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Homemade machines vernacular technology, mass innovation, and the making of modern china, 1890-1965 Mengliu Cheng
- Format:
- Book
- Thesis/Dissertation
- Author/Creator:
- Cheng, Mengliu, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- History.
- Agriculture.
- Agricultural engineering.
- 0578.
- 0539.
- 0473.
- Local Subjects:
- History.
- Agriculture.
- Agricultural engineering.
- 0578.
- 0539.
- 0473.
- Genre:
- Academic theses
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (215 pages)
- Contained In:
- Dissertations Abstracts International 87-12B
- Place of Publication:
- Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2026
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- This dissertation tells the untold story of inventing and making machines in modern China, focusing on the mundane, everyday machines related to farming. It shifts the focus away from large factories, international companies, research institutions, toward lesser-known inventors, small rural workshops and cooperatives. Using an underused archive of textual, visual, and material sources-from patent applications, drawings, to models-this study shows a wide range of inventors and their vernacular, sometime quixotic machines: from "pseudoscientific" antenna that claimed to use the air to fertilizer the soil, to "vacuum" dragon bone waterwheels created by an "educated youth" in Mao-era countryside. It argues that contrary to the idea that China's weak industrial basis blocked people from accessing and using machines, ordinary people were designing and making machines with vernacular technology. Therefore, this story complicates the narrative of a linear path to industrialism and agricultural modernization, showing how multilayered experience contributed to making China's own "machine age."
- Notes:
- Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-12, Section: B.
- Advisors: Fei, Siyen Committee members: Azuma, Eiichiro; Wu, Shellen Xiao; Jiang, Lijing; F., Roy; Nichols, Jeannette P.
- Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2026
- Vendor supplied data
- Local Notes:
- School code: 0175
- ISBN:
- 9798247974451
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license
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