News and Identity in Imperial China, 10th-13th Centuries

FAIN: FA-53541-07

Hilde Godelieve De Weerdt
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

Between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries Chinese elites developed both an interest in current affairs and the means to tap into, transform, and commercialize official sources of information on current affairs. News, in the form of new information about subjects of public interest, was reported regularly and in a variety of genres, and shared with a rapidly expanding readership. This project proposes to reconstitute the networks of information sharing among literate elites and to gauge their impact on the imperial information order and on elite identities. It offers a case study of the political uses of print technology, and of the relationship between changing information networks and structural transformations in elite identities.