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.
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.
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.
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.
Barbara Mittler is Professor of Sinology at Heidelberg University, where she co-founded the Excellence Cluster ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ and the Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS). She studied Sinology, Musicology, and Japanese at Oxford, Taipei, and Heidelberg, earning her PhD (1994) and habilitation (1998) there. Her research covers cultural production in Greater China, including music, print media, women’s magazines, and Cultural Revolution culture. Her book A Continuous Revolution (Harvard UP, 2012) won the John King Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association. She has also received the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz Prize (2000) and the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities (2009).
Brett Sheehan is Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley (1997) and came to academia after a first career in commercial banking and finance. His research focuses on the intersection of business, economy, and culture in modern China, especially Republican-era finance. He is the author of Trust in Troubled Times (Harvard UP, 2003) and Industrial Eden (Harvard UP, 2015). He also served as Director of USC’s East Asian Studies Center and divides his time between Los Angeles and Shanghai.
Cameron Campbell is Chair Professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). His research focuses on demography, stratification, and inequality in historical China using large multi-generational population databases. He co-leads the Lee-Campbell Research Group, which builds and analyzes the China Multigenerational Panel Datasets (CMGPD). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and served as Changjiang Scholar at Central China Normal University (2017–2020). He was also a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2022–23).
Ling-Ling Lien is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research interests span modern China, women’s history, business history, and urban culture history. She has investigated civilian internment camps in Shanghai under Japanese occupation, exploring military policy and civilian life in wartime. Since 2010, she has edited the journal Research on Women in Modern Chinese History and manages the Early Chinese Periodicals Online database. She has also contributed scholarship on social investigation as an emerging genre in late Qing periodicals.
James Z. Lee (李中清) is Yan Ai Professor of Social Science at HKUST, where he served as Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science (2009–2018). He holds a PhD in History from the University of Chicago (1983) and previously held positions at Caltech and the University of Michigan. His research pioneered quantitative methods in Chinese social and demographic history, co-founding the Lee-Campbell Research Group. His book One Quarter of Humanity (Harvard UP, 1999) won the Allan Sharlin Award from the Social Science History Association. He has been recognized as a Guggenheim Fellow (2004) and a Peking University Changjiang Scholar (2006–2010).
Marilyn Levine is Professor of History at Central Washington University, trained in modern Chinese and Vietnamese history at the University of Chicago and the University of Hawaii. Her research focuses on Chinese political party formation in Europe during the 1920s and on life history methods applied to modern China. She is the author of The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties (University of Washington Press, 1993). She founded the Chinese Biographical Database (CBD), one of the first online scholarly databases on the web (1998–2006). Her service includes terms as President of H-NET and President of the Historical Society for 20th Century China.
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.
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.
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.
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.