Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto
Tong Lam’s research interests encompass modern and contemporary China, East Asia, urbanism, visual culture, science and technology studies, postcolonial critique, and transnational history. His research areas include the modern and contemporary history of China, science and technology, politics and aesthetics, urbanism, and empire.
His first book, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949 (2011), analyzes the profound consequences of the emergence of the technology of the “social fact” and social survey research in modern China.
Professor Lam’s current research examines China’s urban infrastructures, ruins and ruination, as well as the renewed imperial ambitions of the later Qing empire.
As a visual artist, he uses photographic and cinematographic techniques to dissect contemporary China’s transformation, as well as Cold War ruins around the world. He has published a photo-essay book, Abandoned Futures (2013), and has exhibited his work internationally.
Panel 1 | Global Regimes and 20th-century China
Let the ore speak: extractivism and early Cold War mobilization
Abstract
From Chairman Mao’s “receiving” of a uranium ore in Zhongnanhai to the nationwide mapping of mineral resources and the mass movement for sighting and reporting minerals, the 1950s marked the beginning of what could be described as China’s age of extractivism.
The intensifying interactions between humans and nonhumans in socialist China had profound global and planetary consequences that continue to unfold today.
