East Asian Studies

This dissertation analyzes the history of suffrage and mass elections in Japan from the aftermath of World War I through World War II in conjunction with global history. Suffrage and elections have been understudied subjects in the English-language historiography of modern Japan, while Japanese scholars have examined them within the domestic context mostly from institutional perspectives. At the same time, scholars of mass politics have only rarely included Japan in their analyses, due to a lack of archival access. By examining the rise of mass politics in Japan within the global context, this study argues that Japan fully participated in transnational socio-political trends that characterized post-World War I democracies, and that the authoritarian turn that led to war may be explained with specific contingencies of the late 1930s rather than structural issues. Nonetheless, as explained in the conclusion, such authoritarian turn was not a radical departure from the mass political practices of the democratic era but was instead based on them, as the wartime state, not unlike other fascist regimes, used suffrage for mass mobilization. Therefore, suffrage, rather than being equated with democracy, represented a significant transwar trend.This study examines politics as it intersects with institutions, society, ideas, and culture. Suffrage is interpreted as a complex socio-political experience whose meanings changed depending on the broader domestic and transnational circumstances. Several key topics are surveyed through the chapters, such as men’s and women’s suffrage movements, the state debate on suffrage expansion, suffrage movements across the Japanese empire, electoral campaigns and parties’ strategies, voting trends and mass ideologies, political visual culture, popular participation in state campaigns, institutional crisis and democratic breakdown, and war mobilization. Japan is placed within three global moments – the post-World War I democratic internationalism, the Depression crisis and its consequences, and war. If existing English-language scholarship has paid little attention to the roles that suffrage and elections had in interwar and wartime Japan, this dissertation reinterprets them as foundational moments for political competition, popular political consciousness, state legitimacy, and the integration of the masses into the praxis and discourse of national politics.

This dissertation reads Tang dynasty narratives (7th–10th centuries) as hermeneutical tools through which the Tang people responded to the increasing unintelligibility of the past in a disrupted present. Moving beyond the dichotomy of historicity and fictionality that has long shaped scholarly discourse, I argue that Tang narratives emerged and transformed not merely as linear evolution of a literary genre or repositories of historical information, but as deliberate efforts to recontextualize the past in response to contemporary ruptures. The surge of storytelling in the eighth and ninth centuries reflects a widespread need for reinterpretation rather than invention: as the epistemological distance from the past widened, storytelling became a means to bridge that gap and render history once again comprehensible, acceptable, and “usable.”Through four case studies, I demonstrate how narrative strategies reflect interpretive efforts to resolve contextual and epistemological disjunctions. Chapter One reveals how the precedent of prisoner release lost its aura, authority, and paradigmatic power when sifted through leishu and other intermediate works. Chapter Two explores how the decontextualized overuse of yuefu titles spurred the invention of “original stories” to restore the lost authority of “history.” Chapter Three shows how lower-ranking officials in provincial administrations voiced their powerlessness and suppression by reinterpreting “silence” in earlier poetry through patterned anecdotes. Chapter Four investigates how objects emerged as narrative protagonists, revealing new emotional and epistemic enchantment with the material world in a changed social reality. By viewing Tang narratives as products of derivative, paratextual, and context-responsive processes, this dissertation recasts them as interpretive solutions— “fabrications” not in the sense of falsehoods, but as deliberate reinterpretations of the past in response to contemporary anxieties. It further argues that intermediate texts, such as leishu, did not merely preserve or transmit knowledge, but actively reshaped the interpretive frameworks of their readers and the textual landscapes. I hope this dissertation serves as a call for a new methodology in the study of Tang narratives—one that reads stories as clues to unspoken questions, and one that reminds us of the power and beauty of staying close to texts and remaining small in our perspectives.

