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Political Repression, Media Propaganda, and Nation Building

Print media is critical in nation-building. In the conquest of China in the mid-17th century, the Manchu-led Qing government oppressed the Han Chinese, the native population of China. Two and a half centuries later, when modern newspaper technology became available, revolutionary propagandists took advantage of a retelling of the political repression and resistance and made it into ethnic conflicts to fan the flames of discontent. Applying machine learning to analyze 0.3 million newspaper article titles, Peiyuan Li of the University of Colorado Boulder examines the interaction between the anti-Manchu propaganda and the historical repression and resistance. He finds that prefectures with repression and resistance responded more to the anti-Manchu propaganda and produced more revolutionaries. After the revolution, revolutionaries strove to build a modern nation-state by organizing the Kuomintang party, army, and government. His results indicate that propaganda utilizing historical repression and resistance shaped political identity and played a pivotal role in the nation building of modern China.

*Peiyuan’s paper, Political Repression, Media Propaganda, and Nation Building, won the Best Paper Award (第六屆南都量化歷史研究最佳論文獎) at the Eighth Annual Symposium on Quantitative History (2021)

Discussant: Boxiao Zhang, PhD candidate, UCLA Economics

Live on Zoom on April 21, 2022
10:00 Hong Kong/Beijing/Singapore | 11:00 Tokyo | 12:00 Sydney
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The Quantitative History Webinar Series, convened by Professor Zhiwu Chen and Dr. Chicheng Ma of The University of Hong Kong (HKU), aims to provide researchers, teachers and students with an online intellectual platform to keep up to date with the latest research in the field, promoting the dissemination of research findings and interdisciplinary use of quantitative methods in historical research. The Series is co-organized by the International Society for Quantitative History, HKU Business School, and the Asia Global Institute (AGI).

Conveners:
Professor Zhiwu Chen
Dr. Chicheng Ma