Cruz Guan

Cruz (Wenhao) Guan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at The Ohio State University. His dissertation focuses on the transformation of China from an empire to a modern nation-state from 1800 to 1937 based on the influences of cartography, modern education system, print culture, and Shanghai’s publishing industry. By adopting a multi-layered perspective and interdisciplinary approaches from geography, his study will suggest that the birth of a new Chinese nation-state as defined in maps was a complex interaction in which the different, sometimes even contradictory, understandings of emperors, state officials, non-state-educated elites, and ordinary people collided and mixed.