📧 You can contact me at bspivey@uci.edu or brian.spivey@anu.edu.au
Zhūlóng (猪龙) Archives is born partly out of an understanding that people nowadays consume information predominantly through digital means, and partly out of a dissatisfaction with platforms like X/Twitter, Substack, Reddit, and Bluesky. It is meant to be an accessible, stable, academically-informed platform for curated materials and ideas related to my own work and to modern Chinese history more generally. Alongside reading lists and interesting curiosities like historical video clips, maps, art, and so on, the site will host PDFs of primary source documents related to my research and which other scholars and educators might find interesting or useful for their own work. 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, as well as a resource for those with scholarly interests.
I co-edit China-related book reviews for the Los Angeles Review of Books with Jeffrey Wasserstrom.
Los Angeles Review of Books - China Book Reviews
About Me
My name is Brian Spivey and I am a historian of modern China. I have a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine and an MA in Asian Studies from Georgetown University. I’ve lived variously in China or Taiwan for over 5 years. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University 🦘
My research focuses on the interrelated environmental, social, scientific, and technological dimensions of China’s ambitious and uneven industrial development across the 20th century. Perhaps most simply, I am interested in industrial life and the transformation of landscapes, human labor, social orders, and the scientific and technical systems that have made our industrial world possible. Nothing has more thoroughly reorganized human society and remade the planet and the terms of our existence upon it.
Publications & Writing