current-phd-students

Hongyi Yu

Hongyi Yu

Field: Modern Chinese History
Advisor: Eugenia Lean
Email:hy2658@columbia.edu

Hongyi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History-East Asia program, specializing in the social and cultural history of twentieth-century China. His research interests revolve around issues relating to propaganda, censorship, print culture, and the history of books in the contexts of modern China and East Asia. His dissertation foregrounds the centrality of Communist grassroots propaganda personnel in the Chinese Communist Party’s road to power—charting how the Party relied on this heterogenous group of individuals to expand its local organizations during the Second Sino-Japanese War and consolidate power in the early years of the People’s Republic. Extending the historical definition of “propaganda,” his research highlights, in addition to mass media and artistic ephemera, the interplay between grassroots propaganda personnel and their audiences as the backdrop against which effective propaganda played out. Ultimately, he seeks to adopt a comprehensive approach to propaganda, illuminating the political organization, sociocultural landscapes, and material conditions underlying the mundane work performed by propaganda personnel in the course of China’s Communist revolution and socialist construction. Besides the dissertation research, Hongyi is also interested in exploring how to situate the Chinese Communist revolution in an international and global context for pedagogical purposes. Courses he plans to design and teach include Communism in East Asia and the People’s Republic as History.
Before coming to Columbia, Hongyi received his BA in history and MA in East Asian Studies from UCLA in 2020.

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Xiaoke Yang

Xiaoke Yang

Field: East Asian Religion
Advisor: Michael Como
Email: xy2504@columbia.edu

Xiaoke Yang is a Ph.D. student in medieval Japanese Religion and Material Culture. Her research interests center on the materiality of religious objects that facilitate relations between humans, objects, and deities. She focuses on how religious objects generate and empower living networks that translate tangible materials into intangible religious and socio-political benefits. She is also interested in how religious objects described in literary works like folktales, myths, and performative texts serve similar functions as actual offerings in cultic belief construction.

Xiaoke received her BA in East Asian Studies from New York University (2020), and MA in Japanese Religion from Columbia University (2023).

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Hekang Yang

Hekang Yang

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

Hekang is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Chinese history at Columbia University, where he works with Madeleine Zelin. His research focuses on modern Chinese history in global and imperial contexts, with particular attention to political economy, frontier governance, imperial statecraft, bureaucratic institutions, state finance, and transnational trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also undertaken extensive language and area-studies training in Russian and Soviet history at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, NYU, Princeton, and Middlebury.

His dissertation project, Reinventing Frontier Commerce: China, Russia, and the World Economy, 1805–1911, examines how a historically rooted overland trade regime in Inner Asia—epitomized by the Kyakhta system linking the Qing and Russian empires—adapted to the emergence of an industrial, extraction-driven world economy in the nineteenth century. Although imperial Russia was Qing China’s second-largest trading partner in the eighteenth century, its relative importance was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by British India, the United States, and other maritime powers. Challenging the resulting historiographical marginalization of Qing–Russian commerce, the dissertation analyzes how transformations in frontier exchange—including the liberalization of cross-border trade, transnational migration, and the expansion of business ventures and fiscal extraction into imperial interiors—reshaped the political economy and practices of economic statecraft in Qing China and, to a lesser extent, imperial Russia. More broadly, the project explores how the interaction between trade and politics reconfigured sovereignty, jurisdiction, and imperial authority prior to the rise of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism.

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