Dr. Zhaojin Zeng specializes in the economic, business, and industrial history of modern China and the world. In addition to a forthcoming book on China’s factory history, his works explore the early US-China trade and the history of China’s regional economic reform in the 1980s. Most recently, he is leading various projects that use data sources and computational methods to examine the intersection of history, economy, and technology in transitional China.
One of his research projects, The Formation and Development of China’s Industrial Infrastructure: A Study of Industrial Gazetteers in the Republican Era, has received the Jiangsu Higher Educational Social Science Grant (JHESSG) earlier this year. The project, being DKU’s only JHESSG award this year, is hosted under CSCC as one of its pilot research projects.
Tell us about your project.
I have long been fascinated by China’s industrial history – the factories, managers and technicians, and their monumental impacts and legacies. My academic writings delve specifically into China’s ground-level industrializing experience, with a focus on local entrepreneurs. I use their understudied stories to shed light on the continuity and ruptures in the transformation of China’s industrial economy. My dissertation-turned-book project, currently under contract with Cornell University Press, is a case study of the Baojin Company, one of the earliest coal and iron companies in North China. Through a close examination of Baojin’s adventurous life from its founding in 1907 to its bankruptcy in 2004, my book provides a distinctive micro-historical perspective on the formation and evolution of China’s factory economy over the course of the long twentieth century.
My JED-awarded project is part of this larger academic endeavors. Instead of looking at any particular factory cases, this project will adopt another methodological approach to collect data from primary sources produced in the Republican period and turn it into a large, systematic database. In the early 1930s, the Nationalist government commissioned various survey teams to investigate the state of domestically owned factories, plants, and mines. These survey trips yielded multiple volumes of reports and gazetteers containing wealthy narratives and statistical data on China’s early industrial infrastructure. My project is to extract both textual and numeric data from the original sources created by the government agencies in the 1930s. I plan to construct one of the first and most systematic data collections on the geographical, industrial, and ecological dynamics of China’s early industrial infrastructure.
What made you interested in studying the formation of China’s industrial infrastructure in the Republican era?
The Republican era is an important stage in the history of China’s industrialization. Both its macrohistory and individuals have interested me a lot. During this time period, state powers and private capitalists both sprearheaded developmental initiatives on various fronts, such as textile, electricity, and coalmining, especially after the founding of the Nanjing government. The decade between 1928 and 1938 witnessed considerable increases in China’s industrial production, domestic consumption, and international trade. Industrial factories, native and foreign owned, played an indispensable role in making all of those happen. My work aims to build up a systematic understanding of the scale and scope of their remarkable achievements and understand their significance in the broader historical context. The other factor attracting me into the Republican era is the distinctive generation of entrepreneurs who studied overseas and returned to China in pusuit of industrial modernity for the country while building their own business or technological empires. Many of them, or their brands or companies, became household names. Their experiences are of importance for us to understand the subsequent development of China’s industrial economy and technology.
We are really curious about the Jiangsu Higher Education Social Science Grant (general program). Could you let us know more background information about the award? And what is your longer-term vision of this project after completing this grant period?
The Jiangsu Higher Educational Social Science Grant is an exciting program that supports cutting-edge research in various disciplines within social science and humanities. It is open each year for competition, and applicants submit proposals for multi-year projects. The selection process involves internal and external reviews as well as a final confirmation from JED itself. My long-term vision of this project is to develop an analytical framework that could make better use of previously underutilized sources and develop an integrated approach to incorporate both narrative materials and quantitative data into the analysis of China’s industrial economy. As I can see, this will be an interdisciplinary endeavor, and I will look forward to working closely with colleagues from the Center for the Studies of Contemporary China as well as from other divisions and programs at DKU to advance it and make broader impacts.
