I'm a historian of East Asian information technologies, particularly the technologies used for identifying and documenting human individuals, e.g. ID cards, mugshots, fingerprints, signatures, names, personal seals, etc. My current project, tentatively titled "Cards of Modernity: Chinese IDs in the Global Information Age," explores the modern-state building efforts in early-twentieth-century China through the lens of ID cards. Situating in the global trend of identifying humans with paper documents, I explore how the Chinese government justified and implemented a national ID card policy, and how people resisted and negotiated this small information gadget that tremendously shaped their everyday experiences.