Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
East Asian Languages and Literatures
First Advisor
Tsu, Jing
Abstract
The dissertation traces a longer and broader history of computing in the People's Republic of China between the 1940s and the 1990s. The introduction addresses the core issues of writing a critical history of Chinese computing. The first chapter starts with the rise of cybernetics systems engineering in the PRC in the work of Qian Xuesen, which, due to Qian's unusual career path, connected some of the common themes in other chapters. The second chapter presents a long history of early Chinese programming languages and software and analyzes a hidden software development and maintenance crisis that fundamentally shaped the development after the 1980s. Chapter three is a history of early Chinese AI and a historiographical intervention that connects the Mao (chapters one and two) and the Deng era (chapters four and five) by, ironically, identifying a rupture in research paradigms. Chapter four explores the emergence of a socio-technical imaginary of the computational future through the computer education campaign for children between the late 1970s and early 1990s. The last chapter examines the distinctive path Chinese quantitative economics took from the 1950s to the 1990s that represented both the common themes and the overall trajectory of quantification in the PRC. In conclusion, I show how the chapters come together in one of the earliest large-scale computerized policy-making projects in the 1980s, consolidating the rise of modeled modernity in post-socialist China.
Recommended Citation
An, Bo, "Modeled Modernity: A Critical History of Computing in the People's Republic of China, 1949-2000" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 824.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/824
