The Jesuits and Chinese Science* Chicheng Ma† June 2019 Abstract: Based on the historical context of the Jesuit mission to China from 1580, this paper examines the role of knowledge diffusion in scientific production. To facilitate their China mission, the Jesuits introduced European sciences to Chinese cultural elites—the Confucian literati. This stimulated the literati toward scientific research. In places where the Jesuits diffused European sciences, the number of Chinese scientific works increased significantly. But this effect disappeared after the Pope dismissed the Jesuit mission in 1773. The finding questions the conventional wisdom that the Confucian literati of imperial China disparaged science, and demonstrates the importance of opening to knowledge flow in scientific progress. Keywords: Jesuit mission; Science; Knowledge Diffusion; Elites; Human Capital; China JEL Codes: N35; N75; O15; O33; Z12 * Preliminary draft. I thank Ying Bai, Zhiwu Chen, Jeremiah Dittmar, Ruixue Jia, James Kung, Jin Li, Luigi Pascali, Kaixiang Peng, Felipe Valencia Caicedo, Lingwei Wu, Noam Yuchtman, and the seminar participants at the National University of Singapore, Lingnan University, Hong Kong Baptist University, Jinan University, Peking University, Sun Yat-sen University, Fudan University, Shandong University, Economic History Workshop (HKU), and The Sixth Asian Historical Economics Conference for helpful comments. Xinhao Li, Xinran Liu, Xinning Ren and Xiaofan Zhu provided excellent research assistance. I am also grateful to Hong Kong Research Grants Council and The University of Hong Kong for generous financial support. The remaining errors are mine. † Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. Email:
[email protected]. 1 1. Introduction Thanks to the missionary expansion of the Jesuits, European sciences were introduced to imperial China since 1580.