Xueguang Zhou (周雪光) is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University, where he also earned his PhD in 1991. His research examines institutional change in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on state-building, bureaucratic governance, social inequality, and state-society relations. Before joining Stanford in 2006, he held faculty positions at Cornell University, Duke University, and HKUST, and is a guest professor at Peking, Tsinghua, and Renmin universities. His major work, The Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach (Cambridge UP, 2022), develops a unified theoretical framework explaining how China’s centralized political system maintains governance and produces recognizable policy cycles. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford and a leading voice in the organizational sociology of the Chinese state.
Cécile Armand is a CNRS Junior Professor at the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies (IAO), specializing in the social and advertising history of modern urban China. She completed her PhD at ENS Lyon on the spatial history of advertising in Shanghai (1905–1949) and has authored three research monographs, including Madmen in Shanghai. Her work combines archival research with computational and digital humanities methods, including Natural Language Processing and biographical database construction. She is a core member of the ENP-China project, which uses large-scale text analysis to study Republican-era Chinese elites and networks. Her scholarship has significantly advanced the field of digital history of modern China.
Christian Henriot is Professor Emeritus of Modern Chinese History at Aix-Marseille University, former Senior Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France, and recipient of a Humboldt Research Award (2013). His research focuses on the social and urban history of Shanghai, wartime China, and the digital humanities, having trained in Paris, Hong Kong, and Stanford. He is the author of numerous books, including Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai (Cambridge UP, 2001) and Scythe and the City (Stanford UP, 2016). He created the Virtual Shanghai digital research platform and led the ERC-funded ‘Elites, Networks and Power in Modern Urban China’ project (2018–2023). He is widely regarded as a pioneer of digital history methods applied to modern China.
Matthew H. Sommer is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University, specializing in the social and legal history of Qing dynasty China. He holds a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from UCLA, with research centered on gender, sexuality, and family using original legal case records. His book Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford UP, 2000) became a bestseller in Chinese translation. Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (UC Press, 2015) won the Peter Gonville Stein Award from the American Society for Legal History. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia UP, 2024), won the John Boswell Prize.
Marianne Bastid-Bruguière (born 1940) is Research Director Emeritus at the CNRS and a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (elected 2001). She studied at the École Normale Supérieure and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales, and conducted early research at Peking University (1964–1966). Her doctoral thesis and scholarly career centred on educational reform in late Qing and early Republican China. She received honorary doctorates from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Aberdeen, and served as Deputy Director of the ENS (1988–1993). She served on the executive committee of the China Quarterly for twenty-five years and collaborated with leading China scholars worldwide.
Alain Roux is a French historian of modern China, Professor Emeritus at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO) in Paris. He obtained the agrégation d’histoire in 1960 and taught at Paris-VIII and INALCO before retiring as emeritus in 2002. His research focuses on Chinese workers and political elites in the Republican period, particularly in Shanghai, and on the intellectual Qu Qiubai. He is the author of major biographies of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong. His work has been foundational in the study of modern Chinese political history.
During the mid-20th century, the French community in China experienced a dramatic decline as the nation transitioned from an imperial power to a post-colonial state. Despite their privileged legal status, French residents faced significant instability following the 1940 establishment of the Vichy government, which chose a path of collaboration with Japanese authorities. This era was defined by the forced retrocession of French concessions and the 1945 Japanese military coup, which stripped diplomats of their remaining authority and left citizens economically stranded. While French officials utilized legally questionable property transfers and secret funds to preserve their influence, they ultimately failed to recognize the rising tide of Chinese sovereignty. By the war’s end, the French were forced to relinquish their holdings, marking the final collapse of their colonial interests in Shanghai and beyond. These sources utilize diplomatic archives to illustrate the disconnect between the persistent imperial visions of diplomats and the harsh realities of wartime life.
In this interview, Cécile Armand discusses her role as guest editor for a special issue of Twentieth-Century China centered on the Chinese study abroad movement between 1850 and 1950. She explains how the featured research challenges traditional narratives of foreign imperialism by highlighting the agency of students, the influence of informal networks, and the impact of financial constraints. The project is notable for its interdisciplinary approach, merging traditional archival research with computational and quantitative methodologies to analyze large historical datasets. Armand emphasizes that overseas education was a highly stratified and transnational process that reshaped Chinese elite formation and social mobility. By tracing long-term career trajectories, the articles move beyond simple success stories to reveal how individuals navigated complex political and institutional structures. Ultimately, the collection aims to normalize data-driven methods in historiography while providing a more nuanced understanding of China’s active participation in global history.
This podcast presents a contradictory debate about a research article by Cécile Armand and Christian Henriot on a quantitative micro-history of the French community in Shanghai during the pivotal year of 1942. By analyzing a rare consular census, the authors examine the demographic and social structures of this group amidst the Japanese occupation of the city. The study reveals that the French population was a self-contained community, largely supported by municipal employment and religious institutions rather than industrial trade. Using Geographical Information System (GIS) tools, the text maps how French residents clustered in specific residential zones and modern apartment buildings to maintain a distinct cultural identity. Ultimately, the authors argue that the authoritarian power of the French Consul General created a protected niche that granted these nationals unique privileges and status in a transcolonial urban setting.
Historian Christian Henriot highlights the historical neglect of Shanghai shopkeepers, a vital social group that operated between the wealthy elite and the working class in the period between 1872 and 1949. These small-scale entrepreneurs served as the essential link in urban life, managing daily commerce while occasionally engaging in political activism through trade guilds and boycotts. Because traditional archives often lack detailed records of these figures, Henriot utilizes newspapers like the Shenbao and historical photographs to reconstruct their lives. This research project employs computational analysis to examine how the press represented these merchants as economic and civic actors. Ultimately, the study aims to bring this “urban middle” out of the shadows to better understand their influence on the city’s social fabric.
Christian Henriot’s work explores the integration of artificial intelligence into the field of historical scholarship, emphasizing that technology should serve as a research assistant rather than a replacement for human judgment. He proposes a nine-step workflow that balances computational tools with the historian’s unique interpretive “Mind” to navigate the modern era’s abundance of digital sources. This methodology utilizes large language models for specialized tasks such as data extraction, multilingual summarization, and thematic clustering while maintaining rigorous standards for transparency and verification. A detailed case study of Shanghai merchants illustrates how these tools function in practice to enhance prosopography and network analysis. Ultimately, the sources advocate for a hybrid approach where historians acquire technical literacy to responsibly augment their analytical capacity.