About this book:

*Paper, Print, and Power* offers a comprehensive intellectual history of China by tracing the co-evolution of information technology and political authority. It argues that China’s history cannot be understood apart from its media, starting with the Han invention of paper, which allowed for a scale of bureaucratic governance and classical commentary that earlier bamboo and silk media could not sustain. The narrative moves through the Tang dynasty’s scriptoria and the Song dynasty’s woodblock printing revolution, showing how these technologies standardized the Confucian canon and facilitated the rise of the civil service examination system, which linked literacy to social mobility and state orthodoxy.

The book explores the dual nature of print as both a tool for state control—evident in imperial censorship and literary inquisitions—and a vehicle for dissent. It highlights how private academies, religious communities, and even marginalized groups like women utilized the page to create "markets of the mind" and private networks of knowledge. Technical innovations such as movable type and lithography are analyzed not just as mechanical milestones, but as shifts in the materiality of knowledge that altered how readers perceived textual authority and authenticity.

The later chapters focus on the seismic shifts of the late Qing and early Republican eras. The arrival of Western printing technologies and the treaty-port nexus in Shanghai accelerated the decline of the classical examination system and the birth of modern journalism and textbooks. This "vernacular turn" democratized literacy and enabled a new generation of intellectuals to use pamphlets, magazines, and satirical essays to mobilize the public for reform and eventual revolution in 1911.

Ultimately, the work concludes that the struggle over the page—who writes, what is printed, and how it is distributed—remains the central coordinate of Chinese power. By tracking the transition from the imperial archive to the digital landscape, the book demonstrates that while technologies like the smartphone have replaced the woodblock, the fundamental tension between state-controlled orthodoxy and the subversive potential of the written word remains a defining feature of Chinese civilization.