This dissertation is about why there was a massive multi-chapter book in third-century BCE China—and how it was made and what impact it had—when there should really not have been one. By denaturalizing and defamiliarizing every aspect of the creation of the Lüshi Chunqiu—the first big book in Chinese history—in the 240s BCE, this study counters Eurocentric assumptions and hindsight bias prevalent in the studies of ancient textual cultures, cracks open numerous historical and philological questions, and contends that the rise of the big book as a textual form in China, though consequential in fostering a think-big sensibility instrumental to the rise and expansion of the Chinese empire, was neither early nor inevitable. Methodologically, this dissertation offers the first total history of the first Chinese big book, synthesizing data and insights from a range of fields—political history, philology, art and archeology, megaproject management, and the history of ideas, books, mathematics, and technology—and highlighting the interaction and parallel between the global, local, textual, social, ideological, technological, mathematical, and architectural on the eve of Qin’s unification of China.

This dissertation delves into the evolution of the concept of newness in early imperial China, arguing that its emergence as a positive attribute was neither self-evident nor inevitable but the result of a deliberate intellectual construction spanning from the third century BCE to first century CE. The Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) is often perceived as a period of consolidation and stagnation, dominated by a sanctioned Confucian orthodoxy and marked by a perceived lack of innovation. Yet Han intellectuals actively theorized and valorized “newness” (xin 新), shaping a discourse that framed their own time as a moment of renewal and creative transformation.Drawing on a range of sources, including canonical texts, historiographical narratives, philosophical treatises, and court discussions, this dissertation seeks to reconstruct the intellectual and discursive landscape of the Han dynasty, uncovering perspectives that have been obscured by later historians and modern interpretive frameworks. It foregrounds key figures in the mid-to-late Western Han such as Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 BCE), Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE), and Huan Tan 桓譚 (ca. 23 BCE–56 CE), illuminating how their writings contribute to the construction of newness as both a rupture from the past and a continuation of traditions. Rather than merely reflecting historical change, the discourse of newness in this period functioned as a critical agent in shaping imperial ideology, historiography, and intellectual production. This dissertation thus reinterprets Han intellectual history by demonstrating that its scholars did not merely preserve or systematize earlier traditions but conceptualized their era as one of dynamic transformation. In doing so, it contributes to broader discussions on historical consciousness and intellectual renewal in imperial China, challenging narratives that marginalize the Han in accounts of Chinese intellectual history.

This dissertation, Anxious Consumption: The Fantastic, Affect, and Transnational Cultural Flows in 1970s-1990s Japan, traces an alternate genealogy of consumption in 1970s-1990s Japan through reading the fantastic in literary and media texts. My use of the term “fantastic” broadly conceives of the category beyond its common limitation to the supernatural and otherworldly, to indicating a form of pervasive structural anxiety behind consumer culture’s celebratory façade of material prosperity and images of economic “progress." Rather than a specific subject position of any particular individual or group, I approach the fantastic as a liminal affective force that is fluid and constantly in-motion, capable of enveloping, implicating, and bypassing various bodies it comes across, while holding the power to disrupt ideological borders, the confines of static forms of identities, and categories such as gender, race, class, and nationality. Emerging at a historical moment characterized as a de-politicized plunge into self-indulgent celebrations of consumerism, the fantastic complicates this narrative through its power to unveil the workings of otherwise seamless immaterial forces of control within a consumerist landscape. Through its power to reveal and de-familiarize what has been naturalized, the fantastic surfaces as an indication of unease—from expressing unspoken anxiety experienced on the affective register, to revealing nationalistic agendas of the nation state. In the texts that I examine, the fantastic is represented by expressions of anxiety manifesting as the abject, Otherness, and the monstrous feminine— liminal figures that, I argue, reveal the psychological structure underlying cultural production in 1970s-1990s Japan. Through reading across various media forms—fiction, literary- nonfiction texts, newspaper reportage, manga, magazines, and protest leaflets—I trace fantastic’s mobilizing force in de-stabilizing dominant and homogenizing frameworks through which consumption in postwar Japan has been narrated. Chapters one and two focus on the affective dimensions of consumption. These chapters look at the on-going negotiation between biopolitical capture and liberatory potentials within consumer culture in an urban landscape. Chapters three and four look at the material dimensions of consumption, focusing on the mapping of consumption onto iterations of space and notions of mobility—across boundaries of nation, race, and species. These chapters examine how marginalized bodies excluded from national visions of prosperity and development make visible limitations of nation states, or human-centric modes of sensing.

