| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines the key modern infrastructure of telecommunications in early Republican China, through the eyes of a Japanese, Nakayama Ryûji, who served as a telecommunications adviser to the Chinese government from 1913 to 1928. Nakayama's numerous reports and recommendations to his Chinese employer and frequent confidential dispatches to the Japanese government, when read together, constitute a fascinating prism. They not only reveal problems as well as the potential in China's telecommunications sector, they also highlight Japan's efforts to compete with other foreign actors in China through the provision of Japanese equipment, expertise, and loans. While Nakayama strove to shape China's telecommunications development in ways that would, in his view, benefit both China and Japan, his efforts were often undercut by the aggressive actions of the Japanese government in China, such as the infamous Twenty-One Demands. Though promising at first, Japan's influence on China's modernization in the early Republican era came to be more limited, especially when compared with the final decade of the Qing Dynasty. Ultimately, what can be seen through this Japanese prism confirms that the development of an information infrastructure in modern China, as elsewhere, was as much shaped by technological and economic forces as it was influenced by political and diplomatic factors.
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