Elites, Networks and Power in modern China Blog
Introduction The category of “shopkeeper” in late Qing and Republican Shanghai was far from uniform. Terms such as 店主, 東家, 掌櫃, 業主, 行主, 坊主, and 舖主 referred to actors embedded in different economic functions,...
My latest research trip to China, from mid-October to early November 2025, was not a return after a long absence but part of an ongoing intellectual routine, a rhythm of teaching, meetings, and fieldwork...
Reflections on the Sixth Conference on the History of the Shanghai French Concession Shanghai Normal University, November 1–2, 2025 The Sixth Conference on the History of the Shanghai French Concession (第六届法租界会议), convened at Shanghai...
In the previous post, I examined the problem of terminology and the different labels that circulated in the Shenbao to designate shopkeepers. That exercise was not an end in itself but a necessary step...
The Rencontres SHS computationnelles, held at Campus Condorcet in September 2025, marked an important step in consolidating institutional attention to computational approaches across the humanities and social sciences in France. The program offered a...
This study of shopkeepers takes the press as its main source. This is not because we are unaware of the value of other types of sources, as discussed in our literature review. Our focus...
The history of shopkeepers has long occupied a marginal place in economic and social historiography,which privileged the analysis of large-scale commerce, industrial capital, and wage labor, while the small trader situated awkwardly between bourgeois...
Historians of modern China have often written about the great and the downtrodden—the famous and powerful who shaped economies, or the workers who carried revolutions, albeit unsuccessfully. Somewhere in between, however, lies a broad...
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the practice of historical research is no longer a hypothetical prospect. It is unfolding with growing momentum, raising pressing methodological, epistemological, and ethical questions for scholars across...
On June 6, 2025, the Center for Urban Culture at Shanghai Normal University hosted Dr. Cécile Armand, for a presentation titled “The Transpacific Origins of Modern China: A Social History of American-Educated Chinese (1850–1950).”...
The ENP-China project is thrilled to announce the public release of HistText, a groundbreaking application designed to revolutionize how scholars engage with large-scale historical text databases. Developed as part of our successful ERC Proof...
The Modern China TextBase (MCTB) is a large-scale, multilingual digital infrastructure designed to support advanced research on the history of modern China. Spanning from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century (ca. 1850–1950), the MCTB...
We’re thrilled to share some wonderful news from the ENP-China team—two of our talented visiting young scholars, Tian Le and Lu Yijun, have officially earned their doctorates. After years of dedicated research, and a...
On 15 May 2025, the European Commission organized an online meeting with stakeholders, including representatives from different areas of science that are using (or could use) AI in their research projects. Other ERC grantees...
Join authors Cécile Armand, Christian Henriot, and Nora Van den Bosch in a lively discussion about their latest edited volume, “Modern China in Flux: Networks, Mobility, and Transformation.” This recorded book talk highlights innovative...
We are pleased to announce the open-access publication of the collective volume Modern China in Flux: Networks, Mobility, and Transformation (De Gruyter). This book explores Chinese society through the notion of networks—as a concept,...