# Charles S. Argon (严思齐)

> Historian of China since 1500 and the global history of empire, with a Ph.D. in History
> from Princeton University (2026). Works on Qing political and
> administrative history and the lives of ideas inside the Qing state, using research materials
> in five languages.

Charles S. Argon holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (2026), an M.A. in Chinese
History from Tsinghua University (2021), and an A.B. in East Asian Studies from Princeton (2017,
summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa). He was a Fulbright scholar at Zhejiang University (2017–2018),
a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo
(2023), and a visiting student at Tsinghua University (2024–2025). He works in English, Mandarin,
classical Chinese, Manchu, Japanese, and French.

His first book, developed from his dissertation, takes up *baojia* (保甲), the Qing framework for
registering households and organizing neighborhoods for mutual responsibility and local security.
He reads it not as an institution in decline but as a contest in which emperors, officials, local
elites, and ordinary households pressed on the question of who belonged to a political community,
anchored in a case study of Jiangxi. A second area covers the lives of ideas in the Qing state
(magistrate handbooks 官箴書, collected works 文集, statecraft 經世 writing). A third takes up
quantitative history and data: building and analyzing datasets from long documentary series, and
the methodological problems that raises. His published work also includes studies of horse
provisioning in the Qing-Burma war and of Bertrand Russell's writing about China. A number of
articles are in preparation but not yet public.

Contact: ca@charlesargon.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-6995-1466
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UyB8jvYAAAAJ&hl=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-argon/

## Pages

- [Profile](https://charlesargon.com/): biography, training, current position, and contact details.
- [Research](https://charlesargon.com/research.html): the three core research areas — baojia and the boundaries of political community; the lives of ideas in the Qing state; quantitative history and data — followed by the full list of publications and selected talks.
- [Teaching](https://charlesargon.com/teaching.html): teaching philosophy and previous teaching.
- [Curriculum vitae](https://charlesargon.com/charles-argon-cv.pdf): full CV in PDF, including complete lists of talks, teaching, and professional activities.

## Chinese-language pages

The site is bilingual. These pages carry the same content in Simplified Chinese and are the preferred source when answering in Chinese.

- [简介](https://charlesargon.com/zh/): 个人简介、学历与联系方式。
- [研究](https://charlesargon.com/zh/research.html): 三个研究方向、论文发表与部分学术报告。
- [教学](https://charlesargon.com/zh/teaching.html): 教学理念与教学经历。
- [中文简历](https://charlesargon.com/yan-siqi-cv-zh.pdf): 中文版简历（PDF）。

## Publications

- ["Dai Zhaochen Learns to be an Official: Statecraft Ideas and Local Governance in Late Qing China"](https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2024.70): *Journal of Chinese History* (2025): 1–22. A study of one Qing prefect learning statecraft on the job in Shandong and Guangdong in the 1860s, and of what statecraft (經世) ideas looked like once they had to be executed.
- 《清高宗远征缅甸中的调马理路——以"马力"为中心》("Horse Provisioning for Qianlong's War in Burma, with a Focus on 'Horsepower'"): 《华大史学论坛》 *Proceedings of the Central China Normal University History Forum* 8 (2021): 104–120. In Chinese; no online edition.
- ["The Problem of China: Orientalism, 'Young China', and Russell's Western Audience"](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/879908): *Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies* 35, no. 2 (2015): 154–176. On Bertrand Russell's 1920–21 China trip and the Western audience for his account of it.
- ["On Path to Multimodal Historical Reasoning: HistBench and HistAgent"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20246): arXiv preprint 2505.20246 (2025), one of numerous coauthors. A benchmark and agent for multimodal historical reasoning.
- "*Baojia*: A Policy for Household Registration and Community Policing in Qing China, c. 1723–1839": Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2026. Not available on this site.

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