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Date(s)： 2023/06/01
Time： 15:00~17:00
Venue： Archives 3rd Conference Hall
Speaker：Prof. Peter E. Hamilton (Assistant Professor, Lingnan University, History Department)
Organizer： Urban History Research Group
Entitled Managing Modern China: A Global History, my second book project is investigating the history of “scientific management” (科學管理) across twentieth-century Chinese thought and society. By the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912, foreign characterizations of China as inefficient, irrational, and chaotic had gained painful purchase among Chinese elites. Amid this crisis and a broader embrace of Euro-American sciences, in the early 1910s a number of American-returned students introduced the new American idea of ‘scientific’ management as a method of promoting efficiency, discipline, and order across both Chinese business and society. While this imported discourse did provoke some resistance from organized labor, it gained widespread influence among Republican-era industrialists, educators, and Guomindang officials, in part fueled by Japan’s own embrace of these ideas. After 1949, Soviet models surged to dominance before the PRC claimed to re-invent “management science” (管理科學) in the late 1950s and pursued “management democratization” (管理民主化) in the Cultural Revolution. These upheavals left post-1978 reformers such as Zhu Rongji determined to restore ‘scientific’ management to state planning and management education, setting foundations for mainland China’s embrace of another American management import in the 1990s: MBA programs. This English-language talk will provide a broad overview of this book project and my on-going research at the Institute of Modern History.