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Yingchuan Yang

Yingchuan Yang

Field: Modern Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Email: yingchuan.yang@columbia.edu

Yingchuan Yang is a doctoral candidate in the History-East Asia Program at Columbia University. He works at the intersection of knowledge (often in the form of science and technology), culture, and politics in twentieth-century China. His dissertation, “Revolution on the Air: Mass Technology and the Demise of Chinese Socialism,” reveals the unexpected and fateful consequences when the Chinese socialist state actually achieved its goal of popularizing radio technology. With radio technology being associated with industrialization and national defense, the masses were mobilized to partake in the production and circulation of radio gadgets and know-how. Backed by a culture of socialist open source, amateur technologists procured and widely shared the knowledge of assembling, modifying, and repairing radio sets. As these unconventional practices of industrial and knowledge production underpinned the popularization of radio amid material scarcity, such democratization of technology and expertise helped victims of political campaigns circumvent Maoist social control. The socialist state’s success in promoting mass technology, in other words, contributed to its own downfall. By redirecting the scholarly attention on Chinese socialism away from its institutional organizations to its material base, this dissertation offers a new narrative of modern Chinese history with an emphasis on previously ignored actors and through a technological lens. The research for this work has been supported by a Mellon Humanities International Travel Fellowship, the Association for Asian Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia, and numerous internal grants.

His second major project explores the little known oceanic histories of China from the 1940s to the 1990s, and it shows how China was continuously seeking out international connections through the oceans in a period that is traditionally characterized as self-imposed isolation.

A native of Beijing, Yingchuan received his B.A. in History (Highest Departmental Honors) with a minor in East Asian Studies from University of California, Los Angeles in 2016.

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Chung-Wei Yang

Chung-Wei Yang

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Shang Wei
Email: cy2372@columbia.edu

Chung-Wei Yang is a Ph.D. student in pre-modern Chinese literature, with emphasis in fiction and drama in the late imperial period. Chung-Wei received her B.A. in both Chinese and English literature, and M.A. in Chinese Literature from National Taiwan University. Her M.A. thesis deals with the relationship between material/visual culture and historical consciousness in early Qing drama. Building on her past research in the area, Chung-Wei’s future project will highlight the interplay among different genres, from Ming-Qing fiction and drama to the films of the Republican period.

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Chuan Xu

Chuan Xu

Field: Modern Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Email: cx2193@columbia.edu

Chuan Xu is a doctoral student of modern China interested in governmentality studies, media archaeology, critical theory, and history of science and technology.

His previous project, titled From Sonic Models to Sonic Hooligans, examines the role of magnetic tape in the rise and fall of Maoist China’s sound regime. His current project studies the shifting epistemic practices in the early post-Mao period through the lens of paranormal research, a decade-long mass movement in which everyone from prominent scientists to illiterate peasants conducted experiments and observations to corroborate and contest the existence of human superpower. Through this project, he seeks to illustrate how the emergence of post-Mao China was as much an epistemic event as an economic, political, and cultural event. In another project, tentatively titled Math for the Masses, Chuan studies the development and application of operations method (tongchoufa) and optimization method (youxuanfa) in the context of Maoist China. He has also written on the intellectual impact of cybernetics in United States and China, particularly with regard to the development of Graphical User Interface and the rise of economic cybernetics.

Before coming to Columbia, Chuan received his B.A. and M.A. in History at Stanford University, where he also developed an interest in computer programming. In his spare time, he enjoys going to remote corners of the globe with broad horizons and starry skies.

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