China

Yingchuan Yang

Yingchuan Yang

Early Career Fellow

Office Hours: Email for appointment
Email: yingchuan.yang@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Columbia University (2024)
BA: University of California, Los Angeles (2016)

Classes Taught

HESA GU4882: History of Modern China II
EAAS GR6200: M.A. Workshop in East Asian History

Research Interests

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

“Connecting the Countryside: Radio Networks and the Infrastructure of the Masses in Socialist China.” Radical History Review no.147 (2023): 111–36.

Madeleine Zelin

Madeleine Zelin

Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies,
 History East Asia coordinator

Office: 611 Kent Hall
Office Hours: Tuesdays 10:30-12:30 Link for appointment https://calendar.app.google/GUxE5JGxp18TULmc6

Phone: (212) 854-2592 [I do not use my phone, please email]Email: mhz1@columbia.edu

Educational Background

BA: Cornell University (’70)
PhD: University of California, Berkeley (’79)

Selected Classes Taught

HSEA GU4891 Law in Chinese HIstory
HSEA GU4880 History of Modern China I
HSEA GU4884 Merchants, Markets and the State
HSEA GR8888 Colloquium on Chinese Legal History
HSEA G8861 Industrial Revolutions

Research Interests

Modern Chinese Legal and Economic History, Comparative History of Law and the Economy
Madeleine Zelin has, since her Ph.D. work at the University of California at Berkeley, taken an
iconoclastic approach to the complex forces shaping modern China. Professor Zelin’s recent
research has focused on legal history, the role of law in the Chinese economy and the interface
between law, culture and the market in early modern China. She has written on state handling
of economic disputes as well as the role of Chambers of Commerce as new sites for economic
mediation. Her chapter on “Economic Freedom in Late Imperial China” (in William Kirby, ed.,
Realms of Freedom in Modern China, Stanford, 2004) challenges the assumption that the
politically autocratic late Ming and Qing imperial regimes were restrictive in their handling of
the private economy. Her latest book, The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Enterprise in Early
Modern China, is a study of an advanced industrial community in southern Sichuan from the
eighteenth to the early twentieth century and provides new insights into the role of customary
legal and business practices in China’s early modern economic development. It has been
awarded the Fairbank Prize (American Historical Association), Alan Sharlin Memorial Award
(Social Science History Association) and the Humanities Prize of the International Conference on
Asian Studies (ICAS). As part of her commitment to mentoring younger scholars in legal and
economic history of East Asia Professor Zelin serves as co-director of the first AAS New
Directions Workshop: Economic History of Asia and is a founding board member of the
International Society for Chinese Law and History. She is currently completing a book on China’s
earliest company and bankruptcy law reforms at the onset of the twentieth century.

Selected Publications

Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600‐1980 (co-editor, Pickering and Chatto, 2015)

The Merchants of Zigong, Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (Columbia, 2005)

The Magistrate’s Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch’ing
China (University of California, 1984)

Zhaohua Yang

YangZhaohuaZhaohua Yang

Sheng Yen Assistant Professor of Chinese Buddhism

Office: Room 307, 80 Claremont
Office Hours: M 6:00-6:45 PM/W 4:45pm-6:00 PM; email for appointment confirmation
Phone: (212) 851-4147
Email: zy2200@columbia.edu

Educational Background

PhD: Stanford University

Classes Taught

RELI UN2405 Chinese Religious Traditions

RELI GU4307 Interactions of Buddhism and Daoism in China
CHNS GR9333 Readings in Chinese Religion

Research Interests

Zhaohua Yang received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. He specializes in tantric or esoteric Buddhism in middle-period China. His research interests also include indigenous scriptures, the interactions between Buddhism and Daoism, and religions on the Silk Road. In addition to his training in pre-modern Dunhuang and Japanese manuscripts, he has done extensive fieldwork in Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and the US. He is finishing his first book manuscript, Devouring Impurities: Myth, Ritual and Talisman in the Cult of Ucchuṣma in Tang China (618-907), which explores Chinese responses to antinomian tantric practices as seen through a Dunhuang manuscript on this fierce god. His next project, tentatively titled Performing Yoga: Transformations of Buddhist Ritual in Late Imperial China (960-1450), studies the evolution from Yoga in esoteric Buddhism to Yoga as a monastic category in institutional Buddhism.

Selected Publications

“Snake, Spell, Spirit, and Soteriology: The Birth of an Indian God Jiedi 揭諦 in Middle-period China (618-1279).” Religion 14 (2023)