Papers presented by Boyao Zhang since 2019
2024 Providence, Rhode Island
"Counting to Ten on the Abacus: The International System of Units and the Algorist Revolution of Commercial Arithmetic in 20th-Century China"
Boyao Zhang, University of Toronto
Abstract:
This paper examines how the adoption of the international system of units (SI) radically transformed the use of the abacus in everyday commercial calculations in 20th-Century China. Chinese merchants have traditionally used the “catty (斤，or jin)” and “tael (两，or liang)” as the primary units of weight measurement, with one catty being equal to sixteen taels. However, the successive modernizing regimes of 20th-Century China have repeatedly attempted to align existing weight units with the International System of Units, which operated on a decimal basis. Officially, this process was complete in 1959, when the State Council of the People’s Republic of China decreed that one catty would be equal to ten taels, and that one kilogram would be equal to two catties. The standardization of the decimal system of weight measurements would prompt a new generation of accountants and managers to experiment with new methods of abacus use that incorporated the principles of formal arithmetic. The abacus had traditionally been an instrument of numeracy for commercial clerks, who only needed to memorize a series of formulas to be able to work with numbers. However, dissatisfied with the long list of formulas of abacus manipulation that needed to be memorized, 20th-Century business professionals sought to develop an approach to abacus use that mirrored the mechanics of written arithmetic calculations. The phasing out of the special abacus formulas for non-decimal systems of weight unit conversions encouraged them to further attempt to eliminate as many existing formulas of rote memorization as possible. This paper will demonstrate that through this new approach, the abacus would become a calculative aid rather than an instrument of numeracy, as mastery of formal arithmetic would now become the precondition for abacus manipulation. This entailed decisive changes in the professional lives of 20th-century business clerks, for whom numeracy in business was no longer possible without knowledge of formal arithmetic.
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"The Mystique of Expert Numeracy: Reinvented Traditions, Untranslatable Science, and the Professionalization of Chinese Accountants"
Boyao Zhang, University of Toronto
Abstract:
This paper explores the debates on double-entry bookkeeping that were central to the professionalization of twentieth-century Chinese accountants. Conventional histories of Chinese accounting have generally assumed that double-entry bookkeeping only became prevalent in twentieth-century China through the agency of forward-looking modernizers. However, recent scholarship has unearthed growing evidence that double-entry bookkeeping was already widespread in the early modern Chinese commercial world. This raises a rather perplexing question: why twentieth-century Chinese professional accountants claim that double-entry bookkeeping was a “Western” innovation, if this method had long been known to nineteenth-century Chinese merchants? Drawing from professional journals, company gazetteers, old accounting manuals, and declassified government document collections, this paper argues that twentieth-century Chinese professional accountants sought to buttress the legitimacy of their new discipline by framing the discussion on double-entry bookkeeping as a controversy over Chinese tradition and Western modernity. The first generation of Chinese accountants educated in business schools embraced the ideals of scientific management at a time when the “visible hand” of the management was still largely absent from Chinese economic life. For this reason, Chinese professional accountants strove to demonstrate both the inadequacy of existing bookkeeping practices and the ineluctability of the future in which their new managerial science of expert numeracy would play a central role in modern industry. In the process, these accountants deployed a new nomenclature that reinvented “traditional Chinese accounting” and “double-entry bookkeeping” as two sets of incompatible knowledge systems that could not coexist in the modern world. However, this strategy of self-legitimation by no means guaranteed the unassailability of the authority of Chinese professional accountants. In the 1960s, anti-technocratic critics of professional accountants, encouraged by the Maoist regime, appealed to "tradition" and "customs" to justify their rejection of modern managerial science.