The Song Dynasty (960-1276) witnessed significant transitions in Pure Land Buddhism, with the rising literati class playing a crucial role in reshaping this religious tradition. This dissertation contextualizes these changes within the Buddhist resurgence following the Huichang Persecution (841-845) and the political turmoil of the tenth century. By examining the transformation of Pure Land belief and its interaction with literati culture from four perspectives—social organization, cultural paradigm, print technology, and anthologization practice—this project sheds light on the complex dynamics that shaped the development of Pure Land Buddhism during this period.The dissertation investigates the popularization of Pure Land teachings through the lens of community organization, focusing on the West Lake Lotus Society established by the monk Shengchang in the late tenth century. It also explores how Song literati constructed and adapted the myth of Huiyuan and his “White Lotus Society” to make Pure Land teachings culturally appealing and socially acceptable among their social stratum. The study further analyzes the significant role of lay Buddhists, particularly Wang Gu and Wang Rixiu, in composing and circulating proselytizing texts that simplified and restructured Pure Land doctrines for a broader audience. Finally, it examines the first anthology of Pure Land texts, the Lebang wenlei (Categories of Writings on the Blissful Land 樂邦文類), compiled by the Tiantai monk Zongxiao 宗曉 (1151-1214) in 1199 CE, highlighting his pioneering efforts to establish Pure Land Buddhism as a distinct and legitimate tradition, with literary footprint deserving of a comprehensive anthology. Employing a combination of social network analysis, textual analysis, and literary-historical analysis, this dissertation offers new insights into the popularization of Buddhism, religious shifts within the Tang-Song transition framework, and religious-literary writings of Song literati. By analyzing the reciprocal influence between literati culture and the Pure Land tradition, this dissertation seeks to complicate current academic narratives and offer a more complex and multifaceted understanding of the interaction between religion and literati culture.

ABSTRACT This dissertation examines epistemological practices and information technologies before the era of paper. Scrutinizing a series of recently unearthed bamboo, wooden, and silk manuscripts from ca. 400 BCE to 300 CE as both cultural documents and material objects, this project explores how classical texts and imperial laws were created, stored, circulated, and organized in early China across various ancient informational media. Negotiating the border between the “lowly” scribes and the “learned” scholars, this project concerns the common people and the actual practices behind the edifice of Sinitic classical knowledge. I propose that knowledge-making in ancient China was inextricably connected to the intellectual agency and executive autonomy of various, myriad, nameless scribes. I integrate methods from various historical disciplines—book history, the history of scholarship, the history of information, along with codicology, paleography, philology, and media studies—and I apply them to a series of newly unearthed archaeological sources. Based on a comprehensive survey of the existing materials, I show how ancient manuscripts are both witnesses to and products of the very processes that brought them into being; they are not merely “the earliest versions” of transmitted classics or of long-lost texts, but also physical, contingent literary objects that were created by and for their own epistemological contexts. Through four chapters (materiality, paratext, orthography, textuality), I reveal 1) the technological affordance and historical importance of various bamboo and wood manuscripts as ancient media, 2) the actual practices and scribal/scholarly methods behind the making of the written objects, 3) continuity and transformation between pre-imperial and early imperial written cultures, and 4) the traces of myriad scribes, the actual people behind the grand enterprise of the classical knowledge and imperial governance. Ultimately, I underscore the interplay between knowledge and media as pertinent to our understanding of every facet of history: from emperor to peasant, from poetry to law—everything we know about the past is contingent upon not only what was written and survived in historical sources but also how such knowledge was produced, practiced, and perpetuated.

