From Telegram to Hypergraph: Communication, Relational Semantics, and Regional Politics in Republican China, 1911-1928

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 8

Abstract

How should historical sociologists model political communication when a single message simultaneously connects correspondents, intermediaries, and third parties who are discussed, accused, or governed? Using 4,597 catalogued telegram and letter titles from a Republican China archive (1911-1928), I treat each document as a role-labeled communicative hyperedge (senders, relays, recipients, involved actors) and combine it with extracted relational statements (orders, accusations, criticism) to link interaction structure to relational meaning. Higher-order participation is the rule rather than the exception: while most entries have one sender and one recipient, roughly two-thirds also name at least one involved actor. Actor prominence shifts once multi-actor episodes are preserved: coordination-oriented officeholders are central in dyadic correspondence projections but less central in hypergraph-sensitive projections that capture shared attention. Logistic models show that negative semantics concentrate in titles with narrower correspondence sets, in relay-chain situations, and in ties involving collective actors, even with year fixed effects and clustering by document. Finally, treating place names as document-level geographic labels reveals a North-South asymmetry in how communication episodes bundle third parties and deploy hard political semantics. The paper contributes to comparative-historical sociology by providing an operational framework for higher-order interaction and meaning at an archival scale, and to Republican China scholarship by offering new measures of coordination, attention, and contention in elite communication.

Author

• Simon Yuan Xi, University of Virginia