 統一 the fingerprint classification systems in use in China during the
1930s, for example, resembled the earlier aspirations of the Fingerprint
Society to bring about a nationally standardized fingerprinting system.30
Comparable efforts continued following the Communist revolution in 1949 as
the central government of the People’s Republic of China began to regulate
and standardize the ten-print classification systems used throughout the coun-
try. The national system that emerged out of this process, ironically enough,
incorporated elements from the Henry system, an old tool of colonial admin-
istration that was, once again, put into the service of a very different set of
political interests (Liu, 1984: 12–13, 495–501). The cumulative effect of these
efforts, which unfolded over many decades and under varied political condi-
tions, has been to put into place training, research, and investigative capabili-
ties in fingerprinting that support a now unquestionably sovereign China’s
policing and judicial apparatuses. There is much about this outcome that
would have been recognizable and perhaps even desirable to the members of
the Fingerprint Society.
Beyond its significance for the history of Chinese fingerprinting, the case
of the Fingerprint Society is useful for understanding how concepts of finger-
printing knowledge and expertise have been negotiated at the intersection of
policing and science, a dynamic that has run throughout its history (Cole,
2002; García Ferrari and Galeano, 2016; Joseph, 2001). Framing fingerprint-
ing as a science was one of the strategies used by the members of the
Fingerprint Society to demarcate a distinct area of professional knowledge
and expertise within policing. While the underlying motives have undoubt-
edly differed across time and place, similar rhetorical moves have been made
throughout the modern history of fingerprinting. Writing in China in the early
1980s, for example, fingerprinting expert Liu Shaocong 劉少聰 defined this
field as an “applied science” 應用科學 with connections to dermatoglyphics
皮膚學, biochemistry, organic chemistry, advanced mathematics, and com-
puting, a disciplinary landscape much more complicated than the Fingerprint
Society’s mere invocation of “physiology” (Liu, 1984: 1).
Moreover, in the United States and elsewhere recent decades have seen
calls for latent fingerprint identification to become more research-based as
well as more autonomous in relation to law enforcement (Lynch et al., 2008:
293–334; National Research Council, 2009: 136–45). That this critical dis-
course has questioned the epistemic foundations of fingerprinting—that is,
Asen 23
the quality of the knowledge on which fingerprinting is based—makes it
different from the unquestionably positive characterizations of fingerprint-
ing as a “science” that have been common throughout its modern history,
including in 1920s China. At the same time, the current expectation that
fingerprinting should be even more “scientific,” however that category is
defined, suggests just how compelling scientific disciplines and academi-
cally validated knowledge have been, and continue to be, for conceptualiz-
ing expertise in this field.
Statements such as those of the Fingerprint Society or Liu Shaocong
about the scientific status of fingerprinting knowledge should not, of
course, be taken to imply that this field is organized as a scientific disci-
pline in an institutional sense. Much as Jennifer Mnookin (2001: 1745) has
observed for American handwriting identification experts, fingerprinting
can be viewed as another example of “forms of knowledge that lack extra-
legal social institutions, such as universities or commercial research labora-
tories, through which to legitimize their authority.” The short history of the
Fingerprint Society can be interpreted, in fact, as demonstrating one of the
fates that can befall professional groups that lack independent support
structures and resources such as those associated with established academic
disciplines, which play various roles in the legitimization and propagation
of professions (Abbott, 1988: 195–211).
That the members of this association so consistently appealed to the
Ministry of Interior in their profession-building efforts suggests just how
much they were dependent on the policing infrastructure in which they were
already embedded for the realization of their new professional identity and
interests. Ultimately, as much as the Advanced School might have provided a
unique setting for imagining fingerprinting as a distinct field of academic
knowledge and perhaps even as an autonomous profession, it also gave rise
to inflated expectations about the possibilities for this particular model of
expertise to be successful.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the journal’s two referees for their valuable feedback. I would
also like to thank Jia-Chen Fu, Lijing Jiang, Tong Lam, and David Luesink for hold-
ing the 2017 Association for Asian Studies panel “Making Up Individuals and Species
in Twentieth-Century China,” which helped me to develop these ideas.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
24 Modern China 00(0)
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research and writing of this article
received support from National Science Foundation, award #1654990, “Fingerprinting
in Twentieth Century China from Racial, Political and Scientific Perspectives.”
Notes
1. An account of the proceedings and the text of the speeches were included in
Zhiwen zazhi 指紋雜誌 ([1924], no. 2: 附錄, 4–8), the irregularly published
journal of the Fingerprint Society. The first issue is accessible at the Beijing
Municipal Archives (BMA), where it is appended to BMA J181-18-14572. The
second and third issues were consulted at the main library of Peking University.
2. For an overview of such practices, see Zhao, 1997: 6–21. Hand and finger impres-
sions were used to sign documents as early as the Tang dynasty (618–907), when
signatures were also given in the form of dots or lines indicating the segments or
shape of the parties’ fingers (for more on this practice, see Niida, 1939). Hand
and foot impressions were routinely given on Qing-period wife sale contracts,
at times alongside the use of a cross or other mark to indicate the signature of
the husband. Matthew Sommer (2015: 141–43) shows that making these inked
impressions was an indispensable step in the “public ritual” of finalizing such
contracts by demonstrating the husband’s consent to the transaction.
3. For early twenty-first-century perspectives on these issues, see Cole, 2006; Cole,
2009; Breckenridge, 2014.
4. Elsewhere, the global proliferation of fingerprint identification practices was
driven by factors that included racist assumptions about the untrustworthiness of
colonial subjects and immigrants as well as anxieties about crime and anonymity
that were generated by new patterns of global migration and urbanization. See
Cole, 2002; Sengoopta, 2003; Rodriguez, 2004; Breckenridge, 2014; Takano,
2016; García Ferrari and Galeano, 2016.
5. For critical treatments of this concept, see Goodman, 2000, and Rogaski,
2004. In a study of how the Qing Empire used modern policing practices
to demonstrate its status as a “civilized” state, Tong Lam (2010: 885n14)
explores a specific dimension of the “semicolonial” condition: the ways for-
mally sovereign states such as China “actively sought to remake themselves
by appropriating the logic and language of colonialism.” This approach is
particularly useful for examining the history of fingerprinting, a field of prac-
tical knowledge that initially supported British colonial administration yet
subsequently came to serve varied (non-colonial) political and social interests
as it has been adopted by nation-states around the world (Breckenridge, 2014:
16–18, 164–95).
6. For general information on these classes and their instruction, see Anonymous,
1934b: 299–302; Hu, 1989 (1929): 475–80; Chen, 1935: 86–88; Han and Su,
2000: 500.
Asen 25
7. For information on the students’ career paths, see tables in the following issues
of Modern Police 現代警察: (1934) 1, 3: 110–16; (1934) 1, 4: 183–92; (1934) 2,
1: 303–22; (1935) 2, 3: 138–42.
8. For establishment of the fingerprinting program, see Tian, 1924d: 論說, 2; Hu,
1989 (1929): 476–77.
9. Xia’s educational background is mentioned in Xia, 1935 (1922): Liu Bangji pref-
ace, 11, as well as in the Shanghai county gazetteer, 1975 (1935), 19.9a. Xia’s
age was given as 26 sui in Metropolitan Police Board, 1920: 16.
10. In 1924, Xia (1924a) claimed that he had ‘‘served as an official in the police for
seven years,” thus suggesting that he began this career almost immediately after
graduating.
11. For an example of such perceptions from the late 1920s, see Bourne, 1929: 26–28.
12. For more on the Henry system, see Cole, 2002: 81–94. As Chandak Sengoopta
(2003: 141–45) discusses, there is evidence suggesting that Henry’s assistants
played a greater role than he did in devising the system.
