Lightning Wires

The Telegraph and China's Technological Modernization, 1860-1890

Erik Baark author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:18th Mar '97

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Lightning Wires cover

Examines cultural and political conflicts associated with one of the earlier examples of technological transfer and assimilation in China.

This study focuses on the dilemmas faced by Chinese modernizers of the yangwu movement. It examines the tensions between the Chinese and the foreign companies seeking to extend telegraph technology to East Asian cities and how the domestic network was shaped by social and cultural forces.Baark examines the transfer of telegraph technology to China in the late nineteenth century. He shows how the initial Chinese rejection of the telegraph as an inconvenient technology contributed to violent conflicts between foreigners and the Chinese, but that this resistence gradually gave way to an assimilation of the telegraph into Chinese society. The transfer and assimilation of advanced technology has been an important challenge for China's modernization for more than a century. Baark examines some of the dilemmas faced by Chinese modernizers of the yangwu (Western affairs) movement from the 1860s to the 1890s. Telegraph technology emerged in the West on the basis of scientific discoveries in electricity in the early nineteenth century, and was greeted with enthusiasm by governments and the public alike. The Chinese attitudes to the telegraph, however, were informed by entirely different political and cultural priorities. Baark examines the tensions which existed between the Chinese and the foreign companies seeking to extend telegraph technology to East Asian cities, and he shows how the domestic network was shaped by indigenous social and cultural forces. This book will be of considerable interest to historians of modern China, technology, and economic development.

ISBN: 9780313300110

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 539g

240 pages