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.