My dissertation is driven by the desire to understand time in the era of hypermediation, when images are no longer mimesis but the driving force for reality. Exploring Japanese cinema, photography, and critical thoughts from the 1960s to 1980s as well as the philosophy of time in the long 20th century, I theorize expressing time as a critical phenomenology of time that generates the affect of resistance to confront the technological maneuver of space-time, from the inception of storage media to the Cold War paradigm of cybernetics and system thinking.

My dissertation is a history of the nine ranks system, an institution that guided the selection of officials in early medieval China (220-589), with an emphasis on the intellectual dimension of its inception, development, and impacts. The two central questions I seek to answer are: why did China adopt this unique system of arraying official candidates into nine ranks for more than three hundred years? What impact did this political institution have over Chinese individuals, over their social and intellectual lives? By examining primary sources from this period, I characterize the nine ranks system as a meritocratic experiment that sought to overcome the shortcomings of the recommendation-based system yet diverged from its initial design and further stifled social mobility in this period. Moreover, by analyzing the intellectual discourses about the nine ranks, I contend that this political institution also shaped the social and religious lives of individuals through its impact on their perceptions of merit, power, order, and social hierarchy.

This dissertation investigates the world’s global entanglement with China through what I call classic Chinese novels’ “global media climates.” From the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to the “rise of China” after the millennium, classic Chinese novels such as Xiyouji (Journey to the West) and Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), have circulated around the world in the forms of translations, rewritings, theatrical, and other media adaptations. However, three dominant approaches have thus far limited our understanding of such phenomenon. First, the China-centered approach, which assumes that the novels’ spread symbolizes “Chinese influence” over its neighbors. Second, the China-decentering approach, which accentuates how the novels have been re-appropriated or absorbed as “national canons” in, for example, Japan or Korea. Third, the transnational and pluralist approach, which fully acknowledges the portable use of classic Chinese novels in multiple contexts. While this third approach correctly highlights heterogeneity, it still fails to explain why multitudinous agents across times, spaces or even races, have to and want to assert their own “versions” by returning and resorting to, as well as (re)playing with and participating in the very same infrastructure of classic Chinese novels from time to time. This dissertation suggests that the answer lies with classic Chinese novels themselves – their forms of affect, as well as their affordance of imaginative materials for collaborative world-making. Drawing from new materialism, actor-network theory, ecocriticism, affect theory and infrastructuralism, this dissertation shows how the ecological, formal, affective and infrastructural qualities of classic Chinese novels distinctively afford (i.e. providing materials for) and invite adaptations to globally take place as world-making events. Theorizing Hongloumeng and Jin Ping Mei’s affordances of ecological forms, affective worldmaking and infrastructural network as “global media climates” in the 20th and 21st century, this dissertation adopts a non-anthropocentric approach in showing how cosmological forms of affect (such as “water” in Daoism, and “wind” as conceived in Chinese and East Asian literature) serially link the original novels to each and all of their adaptations across times, spaces, and cultures, dissolving the human-non-human as well the socialism-and-capitalism dichotomy in the age of Anthropocene and Sinocene.

This dissertation analyzes the role of sound in language use in early Chinese texts. By focusing on developments of sound-based recurrences such as rhyme and paronomasia, focusing on the classical, foundational texts from the third to first centuries BCE, I offer a new understanding of how textuality, the writing system, and language itself were conceptualized during these centuries. Overall, I argue that these sound-based devices underwent transformative functional and structural changes, in which their primary focus shifted from composition to interpretation. I trace the importance of sound in language use from the Later Mohist textual material through other Warring States texts, including the “Masters’ literature” (zǐ shū 子書), all the way to Hàn dynasty material. Specifically, this dissertation highlights that sound recurrences in early Chinese texts occur both as a structuring element for longer material – whereby sound coordinates textual units – and as a means to express conceptual and ontological connections valid for ancient language users. Additionally, this dissertation proposes to computationally apply existing historical phonological data at scale to digitized early Chinese textual material in order to detect phonological recurrences. Key findings of this study include, firstly, that early Chinese rhymes and paronomasia did not only fulfill ornamental and mnemonic functions but could also form the basis for performative segments, arguments, and ontological connections postulated by and in texts. Secondly, functions of paronomasia shift over centuries, changing from compositional devices to decidedly interpretive tools.

