Involution and Revolution: Information in Nineteenth Century China

June 14-15, 2025

Room 201, Jingyuan Courtyard one

Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine,

Peking University

June 14

Opening Remarks 9:30-10:00

1. Information as Mediator: 10:00-11:50

Carl Kubler, Carnegie Mellon University,“Globalizing Information at the Grassroots: Sino-Western Knowledge Transfer and Everyday Relations in the Nineteenth Century”

Susan Eberhard, Swarthmore College, “Knowing Silver: The Foreign Coin Information Economy”

Yingying Huang 黄莺莺，Lafayette College, “Telling a China Story from Afar: Wang Tao and His De-centered Journalism”

Lunch

2. Information for Managing People and Space:  1:20-3:00

Charles Argon, Princeton University, “The Flow of Policy Information in Late Qing China: The 1813 Baojia Reforms in Practice”

Qingrou Zhao 赵晴柔，University of Edinburgh, “Counting in, counting out: practical and ideological considerations in the 1865 census of Shanghai foreign settlements”

Xu Tianmin 许天敏 ,中国传媒大学，《解构、承继与沿革：近代中国时制变革与国族建构》

Tea Break

3. Managing Information Itself: 3:20-5:00

Yang Enchao 杨恩超, 上海交通大学，《会议、议会、研究会：清代会议形式与信息处理》

Wang Hanmei 王含梅, 华中师范大学，《晚清邮驿空间的分异与政治信息传播的时空压缩——以华北为中心的考察（1840-1911）》

John Alekna, Peking University, “Arithmetic and Abacus: the Processing of Information in Late Imperial China”

Dinner

June 15

4. Empires and Information 10:00-12:10

Timothy Weston, University of Colorado, Boulder, “The Rise of the Press in Nineteenth-Century China: A Commercial Story”

Xavier Ma 马玺，湖南大学，“The Irrawaddy Intersected: Colonial Explorations, Territorial Borders, and the Charting of a Transboundary River in the Age of Empire”

Ling-wei Kung, Academia Sinica, “Sovereignty in the Wire: Qing Diplomacy, Media Channels, and Information Flows in Tibet, 1904-1906”

Emily Mokros, University of Kentucky, “False Reports and Reactive Panics: The Qing Information Order in Wartime Beijing”

Lunch

5. Points of Connection 1:20-3:00

Huan Jin 金环, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, “Printing to Proselytize: A Comparison of Three Early Missionary Magazines in Chinese”

Daniel Knorr, Illinois State University, “Social Patterns and Media of Translocal Information Circulation in Nineteenth-Century Jinan”

Zhang Yu 张宇, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, “Love Over the Wires: Telephonic Information in Late Qing and Early Republican China”

Tea Break

Closing Remarks and Discussion 3:10-4:00

Dinner