About & Contact

Zhūlóng (猪龙) Archives is meant to be an accessible, stable, academically-informed platform for curated materials and ideas related to modern Chinese history. Alongside reading lists and curiosities like historical video clips, maps, art, syllabi, reading lists, and so on, the site will host PDFs of primary source documents related to histories of the environment, industry, science and technology, and history of Xinjiang. The site is experimental and there is no final form. My simple hope is that it will evolve into a way to connect with broader audiences curious about China, and as a resource for scholars at a time when historical research in the PRC remains trammeled.

About Me

I'm a historian of modern China and a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. I hold a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine and an MA in Asian Studies from Georgetown University. I've spent over five years living in China and Taiwan.

I study the history of the environment, science and technology, and industry in 20th century China. Within the course of a single century, China went from a largely agrarian society to the world's largest industrial economy, its largest carbon emitter, and its most important actor in global supply chains. I am interested in the scientific and technical knowledge that made industry possible, the labor and factories that made it work, the promises of liberation and national power that sustained it, and the ecological and material transformations it has wrought. My first book, "Pollution Revolution," examines how Chinese leaders, scientists, and ordinary citizens confronted environmental issues caused by industrial development amidst the Cultural Revolution and the global environmental awakening of the 1960s-1970s—but my interests also range widely across the social, political, and material history of modern China and its connections to the wider world.

I also, for example, write about the history of the Uyghur people and ethnopolitics in the PRC.

— Brian Spivey

Writing