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.