Hekang Yang

Field: Chinese History
Advisor: Madeleine Zelin
Email: hy2614@columbia.edu

Hekang studies late imperial and modern China. His research interests revolve around three intersecting and recurring themes: state formation, frontier and province, and bureaucracy. His dissertation project, “The Qing Fiscal Policy, 1875-1916” analyzes the consolidation, coordination, and constitutional reforms of fiscal planning in the late Qing state. He presents a revisionist assessment of the declined nineteenth century thesis. Hekang also explores the party-state apparatus in socialist China, which is a hybrid of the Soviet Nomenklatura and the Qing’s Manchu-Chinese civil service. The two models emphasized noble bloodlines, ethnic balance, cyclical rotation of posts, and systemic evaluation. Hekang, a native of Zhejiang, studied in Bremen, Minnesota, and Chicago before coming to New York City.