This article describes China’s century-long concern
with the professional ethics of engineers, especially a succession of codes of
engineering ethics going back at least to 1933. This description is the result
both of our own archival research and of “philosophical history”, the
application of concepts from the philosophy of professions to the facts
historians (or we) have discovered. Engineers, historians, social scientists,
and philosophers of technology, as well as students of professional ethics,
should find this description interesting. It certainly provides a reason to
wonder whether those who write about codes of professional ethics as if they
were an Anglo-American export unlikely to put down roots elsewhere might have
overlooked many early codes outside English-speaking countries. While code
writers in China plainly learned from Western codes, the Chinese codes were not
mere copies of their Western counterparts. Indeed, the Chinese codes sometimes
differed inventively from Western codes in form (for example, being wholly
positive) or content (for example, protecting local
culture).
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