Yingchuan Yang is an Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. With broad interests in modern Chinese history, he works at the intersection of knowledge (often in the form of science and technology), culture, and politics in modern China. He is preparing a book manuscript, Revolution on the Air: Radio and the Mass Technology of Chinese Socialism, that offers a new understanding of Chinese socialism as a mass technological project. By investigating the state-sponsored popularization of radio technology and expertise as well as its unexpected consequences from the 1950s to the 1980s, this book will be one of the first monographs on the history of technology in modern China. This project 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, “South of the Sea: Transnational Migration and the Reformation of Coastal China,” places the economic and environmental development of China’s coastal areas and Hainan, China’s largest island, in the transnational circuit of people, capital, and expertise between East and Southeast Asia. Other in-progress projects cover topics such as astrology, weather modification, and a little-known campaign of annotating ancient Chinese texts during the late Cultural Revolution.

Selected Publications