Overview

Abstract

This new research project aims to reconstruct the history of China’s electrical and electronics industries between the late 19th century and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Situated at the intersection of economic and business history, urban history, the history of technology and global history, my research traces the introduction and adaptation of electrical technology and electrical appliances — first by multinational and then by Chinese businesses — in modern China. In addition to its primary focus on the business history of the two industries, the study will also reconstruct Chinese consumers’ use and integration of electrical goods into their daily lives and how businesses interacted with those consumers in order to understand the development of China as a market for electrical goods. In sum, this study aims to explain the role that the electrical and electronics industries played in the electrification of modern China and how the two industries can be situated in the broader development of Chinese business and the Chinese economy during the 19th and 20th centuries.

About the Speaker

Dr. Ghassan Moazzin is Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and Department of History, HKU. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he received both his B.A. (2012) and Ph.D. (2017). Before coming to Hong Kong, he was a JSPS International Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Economics of the University of Tokyo. He has also been a visiting scholar at East China Normal University in Shanghai and the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica in Taipei.

Organizer

CRF Project “Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life, 19th – 21st Centuries” (RGC CRF HKU C7011-16G), Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong