Yingchuan Yang

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 modern China. His dissertation, “Revolution on the Air: Radio and the Mass Technology of Chinese Socialism,” asks what happened when the Chinese socialist state sought to build a cutting-edge telecommunications system with its unparalleled power of mass mobilization. By investigating the state-sponsored popularization of radio technology and expertise as well as its unexpected consequences from the 1950s to the 1980s, it offers a new understanding of Chinese socialism as a mass technological project. Portions of this dissertation have been published in Radical History Review and forthcoming from an edited volume titled Practices of Reading in the People’s Republic of 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.

Yingchuan’s second major project, “South of the Sea: Transnational Migration and the Transformation of Coastal China, 1949–1988,” 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 side projects cover such topics as astrology, the Chinese space program, and a little-known campaign of annotating arcane ancient Chinese texts in the late Cultural Revolution.

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.