Digital Horizons and Historical Continuities

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 Normal University on November 1–2, 2025, reaffirmed the vitality of research on Shanghai’s treaty-port past while gesturing toward the growing influence of digital and computational methods in urban historiography. Organized by Professor Jiang Jie (蒋杰), the event brought together more than thirty scholars from China, Japan, and Europe. Over two days, participants traversed a wide chronological and thematic landscape, from the architecture of the late nineteenth century to the industrial transformations of reform-era Shanghai, revealing both the durability of traditional historical inquiry and the cautious but perceptible rise of digital experimentation.

If earlier editions of the conference had focused primarily on the material, political, and cultural legacies of the French Concession, this sixth meeting distinguished itself by seeking methodological breadth. It did not become a laboratory for digital history alone, but rather a forum where digital humanities, archival research, and transnational perspectives intersected, sometimes converging, sometimes standing apart.

In his opening remarks, Professor Jiang recalled the intellectual trajectory of the French Concession Conference series, initiated more than a decade ago to promote dialogue among historians, art historians, and cultural scholars of modern Shanghai. He noted that the study of the Concession continues to expand beyond its colonial frame, functioning as a laboratory for questions of modernity, globalization, and urban life.

The 2025 program confirmed this expansive ambition. Presentations moved fluidly between political history, cultural exchange, urban design, and, in a handful of cases, digital methodology. The resulting mosaic reflected the French Concession’s own historical heterogeneity, a territory simultaneously administrative, diplomatic, cultural, and social in nature.

From Archival Depth to Algorithmic Experiments

The conference’s keynote address by Christian Henriot (Aix–Marseille University), “塵封賬本與新算法:《申報》中的上海店主世界與生活” (Dusty Ledgers and New Algorithms: The World and Life of Shanghai Shopkeepers in Shenbao), set the tone for the meeting’s digital aspirations. Drawing on more than 69,000 articles from the Shenbao (申报, 1872–1949), Henriot combined corpus building using the HistText platform, text mining, network analysis, and large-language-model (LLM) discourse analysis. His approach reconstructed the linguistic and moral universe of Shanghai’s shopkeepers, tracing the shifting vocabulary of credit, thrift, and respectability from the late Qing to the Republican era. Henriot’s methodological reflection—“data is not merely evidence, it is a site of interpretation”, resonated well beyond his corpus. Yet it also marked a minority orientation within the conference. While his paper illustrated the interpretive potential of machine reading, most other presentations returned to the historian’s traditional tools: close reading, archival comparison, and visual analysis.

A small cluster of papers pursued digital or data-driven questions. Jiang Jie’s contribution on the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce extended the HistText approach to institutional networks, mapping the connections among merchants, associations, and civic organizations in early twentieth-century Shanghai.  In “基于主题建模的上海‘老工人谈话记录’（1953–1958）文本分析” (Topic Modeling the Shanghai ‘Veteran Workers’ Oral Records’, 1953–1958), Lu Yijun applied topc modeling to a corpus of post-1949 oral transcripts preserved in municipal archives. The analysis revealed thematic continuities in workers’ discourse—from pre-1949 industrial hierarchies to socialist-era narratives of production and morality—demonstrating how computational analysis can recover semantic memory embedded in collective speech.

Zhao Yi’s (Kwansei Gakuin University) paper, “日本学界与《法文上海日报》的数字化及利用” (Digitization and Use of the French-Language Journal de Shanghai*) traced the transnational digitization of the French-language press in Shanghai (1927–1945). Conducted in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Kyoto University, and Chinese collaborators, this initiative has made available a multilingual source base that allows scholars to analyze how the French community represented Shanghai’s political transformations and cosmopolitan culture. By providing open access to a previously scattered corpus, the project embodies the spirit of digital diplomacy—a collaborative infrastructure for shared historical knowledge.

These papers exemplified the emerging computational turn in Chinese urban history—an effort to move from digitization to computation, from source collection to data analysis. Yet they stood apart within a program still dominated by archival scholarship, serving as methodological provocations rather than a new orthodoxy.

Revisiting the French Concession: Culture, Power, and Everyday Life

The bulk of the proceedings reaffirmed the plural and enduring vitality of conventional historical approaches.

