This issue of the Journal of Chinese History aims to take stock of the effects of “the digital” on the study of Chinese history. We are doing this through a combination of research articles whose authors have made extensive use of digital resources and technologies and a set of introductions to non-commercial, open-access utilities and tools that scholars have created to support research in a digital environment. These hardly exhaust the universe of research or tools.

In the past two decades, increasing attention has been paid to the significance of the fiscal capacity of the premodern state to promote or retard economic growth. In particular, scholarship on economic history has stressed the positive impact the emergence of the “fiscal state” had in enhancing economic growth in early modern Europe. Comparative studies have contrasted the administrative efficiency of the emerging European fiscal state with contemporary Asian empires (the Ottomans, Mughals, and the Ming and Qing empires in China). But the Ming-Qing state represents only one version of Chinese state formation under the Chinese empire. This article identifies four basic types of fiscal state that appeared between the Qin unification and the Ming-Qing era, analyzes their ideological foundations, and assesses their implications for economic growth.

During the centuries after the fall of the Han dynasty, dozens of states rose and fell in geographic China, which was not only politically divided but also home to multiple separately named population groups, some of which were speakers of languages unrelated to Chinese. Yet, a single written language was used throughout the region, broadly common institutions were everywhere in place, and there was a widely shared collective historical memory. This memory included an assumed single line of legitimate sovereigns stretching back to the Sage Kings of legendary antiquity. Differently named population groups could adopt that written language, institutions, and historical memory, and their rulers could potentially even join that line of legitimate sovereigns. It was therefore relatively easy for the Sui and Tang dynasties, having militarily unified the geographic space of the old Han empire, to successfully depict themselves as heirs to a unitary China rooted in ancient memory.

The digital humanities offer more than just a set of tools. The application of software to assist in the analysis of large collections of data does not just expand the volume of material we can incorporate in our work, it also expands how we in the humanities understand the nature of meaning. The recent scholarly turn to the expanded modes of analysis made possible by DH is not just the “latest new thing” but gives the scholarly community a way to articulate and respond to long-standing doubts about the epistemological grounding in the practice of the humanities. Even more importantly, I believe that this broadening of inquiry afforded by DH is intrinsic to the humanistic project itself. In this essay, I seek in particular to connect the implicit conceptual substructure behind the architectural logic of the digital humanities to key strains of hermeneutic thought that have established a basis for exploring the question of how we are to understand the vast, variegated world of historical human experience that is the object of our humanistic inquiries across disciplines.

How did the Tang political elite evolve between the seventh and ninth centuries? Using network analysis and a large prosopographic database, this article approaches this question from four perspectives: the marriage network of political elites, the backgrounds of chief ministers, the composition of the capital elite during three time slices, and the makeup of the provincial elite. Despite important continuities in the elite marriage network's basic structure, there were also significant discontinuities. Between the seventh and eighth centuries, Luoyang emerged as a secondary political center, and Luoyang-based families—including so-called “marriage-ban” clans—acquired a renewed significance, partly at the expense of old southern clans, whose political significance declined over the course of the dynasty. In addition, the political divide between capital and provinces grew over time, culminating in the ninth century with capital-based men occupying nearly all significant provincial posts and provincials serving only locally and in second-tier offices.

This article engages critically with William Rowe's notion of an “alternative economic discourse” linking the market-consciousness shown in some aspects of Dong Wei's approach to famine relief in the Song dynasty to that which informed many subsistence-policy discussions and some aspects of bureaucratic practice during the high Qing. The longevity of the discursive tradition is shown to be understated if we start with Dong Wei, but it is also taken as an interpretative challenge. Comparison with the case of ancien régime France is used to suggest an alternative conceptualization that enables us to differentiate between (1) a mainstream tradition of conventionally accepted market-conscious prescriptions that were not perceived as challenging Confucian moralism, and (2) avant-garde departures. A review of the arguments used down the centuries to justify distributing famine relief in monetary form is used to pinpoint one such departure and to reflect on its significance in a multi-century perspective.

Historians disagree about the role of literacy in Ming society. Certainly, the stone inscriptions that littered the Chinese landscape displayed elaborate essays showing the gentry author's erudition and compositional skill. Yet steles for shrines to living officials also sent political messages. They authorized and amplified the voice of “the common people,” embodying and explicitly arguing for a popular voice in the evaluation of magistrates and prefects. How were these texts on public monuments understood by the many Ming people with only basic literacy? The Late Imperial Primer Literacy Sieve is a digital tool that sifts a target text, such as a commemorative stele, leaving only the characters found in one or more primers. The Sieve may bring us closer to understanding not only what was written, but what was read. The article argues that the message of premortem steles about popular participation could indeed come across.

A hallmark of the Song dynasty's achievements was the creation of a national network of state-sponsored local schools. This engendered an exponential growth of commemorative inscriptions dedicated to local government schools. Many authors used these inscriptions as an avenue to expound and disseminate their visions of schools and education. Using the methods of network analysis and document clustering, this article analyzes all the inscriptions extant from Song times for local government schools. It reveals a structural schism in the diffusion of ideas between the Upper Yangzi and other regions of the Song. It also demonstrates the growing intellectual influence of Neo-Confucian ideologues that gradually overtook that of renowned prose-writers. Methodologically, this article provides an example of how diverse digital methods enable us to handle a large body of texts from multiple perspectives and invite us to explore connections we might not have otherwise thought of.

