Books from China

How does a society innovate when resources are scarce? In Chinese Media Improvisations: Thriving on Deficits, scholar Xuenan Cao offers a fresh perspective on China’s technological development, examining how shortages, political pressures, and material constraints have shaped the country’s media and technological imagination. Moving across several periods of Chinese history, Cao explores the printing shortages of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the challenges of modernising China’s railway infrastructure, early experiments in information theory when computers were unavailable, and contemporary attempts to incorporate artificial intelligence into urban life. These seemingly disparate episodes reveal a recurring pattern: people adapt existing tools, improvise unconventional solutions, and transform limitations into opportunities for experimentation. Drawing on archival documents, newspapers, scientific publications, and literary works, Cao combines historical research with media theory to challenge assumptions about technological progress that originate in Western scholarship. The result is an interdisciplinary study of creativity, scarcity, and innovation that illuminates how China’s distinctive historical and political circumstances have shaped its relationship with technology.