John Alekna is a historian of the technology and sociopolitics of China. He joined the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Department at Peking University in 2020 after completing his PhD at Princeton University. His recent book, Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford University Press, 2024), a history of news in twentieth-century China, investigates the ways that information technologies and social practices interact to create new political orders. He is currently working on two projects: a biography of a Chinese scientist-explorer in the ‘Great Game’, and an examination of mathematics and print technology in China’s modern transition.
In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford University Press, 2024), John Alekna explores how the rise of radio and the circulation of news transformed China’s political and social landscape. He shows how new technologies of communication created a Chinese ‘newsscape’ that linked distant regions, shaped how people understood […]
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