Uluğ Kuzuoğlu
Associate Professor of History
Washington University in St. Louis
Friday, February 6, 2026
2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
West Electronic Classroom (2nd floor)
Young Research Library
In 1974, the PRC government embarked on a project to engineer a nation-wide information network by installing computers across the provinces, cities, districts, and state-owned enterprises. Conceived soon after the announcement of ARPANET in 1969, this was China's own bid to invent the Chinese internet and optimize economic planning through the real-time transmission of data between production units and administrative authorities. Situating this large-scale infrastructural project within a global history of economic cybernetics, this talk examines the tensions between Maoism, numerical governance, and computer engineering in socialist China.
Dr. Uluğ Kuzuoğlu is an associate professor in the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age (Columbia UP, 2024).
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies