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Alexandria is the pearl of the Mediterranean.

Steeped in history and knowledge, visitors gulp down colour, like donkeys gorging on oats. But it has come to feel like Birmingham. It's not just the endless El Geish Road, the lively and frustrating dual carriageway with its complex system of u-turns and an insurmountable central reservation that makes me feel like I'm covering familiar ground, but the topics for discussion at the conference on Darwin's legacy. I wanted to write about Hindu creationism after Michael Roberts gave it a fleeing mention in his presentation but nobody here was able to give me any details. Happily I bumped into Darryl E Brock while choosing desserts at the thrillingly downmarket Four Seasons.

He didn't know anything about Hindu creationism either, but he knew about Darwin's influence in China and invited me to come along to his talk. On the Origin of Species may have stormed the west in 1859 but Darwinian scientific and social thought did not reach China in any significant way until four decades later, when the nation was in turmoil, says Brock.

The corrupt and failing Manchu dynasty fuelled revolutionary aspirations, while a crisis of national confidence emerged with Japan's military triumph over China in 1895. This humiliation prompted intellectuals Kang You-wei and future president Sun Yat-Sen to look to Darwin and Herbert Spencer as guides to help model China on the "fitter" western powers. Darwinism helped catalyse revolution and the establishment of the 1911 Republic, Brock claims.

In the aftermath of the defeat of 1895, scholar and translator Yan Fu, who went on to publish Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics and Herbert Spencer's Sociology, said: "With rapacious neighbours all around, I fear that we will be too late, that we will follow upon Poland and India, providing an example of Darwin's [elimination] before we have been able to implement Spencer's methods. The west is truly wealthy and powerful, therefore in today's policies we can have no other teacher than the west."

Survival of the fittest took on a very different meaning for the wounded nation. Yan Fu wrote: "Men and all other living things are born on the earth in great profusion ... species struggle with species and ... the weak are devoured by the strong, and the stupid enslaved by the wise, so that, in the end, those who survive … are most fit for their time, their places, and their human situation."

Mao also recognised the importance of Darwinian theory. It legitimised his nation. In 1957 the chairman discussed China in Darwinist terms: "Socialism, in the ideological struggle, now enjoys all the conditions to triumph as the fittest."

That same year Mao also invoked Darwin to justify his Hundred Flowers Campaign of openness to invite new ideas for advancement of the communist nation, writing: "Correct and good things have often at first been looked upon not as fragrant flowers but as poisonous weeds; Copernicus's theory of the solar system and Darwin's theory of evolution were once dismissed as erroneous and had to win out over bitter opposition."

Brock concluded that without Darwin "the ground would not have been tilled for Mao to sow the seeds and reap the crop." When asked what social and economic circumstances were needed for Darwinism to flourish he replied: "What we saw in China was a lack of national confidence. It became a nationalism project. In other countries it became a vehicle for eugenics."

Jim Secord, who was chairing the discussion, added: "There are certain types of religious tradition that require more interpretive work. In the case of some Hindu and Japanese traditions, these are more resourceful within traditional philosophy and therefore more successful [at embracing Darwin]."

Normal service is resumed.