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 Yang is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Chinese history at Columbia University, where he works with Professor Madeleine Zelin. His research focuses on late imperial and modern China in global context, with particular interests in political economy, frontier governance and statecraft, legal-economic institutions, transnational trade, and Qing–Russian relations in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is also affiliated with Columbia’s Harriman Institute and Center for Political Economy. His dissertation project, Reinventing Frontier Commerce: China, Russia, and the World Economy, 1805–1911, is supported by fellowships from the Economic History Association, the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Weatherhead and Harriman Institutes, among others. Based on extensive archival research in China, Russia, and Japan, this study examines how a historically rooted overland trade in Inner Asia adapted to the emergence of a nineteenth-century industrial, extraction-driven global economy. Late imperial China maintained two principal entrepôts for international trade: Canton and Kiakhta.

Hekang’s dissertation focuses on the less-examined northern frontier trading regime, analyzing the business practices of Kiakhta merchants, its position within and interaction with the Canton system and the global economy, and its institutional transposition and expansion into Central Asia, Chinese treaty ports, and the Russian Far East over the long nineteenth century. The dissertation conceptualizes the frontier trade regime as a shared arena of empire-making between Qing China and Tsarist Russia. Hekang argues that rather than being peripheral or self-contained, frontier commerce functioned as an integrated system of imperial governance, through which commodity exchange, diplomacy, tax policy, and diaspora institutions collectively shaped modern China’s economic and geopolitical statecraft, law and extraterritorial jurisdiction, as well as nationalism and sovereignty.

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