The Information Ecology of Rural Family Archives in Late Imperial China: Findings from Yongtai, Fujian

Since 2016, my colleagues and I have collected over one hundred thousand documents such as land deeds and contracts, dating from the late imperial period to the present, held in private hands in the villages of Yongtai County in Fujian Province. While the individual documents themselves are typically mundane, in the aggregate they paint an extraordinarily detailed picture of local social and economic life. But in this presentation I argue instead for reading the documents not as windows onto the past but as elements in a complex system or ecology of information production and management. This approach shows us how ordinary rural people used written documents to secure their interests, protect themselves from risk, and record their social interactions. Indeed, contrary to previous assumptions, rural society in the late imperial period should be understood a “document society”, in which people wrote, used and preserved documents to solve many of the problems they faced in their everyday life.

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About the speaker:

Michael Szonyi is Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History and former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. A social historian of late imperial and modern China, his books include The Art of Being Governed: Everyday Politics in Late Imperial China (2017) and Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line (2008). His most recent works are The China Questions 2: Critical Insights into US-China Relations (co-edited with Adele Carrai and Jennifer Rudolph, 2022) and Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present (co-edited with Tarun Khanna, 2022). He received his B.A. from University of Toronto and his D.Phil. from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has also studied at National Taiwan University and Xiamen University. He is currently writing a modern history of rural China and a study of a remarkable trove of local documents found in Yongtai County, China. In 2024, he was made an “Honorary Villager of Yongtai”.