Research
Wireless telegram from He [Long] and Deng [Xiaoping] to Mao zhuxi [Chairman Mao], January 16, 1951, "Guanyu jinZang [character not clear] budui ji gongying wenti [about the supply issues of troops entering Tibet]," Zhonghua renmin gonghe guo guojia dang'an guanli ju [National Archives Administration of China]. Accessible at https://www.saac.gov.cn/zt/2013-01/14/content_22185.htm. Accessed on October 26, 2024.
According to the "Zhongji 中機" (short for Zhongyang jiyaoju [Central Cipher Bureau]), the original wireless telegram made a mistake: it said "ten horses" instead of "one thousand horses" (the correct number). In fact, mistakes like this were common in Chinese Communist wireless telegrams from the 1930s to the early 1950s.
My book project, Information Culture and Institutionalization in Revolution: The Chinese Communist Party’s Radio Communications and Reconnaissance, 1927–1953, is a study of secret information and technological institutions in the revolutionary movement. Placing Communist archives into dialogue with Nationalist, Japanese, Russian, and US archives, and through digital history analysis, I argue that the Party was successful in revolutionary struggles because it developed a security-focused information culture that enabled it to build sophisticated technological institutions while maintaining tight security.
The project intervenes in the long-standing “public discourse” paradigm which considers revolutionary propaganda the key to understanding the mass-based, self-reliant, and crude technologies of the Communist revolution. Foregrounding secret information operations shows that the focus on public information has led scholars to underestimate how secret information flows forged institutional connections between the state and the revolutionary movement. My approach brings secret information back into the analysis, opening a new direction for a study of information culture and its relations to the diffusion of sophisticated technological skills from the state to the revolutionary movement, and across gender and national boundaries.
Putting Nationalist archives into dialogue with Communist, Japanese, and US archives, my second project highlights how the Nationalist government’s concerns about information insecurity, in face of Japanese and Communist espionage, prevented effective sharing of meteorological data for weather forecast in agriculture and civil and military aviation in 1927–1949. The project intervenes in the dominant “predatory state” paradigm that emphasizes how state-driven wartime resource extraction contributed to ecological scarcity. Instead, I show how a fragmented information infrastructure constrained the state’s capacity to exploit the environment.
The project intervenes in the long-standing “public discourse” paradigm which considers revolutionary propaganda the key to understanding the mass-based, self-reliant, and crude technologies of the Communist revolution. Foregrounding secret information operations shows that the focus on public information has led scholars to underestimate how secret information flows forged institutional connections between the state and the revolutionary movement. My approach brings secret information back into the analysis, opening a new direction for a study of information culture and its relations to the diffusion of sophisticated technological skills from the state to the revolutionary movement, and across gender and national boundaries.
Putting Nationalist archives into dialogue with Communist, Japanese, and US archives, my second project highlights how the Nationalist government’s concerns about information insecurity, in face of Japanese and Communist espionage, prevented effective sharing of meteorological data for weather forecast in agriculture and civil and military aviation in 1927–1949. The project intervenes in the dominant “predatory state” paradigm that emphasizes how state-driven wartime resource extraction contributed to ecological scarcity. Instead, I show how a fragmented information infrastructure constrained the state’s capacity to exploit the environment.