Several studies turned their attention to the built environment of the French Concession as a medium of colonial administration and cultural translation. They tracked the built environment and municipal governance—cinema and entertainment geographies, the “French wall” during the Small Swords Uprising, street-tree management in 1927–37, Aurore University campus architecture, a 1930s city-zoo siting debate, and how architecture journals documented and shaped the concession’s urban image. These contributions relied on traditional archival, visual, and textual analysis, but collectively they offered a rich picture of how urban modernity was imagined, constructed, and regulated in colonial Shanghai.

Another cluster focused on the political life of the Concession: contributors revisited policing/governance, Tianjin “教案” repercussions, Sun Chuanfang and sovereignty recovery, the 1949–50 closure/transfer of the French embassy, and comparative press images of the Tianjin concession (“from ‘Little Paris’ to ‘Isolated Island’”) These studies reinforced the field’s enduring commitment to empirical documentation and the micro-politics of colonial administration—approaches less spectacular than machine learning but no less critical to historical understanding.

Equally prominent were papers exploring the Concession as a space of cultural exchange and cosmopolitanism. Nozawa Joji (Waseda University) surveyed Japanese scholarship on the French Concession and introduced a new Kakenhi-funded project, “Multilingual, Interdisciplinary Research on Educational and Cultural Activities in the French Concession (1849–1943).” His overview highlighted transnational flows of books, art, and education that connected Shanghai to Tokyo and Paris. Other contributions examined treaty ports’ artistic and literary life beyond Shanghai, with papers on Tiajin and even Svedin’s expeditions in Xinjiang and Mongolia.

Through these papers, the conference foregrounded the cultural and intellectual vibrancy of the Concession, emphasizing continuities between art, politics, and social identity.

One of the notable features of this year’s program was its chronological reach. Several papers moved beyond the treaty-port period to explore how the legacies of the French Concession persisted—or were reconfigured—after 1949. Tao Chen (Tongji University) analyzed the formation of Shanghai Volkswagen (1978–84) through German and Chinese archival sources, linking the joint venture to broader debates about technology transfer and reform-era industrial policy. Other studies examined the transfer of French diplomatic missions (1949–1950), the postwar reorganization of Sino-French enterprises, and the adaptation of industrial infrastructure in early People’s Republic Shanghai. Although methodologically traditional, these works extended the conference’s scope into the postcolonial and global twentieth century, bridging the study of treaty-port institutions with the economic transformations of modern China.

Digital Humanities in Context: Promise and Proportion

Against this backdrop, the digital and AI-oriented presentations stood out as innovative but still peripheral. The computational projects—Henriot’s algorithmic reading of the Shenbao, Jiang’s and Lu’s network and topic modeling analyses—offered glimpses of what an integrated “digital urban history” might look like. Yet their rarity underscored the distance still to be traveled before such methods become mainstream within Chinese historiography. At the same time, their presence within a conference otherwise dominated by traditional research was itself significant. It suggested a gradual convergence between two intellectual traditions: one grounded in archives and textual criticism, the other in data modeling and algorithmic reasoning. Rather than replacing established methods, computation here functioned as an invitation—to revisit old sources with new eyes, and to imagine history as a dialogue between human interpretation and machine-assisted discovery.

The Sixth French Concession History Conference did not herald a digital revolution, but it mapped the contours of a disciplinary crossroads. The majority of contributions reaffirmed the strength of conventional scholarship in political, cultural, and urban history, while a few pioneering papers pointed toward computational futures. This coexistence—between the analog and the algorithmic—may in fact be the conference’s most telling achievement. It revealed a field in motion: deeply anchored in the materiality of archives and yet increasingly aware of the interpretive power of data.

From the colonial streets of the Concession to the transnational networks of postwar industry, the 2025 gathering demonstrated that the history of Shanghai remains a fertile terrain for methodological innovation. Whether through new readings of old documents or the distant gaze of the algorithm, historians continue to seek what binds the social, cultural, and spatial textures of the modern city. The French Concession, long a symbol of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past, thus reemerged in this conference as a metaphor for the present state of the discipline, a place of negotiation, translation, and transformation, where the future of historical inquiry is being quietly, and collectively, reimagined.

---

---