Many early Chinese writings feature a scene of speech. In more literary writings as in more technical ones, writing often puts in the mouth of a speaker what the text tries to get across. Frequently, the speaker’s spoken words, comprising a text either in full or in part, also occupy the center stage of writing’s attempt at narrating a story, arguing a point, imparting a skill, or simply sorting things out. The list goes on. This lasting, shared, and versatile appeal to, and of, the spoken word in early Chinese writings is the topic of this dissertation. It argues that speech representation is first and foremost a narrative device serving a text’s rhetorical aims. Writing does not represent speech as a mere technology of transcription; rather, writing creates a world-in-itself with and through the representation of speech, a highly elevated medium of expression since early on. In the process, this dissertation also shows, there developed a set of representational structures and narrative techniques with which speech representation was approached. The former supply writing with the forms, shapes, and tropes that underlie the representation of speech; the latter the means to make creative but circumscribed variations. Together, they cement the role of the spoken word as a narrative construct that different writings can use and adapt for their own rhetorical purposes. In highlighting these aspects of the spoken word, this dissertation offers an account of a core but underemphasized attribute of early Chinese textuality, models a new methodological approach, and proposes a range of interpretations of texts old and new intended to reevaluate their meaning and significance. Its goal, ultimately, is to promote a new way of reading.

The Ise shrines are known throughout Japan as the residence of the mythical progenitor of the Japanese Imperial line, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Ise has held long-lasting importance in legitimating the Japanese imperial line and operating as an important site for state-sponsored rituals. Ise maintains an image of unchanged continuity reaching deep into the foundational myths of the country. In fact, Ise fell into ruin in the mid-fifteenth century. The physical destruction of the Ise shrines has long been thought to coincide with the collapse of the Japanese state during a period of internal conflict at the end of the fifteenth century. Conversely, this dissertation posits that the Ise region was selectively ignored by the imperial court who supported the Yoshida family, an ambitious sect of Shintō ritualists, in place of the Ise shrines. The interactions between the court and the Ise shrines reveal a shift in the meaning of Ise as a place of political and religious significance, and not the collapse of the state itself. The Yoshida moved important sites where deities were worshipped and determined the sacred geography of Japan. They relocated Amaterasu’s shrine, first to the capital in Kyoto, and then eventually to the city of Yamaguchi in western Japan. In response to this reconfiguration, local pilgrimage facilitators known as onshi propagated an image of Ise as a desirable location for travel and ritual observance. It was during the important period of division with the Yoshida family that much of the imagery and meaning of what Ise became was developed and came to play a central role in the forms of cultural, religious, and political legitimacy that exist in Japan to this day. The shrines were similarly threatened economically and politically by local actors within their home province. This dissertation also examines the Kitabatake family of Ise province to provide insight into the larger picture of economic and political change that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This dissertation aims to provide insight into this dynamic period of contestation and present a new vista of religious and political behavior in Japan.

