Who were the business elites of modern Shanghai? How did they establish and expand their networks? What roles did they play in the unfolding of modern Shanghai and, indeed, modern Chinese history? These are questions that cannot be overlooked in our quest to understand the intricacies of modern China's past. However, a majority of works have adopted traditional approaches, relying heavily on conventional historical sources. After years of extensive exploration, these traditional resources have reached a point of saturation, and further reliance on them to achieve academic innovation is becoming increasingly challenging. The advent of digital technologies, tools, and resources, coupled with the emergence of bibliometric methods such as named entity recognition, topic modeling, and network analysis, has opened up new avenues for traditional humanities research, including history. Building upon this foundation, this paper aims to harness the power of ‘computational methods’ to analyze texts generated by past mass media. We seek to step away from the historian's gaze and adopt the media's perspective to observe and study the business elite group of modern Shanghai, uncovering their often-overlooked facets. Specifically, this paper will utilize the algorithms and corpora embedded in HistText, in conjunction with other collective biographies, to conduct a comprehensive examination of the modern Shanghai business elite group, focusing on aspects of the group, individuals, organizations, and events.