This article explores information management in the Qing government, and the challenges confronted by the Qing authorities, through the prism of imperial maps of Xinjiang. To ensure that newly gathered geographical knowledge of Xinjiang was usable for the emperor and senior officials, technocrats and artisans in the Imperial Household Department collaborated with the Jesuits and border officials to produce maps that materialized it. Because of their utility in military campaigns and everyday governance, these maps were carefully maintained by the Imperial Household Department, which discreetly distributed them to a small coterie of Manchu and Mongol statesmen. Nevertheless, information leakage from the lower echelons of the bureaucracy challenged the department's monopoly and popularized knowledge of Xinjiang among the Han literati.

This article has two main objectives. First, we aim to revisit debates about the structure of Song Dynasty faction lists and the relationship between eleventh- and twelfth century factional politics on the basis of a large-scale network analysis of co-occurrence ties reported in the prose collections of those contemporary to the events. Second, we aim to innovate methodologically by developing a series of approaches to compare historical networks of different sizes with regard to overall network metrics as well as the significance of particular attributes such as native and workplace in their makeup. The probabilistic and sampling methods developed here should be applicable for various kinds of historical network analysis. The corresponding data can be found here: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-xtf-z3au.

This paper focuses on the historical politics of disaster records in Chinese local gazetteers (difangzhi 地方志). Using records of mulberry crop failures as examples, the authors ask how gazetteer editors collated Yuan disaster records—initially collected to help prevent disasters and authorize the legitimacy of dynastic rule—in gazetteers and, in so doing, made them into ‘local’ knowledge. Digital humanities methods allow for both qualitative and quantitative analyses, and the authors deploy them to demonstrate how, in structured texts like the Chinese local gazetteers, they could help combine close reading of specific sections and larger-scale analysis of regional patterns. In the first part, the authors show how disasters were recorded in a Yuan Zhenjiang gazetteer to facilitate taxation and disaster prevention locally—a strategy rarely traceable in subsequent gazetteers until the Qing. In the second part, the authors shifted their perspective to the historical accumulation of data and what that reveals about the reception of Yuan disasters: whereas local gazetteers from the north generate long chronologies of mulberry disasters from the Ming to the Qing, others depict the south as disaster-free.

Chinese conservatism is often reduced to a cultural movement the main concern of which is the preservation of traditional culture. This article proposes a new framework with which to analyze modern Chinese conservatism. It identifies late Qing culturalist nationalism, which incorporates traditional culture into concrete political reforms inspired by modern Western politics, as the origin of conservatism in the Republican era. Conservatism in this period was a reaction against New Culture activists’ denial of the political utility of this culturalist nationalism and constituted a response to World War I, leading some to question the merits of Western civilization. As a result, tradition no longer unitarily evoked the cultural elements corresponding to modern Western politics. Adopting a typological approach in order to distinguish different types of conservatism by differentiating various political implications of traditional culture, it divides the Chinese conservatism of the Republican era into four typologies: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarian conservatism.

Instead of assuming “warlords” as a homogeneous counter-force to the May Fourth enlightenment while imagining Chinese intellectuals as a natural alliance for the “anti-warlordism” National Revolution, this article examines the prevailing idea exchange and political collaboration between Chen Jiongming, the Cantonese military strongman, and the May Fourth intellectual within and beyond regional borders. Between 1919 and 1922, Chen Jiongming not only fostered his anarcho-federalist blueprint, but also garnered support from prominent thinkers hailing from across different ideological camps such as Liang Bingxian, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi. Focusing on the ideological and intellectual aspects of warlord rule, this article attempts to situate the study of warlordism against the backdrop of the Chinese enlightenment, to downplay the differences between the man of guns and the man of letters, and thereby to redefine, re-characterize, and reappraise “warlords” as active agents—the initiators—of China's renewals during this formative period.

We introduce the China Government Employee Database—Qing (CGED-Q), a new resource for the quantitative study of Qing officialdom. The CGED-Q details the backgrounds, characteristics and careers of Qing officials who served between 1760 and 1912, with nearly complete coverage of officials serving after 1830. We draw information on careers from the Roster of Government Personnel (jinshenlu), which in each quarterly edition listed approximately 12,500 regular civil offices and their holders in the central government and the provinces. Information about backgrounds and characteristics comes from such linked sources as lists of exam degree holders. In some years, information on military officials is also available. As of February 2020, the CGED-Q comprises 3,817,219 records, of which 3,354,897 are civil offices and the remainder are military. In this article we review the progress and prospects of the project, introduce the sources, transcription procedures, and constructed variables, and provide examples of results to showcase its potential.

This article presents a data-driven approach to the study of the social and political statuses of urban communities in modern Kunming. Such information is lacking in government maps and documents. Using data from a wide variety of sources, many unconventional, I subject them to critical evaluation and computational analysis to extract information that can be used to produce a land use map of sufficient detail and accuracy to allow scholars to address and even answer questions of a socio-political, economic and, indeed, humanistic nature. My method can also be applied to other Chinese cities and to cities elsewhere that lack accurate information.

A variety of databases, tools and platforms have created the foundation for digital scholarship in Chinese studies. The creators of some open-access projects introduce their work below, but first I offer some notes on the kinds of utilities that make up the expanding digital universe.

The widespread availability of digitized premodern textual sources – together with increasingly sophisticated means for their manipulation – has brought enormous practical benefits to scholars whose work relies upon reference to their contents. While great progress has been made with the construction of ever more comprehensive database systems and archives, far more remains not only possible but also realistically achievable in the near future. This paper discusses some of the key challenges faced, and progress made towards solving them, in the context of a widely used open digital platform attempting to expand the range of digitized sources available while simultaneously increasing the scope of meaningful tasks that can be performed with them computationally. This paper aims to suggest how seemingly simple human-mediated additions to the digitized historical record – when combined with the power of digital systems to repeatedly perform mechanical tasks at enormous scales – quickly lead to transformative changes in the feasible scope of computational analysis of premodern writing.