This dissertation bridges the gap of modern Chinese history divided by the Taiping wars. The first three chapters cover the consolidation of commercial taxes and charitable organizations by the central state, which culminated in the reinvention of the lijin merchant funds for public finance in the 1850s. The middle chapter on upper-gentry activism during the Taiping wars details how elites altered national policies in diplomacy as well as military deployment. From Shanghai, upper-gentry elites persuaded the central state to request foreign powers to intervene in the Chinese civil war. Elites also lured the Hunan army commanded by Li Hongzhang to Shanghai with lijin revenue. The final two chapters document how upper-gentry elites drew from both recent experiences and long-established practices to achieve the gentrification of lijin by perpetuating war-time contingencies for the long-term successes of their families. By formalizing lijin as a replacement of land tax in the post-war reconstruction period, upper-gentry elites shifted the fiscal burden from landowners to everyday consumers.At the core of this dissertation is a prosopography on a group of upper-gentry elites associated with Suzhou. Having earned the official status with exam degrees and/or office purchase, their experience as refugees in Shanghai during the Taiping wars enabled new plans for the future: some left officialdom and became indulged in collecting art; some continued to work for the public sector and benefited from social networks forged during the war; some built new business empires and expanded them to charitable organizations; some got lost in the economic downturn after the war and had to live on borrowing. By joining individual experiences with long-term structural changes, this study revises prevalent conclusions on post-Taiping China as either in devolution or restoration. Challenges from the Taiping rebels and foreign imperialists in the new era were simultaneously opportunities for the elites and the state to bound more firmly. This trusting and interdependent relationship between the emperor and his ministers in and out of office, I argue, is the crucial condition to understand Qing history, which also hints why everything seemed different in the twentieth century.

My dissertation deals with cultural confrontations between the so-called “barbarian/nomadic” North and the “civilized/Sinitic” South in the multi-lateral world of Middle Period China (800–1300). The Jin dynasty (1115–1234), ruled by the Jurchen conquering minority, has received insufficient scholarly attention especially in the literary field. It was dismissed in late imperial China as either an illegitimate, alien regime compared to the Han Chinese-ruled Southern Song polity (1127–1279), or a scaled-down and short-lived predecessor of the Mongol Yuan empire (1271–1368). My research, however, fleshes out the overall Jin literary culture and poetic production in particular, and illustrates the burgeoning literati culture in North China under Jurchen rule. By demonstrating a rival narrative of claiming China in the Sino-Jurchen North against the cultural orthodoxy conceptualized in the Han Chinese-ruled South, I argue for the plurality and constructedness of Middle Period China as an intersubjective, transcultural, and border-crossing space.To envision a comprehensive picture of Jin dynasty poetry and literati culture, my dissertation is organized in a tripartite structure with seven chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 outline the cultural history of Jin literati community. Integrating socio-historical studies and bibliographical research, I examine the origins and developments of Jin literati, including both Jurchens and Han Chinese, as well as their identity negotiation and cultural legitimacy under Jurchen rule. Chapters 4 and 5 compare the contemporary northern and southern literary fashions. In particular, I combine literary analysis and digital tools to map out both discursive force and social networking that shaped the Jin literati group. Chapters 6 and 7 shift from poetry contests in the North-South space to literary traditions of the past – they explore the historical provenances of Jin literati culture, as well as the Jin refashioning of poetic legacies from previous Tang and Northern Song dynasties. Jin material culture including book history and literati art are also integrated into relevant discussions. In conclusion, I argue that the pluralist topology of Northern Song, Southern Song, and Jurchen Jin literary pasts kept intertwined with and superposed on each other, which always potentially spoke for the heteroglossia and constructedness of Middle Period China.

This dissertation examines the epistemic breakthroughs and complexities in the study of “things” (wu) in mid-Qing evidential learning, a prevailing intellectual movement in China circa 1750-1850 which sought for truth from solid facts. By focusing on the multifaceted natural and ritual objects in the Book of Odes (Shi), this work offers a new understanding of mid-Qing intellectual history from the perspective of historical epistemology. Overall, I argue for a parallel development and contending authority between the textual and material aspects of evidential learning, which, in giving rise to an emerging inwardness of wu, collectively shifted the focus of epistemic inquiry from the referential surface of cosmological “coherence” (li) to the well-ordered “textures” (li) of specific wu.
Tracing back to the earlier cosmological tradition, this dissertation first demonstrates how the name and the object, text-derived features and natural traits had already merged into hermeneutical loops in the Song dynasty. These complicated wu were then incorporated into broader epistemic networks in the late Ming, creating an extensive referential surface which frequently left competing theses unresolved. I then elaborate how these unresolved problems were overcome through newly developed philological techniques such as ancient phonology, general pattern, and paleography, as well as intensified observations, frontier evidence, and technocratic inclination on the material side. Given the comparability of the newly revealed philological and material textures, the mid-Qing intellectual movement can be better categorized as a collective inquiry for the refined textures of specific wu.
Nevertheless, due to varied epistemological takes and methodological preferences, these breakthroughs guaranteed no convergence in knowledge making. This dissertation then examines the fickle and frequently irreconcilable working premises behind bifurcating philological theses, as well as the contending evidential authorities between textual and material aspects of a holistic wu. Such complexities suggest both an internal explanation for the trivialization of philological learning and an indigenous propensity for disciplinary division in the nineteenth century. The specified yet holistic inquiry of wu, rigorous in the epistemic construction of “facts” while loose in the epistemological attaining of “truth,” displays an important epistemic mode between the fade of Neo-Confucian cosmology and the advent of disciplinary science.

