Neither Nation, Nor Empire: Situating Shanghai Radio in a Global Technological Moment, 1922–25

In the period following World War I, societies grappled with the implications and necessity of new mass technologies such as radio. The article highlights the synchronous “global technological moment” by examining an individual and a city. From 1922 to 1925, entrepreneur E.G. Osborn founded radio stations across three different political formations in East Asia—imperial Japan, semi-colonial Shanghai, and colonial Hong Kong. Focusing on Shanghai, this article uncovers how Osborn’s radio station sparked a struggle for control between anti-colonial nationalists, imperialist institutions, and a military concerned about its rivals’ growing technological capabilities. Broadcasting both reflected and amplified an unstable post-war world, whose contours were still under negotiation. Rather than perceiving the institutionalization of radio within discrete national or imperial narratives, as some scholarship does, the article places the phenomenon within a simultaneous global technological moment, thus critiquing the idea of an exogenous globalization.