13. In their discussion of the “celebrity aura” that came to surround English patholo-
gist Bernard Spilsbury (1877–1947), a transitional figure in the emergence of
the new paradigm of modern crime scene investigation in England, Ian Burney
and Neil Pemberton (2016: 83) argue that intensive press coverage gave rise to
“a cultural dynamo through which Spilsbury’s identity as a real-life Holmesian
sleuth was amplified, transmitted, and energized, significantly altering and
expanding public expectations about his powers of detection.” One could argue
that a similar phenomenon, albeit on a smaller scale, “amplified, transmitted,
and energized” Xia Quanyin’s public image as an expert in fingerprinting and
detection.
14. For more on the meanings of shiyan during this period, see Lean, 2014; Judge,
2015.
15. See front cover of Finger Print Magazine 1, 1 (1919).
16. For more on anatomy as a source of authoritative knowledge about the body in
early twentieth-century China, see Luesink, 2017.
17. Translation from Chan, 1973: 711. For the original, see Dai, 1982 (1961): 1.
18. For an overview of the rich (and multiple) philosophical meanings of li, see
Chan, 1964.
19. Pan did not provide additional explanation of the meaning of fenzi pailie 分
子排列, a term that, taken literally, would seem to refer to how molecules are
arranged in relation to each other, not to the arrangements of atoms that make up
individual molecules.
20. For the actual context in which this phrase (人心之不同, 如其面焉) was used,
see Yang, 1982: Xianggong 31.12, xia 1193.
21. This point is also made by Cole (2002: 175) in his discussion of Henry Faulds’
assertion that fingerprint examiners should have scientific training: “How much
scientific knowledge was necessary to interpret fingerprint evidence? It required
no scientific training at all to gain the visual acuity to analyze, interpret, com-
pare, and testify about fingerprint evidence.” By contrast, Cole suggests, one
26 Modern China 00(0)
would need scientific expertise to conduct research validating fingerprint iden-
tification techniques—for example, to study “how much matching ridge detail
would be necessary to confidently link a latent print to one person to the exclu-
sion of all others.”
22. For other pieces that touch on similar themes, see Li, 1924a; Liu, 1926a.
23. For newspaper extracts describing this episode, see Zhiwen zazhi, no. 3 (1926):
50–51. Also see Anonymous, 1926.
24. Also see Meng, 1926.
25. To be sure, the association’s proposals did not share certain basic features of the
“biometric state” that was established in South Africa and subsequently exported
to various post-colonial states. As used by Breckenridge (2014: 8–19), this term
refers quite specifically to a state that seeks centralized administrative capacity
through the use of biometric identification techniques rather than relying upon
locally oriented practices of information gathering, based on written records, that
citizens play a greater role in producing.
26. For other instances in which idealized fingerprint-based regimes of registration
and surveillance have been planned or imagined, see Ruggiero, 2001: 192–96;
Breckenridge, 2014: 196–99.
27. Wang Yangbin held this position in the ministry until October 1922.
28. The earlier Police Academy 警察學校 and Local Police Officers Training
School 地方警察傳習所 established in Beijing in the first few years of the
Republic had also been created as part of broader plans to regulate police edu-
cation throughout the country. See Hu, 1989 (1929): 471–73; Han and Su,
2000: 497–98.
29. The Advanced School saw several institutional and curricular changes over the
late 1920s and 1930s, culminating in its reorganization as part of the Central
Police Academy 中央警官學校 in 1936. Instruction in fingerprinting continued,
albeit as one among many subjects in the regular curriculum and not as a separate
specialized program. For the history of this school during the Nanjing decade
and after, see Han and Su, 2000: 732–42.
30. For a survey of fingerprinting in mid-1930s China as well as discussion of the
early stages of this project of national standardization, see Police Administration
Department, 1935: 153–57.
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Author Biography
Daniel Asen is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Rutgers
University–Newark. Professor Asen’s research examines the intersection of law, sci-
ence, and medicine in modern China. His recent book Death in Beijing: Murder and
Forensic Science in Republican China (Cambridge University Press, 2016) examines
the history of homicide investigation and forensic science in Republican Beijing.