This dissertation explores the steel manufacturing industry’s place in the media culture of South Korea from the 1960s to the present, by covering a series of pioneering yet little-known media experiments led by Pohang Iron and Steel Company (now POSCO), South Korea’s oldest and largest integrated steel producer. While remaining attentive to the ways that steel-industry corporate media was mobilized within the rubric of Cold War geopolitics, I call attention to a central node for mapping an alternative media network that it belongs to: industry. I use the notion to reflect on specific technologies used by workers of any field, and their resultant bodily experiences, which formulate the aesthetics of corporate media produced within that industry. Therefore, I start from the question of what the steel industry is to begin with, in order to understand its industrial media aesthetics. To demonstrate how the blooming of the steel industry marks a watershed moment in the media culture of South Korea, I focus on Pohang Iron and Steel Company’s construction of integrated steel mills completed in 1973, where all the steps of steel manufacturing, from smelting iron ore to producing steel plates, were carried out in linearly connected facilities for the first time in South Korean metal-processing history. On the government promotion level, the integrated steel mill was narrativized as the unenlightened subject’s transformation into a “steel-willed” earnest citizen, willingly sacrificing for the nation. However, steelworkers’ training manuals, diagrams, and essays were emphasizing how the very linear structure of the integrated steel mill opened up encounters with the extreme temperamentality of metal that they had never experienced in non-integrated steel mills. I see this ambiguous linearity as key evidence for reading the steel industry as a site where the intersection of the human and the nonhuman is foregrounded, belying the formulation of steel manufacturing as the epitome of a regime leader’s successful leadership. Accordingly, I probe how the steelworker’s sensorial experience at the Pohang Iron and Steel Company’s integrated steel mill has formulated its corporate media aesthetics until today, transcending the presumed boundaries of industrialist and post-industrialist society as well as the periodization of the Cold War and post-Cold War.

This dissertation examines the role of intermediaries and ritual in reconciling conflicting interests in fifteenth century Japan. The first half of the century was a moment of comparative peace but also desperate improvisation. Administrative and judicial institutions survived but overlapped and were mutable, bending to the erratic demands of warlords. The dissertation argues that oaths and ceremonies provided certainty where institutions no longer could, structuring communities to enable conflict resolution at relatively predictable intervals. Unofficial intermediaries, here called conciliators, stepped in for devalued official ones, using their prestige to intercede with authority figures and buffer disputes or reinforce settlements. These pragmatic expedients fueled the personalization of power, revealing the process by which individuals absorbed the power of institutions.Central Japan in the fifteenth century produced an unusual preponderance of materials that reveal the negotiations underlying official action. These include diary-chronicles (kanbun nikki), many of them by professional intermediaries and others by people who relied on their aid; the lists, drafts, social poetry, and other semi-ephemeral documents on the reverse sides of the paper used to produce the diary-chronicles (shihai monjo); and the meeting records of councils that governed a large and wealthy temple. These, supplemented by sources more focused on final outcomes, are analyzed through two primary lenses: ritual and communication via intermediaries. Both intermediaries and ritual, individually and in concert, bridged the gaps between institutional structures and what the people inhabiting them could achieve and accept. By examining the ways that these strategies served communities’ needs while widening the very gaps they bridged, the dissertation illuminates a change often dismissed as mere decline: the loss of interconnected multi-regional institutions—even as inter-regional trade and communication expanded—in favor of the increased authority of individuals over their immediate communities.

