This interview is with Mindi Zhang, the author of “Organizing the New World of Print: Library Management and Cultural Business at the Commercial Press, ca. 1900 to ca. 1940,” which appears in the January 2025 issue of Twentieth-Century China. Mindi Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Read the article here
Before we start into the article and your research, could you tell us a bit about your academic background?
I attended college at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Experiences there as a history major, especially the passionate, caring, and erudite history professors I met, inspired me to pursue advanced academic training in the discipline. After getting an MA degree from the University of Chicago, I started my doctoral program at UCLA in 2019. A course I took in my first year in the program, in which our rare book librarian, Devin Fitzgerald, showcased a dazzling range of early modern objects, piqued my interest in the history of books. I then took courses at the Rare Book School and California Rare Book School, where I was briefly introduced to book history and bibliography. I now consider myself an aspiring historian of books, libraries, and information.
Your article discusses the history of the Commercial Press’s library management and the subsequent cultural transformation in the years 1900–1940. How did you come to focus on this fascinating topic?
When trying to find a dissertation topic, I was attracted to the introduction of American library science into China during the Republican period, a history that involves a range of interrelated processes: the institutionalization of new-style libraries, the professionalization of librarianship, the adaptation of new cataloging systems, etc. As I was taking a research seminar with my advisor at the time, I decided to start small and see where it led me. Since the Commercial Press had one of the leading libraries from the 1910s to the early 1930s and its history has already been extensively researched, I found it to be a manageable topic for a term paper.
How does your history of library management speak to the overall history of Republican China?
My article seeks to enrich our understanding of the New Culture Movement, especially the discourse surrounding “science,” through the lens of information. The quest to organize an unprecedented quantity of information into a proper order so that it could be accessed and utilized with efficiency was part of what Wang Hui has termed the “community of scientific discourse” during the May Fourth period, namely a holistic discursive field that encompassed a wide array of beliefs, practices, and philosophies deemed to be scientific and promoted by Chinese intellectuals as the panacea to China’s ills. Republican-era libraries witnessed some of the most innovative and intense experiments in information management, and the Commercial Press’s library stood out for the role it played in the press’s publishing and marketing activities, which helped popularize a new set of organizational techniques and, by extension, a new model of the public library. My article is therefore a foray into the Chinese pursuit of information management and its ramifications/implications, a topic that has yet to be sufficiently treated in existing literature on the May Fourth/New Culture Movement and, more broadly, on twentieth-century Chinese intellectual and cultural history.
Your article is a fascinating study of the Commercial Press and Chinese cultural consciousness. How did you conduct this research?
I wrote the first two drafts of this article during the pandemic years, and most of my primary sources were published and readily available online. They include pamphlets, catalogs, and advertising materials published by the Commercial Press, as well as private diaries and memoirs by its former employees. I wish I had more sources to work with: the Hanfenlou/Oriental Library must have had some records of its operation, and the company archives could surely have revealed more about the sale of Wanyou wenku. Unfortunately, all these were destroyed in the military conflicts of the day.
Prior studies have discussed libraries and the printing business during the Republican period. How does your article complement or complicate these works?
In both Chinese- and English-language scholarship, “library history” is a niche field within the larger discipline of library and information science. So far, Chinese library history has rarely been put in productive conversation with history proper. In the context of modern Chinese history, libraries have rarely been a topic of interest. My research seeks to bridge the gap between the two fields. This article’s focus on the Commercial Press’s library builds on and contributes to existing historiography on modern Chinese publishing. Accounts of companies such as the Commercial Press and the Zhonghua Bookstore have variously analyzed the role of the selective employment of Western printing technologies, the adoption of new business models, the restructuring of the editorial workforce, and collaboration with intellectual elites in these firms’ preeminence as leading producers of texts in twentieth-century China. Foregrounding library operation brings to light the less visible, yet equally significant practices and techniques of information management that undergirded the Commercial Press’s cultural business.
How does your study speak to the overlap of library sciences, private publishing, and popular culture today?
The age of mechanical reproduction already blurred the boundary between these realms: educated readers in Republican China’s urban centers not infrequently set up publishing enterprises of their own, and library science was a body of skills meant to be easily acquired by library staff and patrons alike. But the Commercial Press and its leadership still assumed the role of the cultural producer that disseminated modern knowledge to an inchoate (and still very much imagined) reading population identified as the Republican national citizenry. Public libraries equipped with efficient organizational tools were conceived as one of the most potent instruments for such dissemination. Nowadays, however, collection and organization, production, and consumption of information are no longer discrete spheres of activity. Propelled first by social media and now further by AI, one can simultaneously own a mass collection of whatever digital things one is interested in, be a “content producer,” and engage as a viewer.
Can you give us a bit of background on this project? Is it part of a wider research project?
Yes, this article is part of my dissertation, which examines the establishment of Chinese/sinological libraries against a transnational backdrop of Sino-US connections in the first half of the twentieth century. It shows the institutionalization of libraries as centers of scholarly information via a dialectical interaction between the bibliographical and bibliophilic practices of the late imperial era and library science introduced from the United States. This process not only took root in China but led to the growth of American and European sinological collections from the 1920s onward. The project brings the emerging field of the history of information into productive dialogue with Chinese book history and the history of Sino-Western cultural exchange (sinology in particular).
In what ways would you like your research to change the field of Chinese history as a whole?
As indicated above, my research is indebted to a recent historiographical development—both in the China field and beyond—that contextualizes “information” in distinct periods and regions and examines its significance as both factor and outcome of monumental historical transformations. The plastic and nebulous nature of the term may cause uncertainties concerning the parameter of “information history,” and we still need to reflect on the potential methodological and interpretive issues this analytical lens may entail. But in our field, the “information turn”—[1] if you will—has certainly generated fresh insights on long-established narratives, as demonstrated by the pioneer works of Thomas Mullaney and Uluğ Kuzuoğlu on the history of Chinese typing technologies and script reforms. Focusing on the collection, cataloging, and circulation of books, my project aims to shed new light on the New Culture Movement, modern Chinese print culture, and Sino-US cultural relations through the prism of information management and exchange.
Where do you see your research going in the future?
Apart from what I planned in the dissertation, I would like to further explore the global circulation of classical Chinese texts in the twentieth century. I want to learn more about the connections, channels, and motives through which the transnational movement of books took place, as well as the intellectual, political, and economic changes that shaped such movement.
What historiography shaped this project? For further reading, what historiography would you recommend?
Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese publishing has been extensively studied by Leo Ou-fan Lee, Christopher Reed, Robert Culp, and Meng Yue, among others, whose insights I draw upon in the article. More recently, scholars (including myself) have begun to explore the production, circulation, and consumption of Chinese-language books across regions and national borders. Culp, for example, is working on the dissemination of Chinese textbooks in Southeast Asia. Mullaney’s and Kuzuoğlu’s works situate Chinese information modernity within a global knowledge economy in which the logics and assumptions of an alphabet-based information infrastructure posed an existential crisis to the Chinese writing system. Although my focus is on libraries rather than technologies or scripts, the fundamentally uneven structure of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century global information age borne out by their research is imperative for any historian of information to think through.
Do you have any closing comments for our readers?
I would be truly grateful to hear from readers of Twentieth-Century China any thoughts or feedback on this article or my broader dissertation project.