This dissertation is an ethnopolitical history examining identity creation and interstate relations across medieval China and Inner Asia. The tenth century has been relegated by traditional Chinese histories as a brief, yet chaotic transitional period centered around the sequential Five Dynasties in North China. Contrary to this dominant narrative, my analysis of excavated materials, paintings, various documents, and diplomatic exchanges —between the Five Dynasties, the Ten Kingdoms, Liao (907-1125), and the Korean kingdoms—reveals a Sino-Inner Asian order with the Inner Asian nomadic group, the Shatuo Turks, at the fore. By fashioning an “elite” identity based on their nomadic roots, the Shatuo Turks legitimated themselves as effective rulers, built multiple states including three of the Five Dynasties and one of the Ten Kingdoms, and ultimately forged a new balance of power across a connected Sino-Inner Asian world. This interstate relations and identity formation of the tenth century marked a watershed in Chinese history by not only establishing precedent for the Covenant of Chanyuan a century later but also fundamentally reshaping the Sino-Inner Asian world for centuries in which Inner Asian nomads could lay claim and rule over China.Diplomatic exchanges indicate a delicate power-sharing arrangement among three main political centers was preferred to a unipolar hierarchy between the hub and its periphery, a power paradigm made solely possible by the Inner Asian nomadic group, the Shatuo Turks. Therefore, I suggest the post-Tang world to be understood as the “New Three Kingdoms,” refuting the established Sinocentric periodization of the “Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms” created by the eleventh century literati. Through this portrayal of an interconnected Sino-Inner Asia where inter-state relations and identity were intricately intertwined, I argue that the Shatuo Turks were the architects of a transregional multipolar hegemony of a world where the ethnic, cultural, and political identities of peoples and states were fluid—when China, as a cultural and political hegemon, was gone.

This study investigates Qing institutions and its ventures of conveying ideology in the eighteenth century. It begins with portraying the sovereign’s felt challenges from the scholar-officials’ placement. The Qianlong emperor’s solution utilized commissions to impose bureaucratic trials upon the candidates’ perceived merits. In particular, he made heavy use of the education commissions, which bridged literary policies between the imperial center and the provinces, as the premier venue of evaluation. The commissioners came with the best scholarly credentials. Their omnipresence in compilation, education, and examination tasks had brought ideological production and propagation together under the throne’s heedful observation. Empowered by this new role, the commissioned academicians were able to fulfill an ambitious vision of textual promulgation, moral cultivation, and literary training to achieve an unprecedented level of ideological conformity among the educated sector of the populace. They earned imperial attention and support as a result of the Qianlong emperor’s professionalized approach to a Yongzheng-era reform. In return, newly-minted Classical commentaries produced at the imperial court were distributed through these commissioners to reach the empire’s lettered communities. The outcome, proven by substantial reports, was positive in both the emperor and the commissioners’ favor. Invested in a reciprocal relationship, these commissioners’ efforts were intertwined with the state’s avid agenda for cultivation, education, and examination reforms. This process refreshes our knowledge about this era’s state capacity of ideological practice as well as the state’s institutional integration with scholarly elites during the Yongzheng-Qianlong continuum. The ideological activism of this era was motivated by multiple factors that were highly dependent on the institutional premises. Hence, it was developed as a governing tool as opposed to an imminent need or interest. I use the archives of memorials and edicts to describe and analyze the institutional precondition, logic, setup, function, and logistics of utilizing scholars and delivering ideas. I focus on the institutional changes and their impact on collective performance. I argue for a strong correlation between emperorship and organizational coherence in the use of intellectual projects and the intra-bureaucratic discussions on pertinent topics. Consequently, the institutions of conveying ideology became an organic part of the imperial rule.