Ruth Rogaski

on February 28, 2022

Ruth Rogaski is a historian of Qing and modern China at Vanderbilt University. She received her B.A. in Oriental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 1996. She came to Vanderbilt from Princeton University, where she taught from 1996 to 2003. Rogaski has written widely on transnational histories of science and medicine in the early modern and modern period. She is the author of Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (University of California Press, 2004), which traces how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hygienic Modernity was awarded the Fairbank Prize in East Asian history, the Levenson Prize in Chinese Studies, and the Welch Medal in the history of medicine, and was co-recipient of the Berkshire Prize. She is also the author of Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which examines the intersection between natural history and projects of empire in northeast Asia from the 17th century to the present. She is currently working on a history of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the American South. Grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the American Philosophical Society, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation have funded her research and writing.

Tahirih Lee

on February 28, 2022

Tahirih Lee is a leading scholar of Chinese law and legal history. She is the author of “By the Light of the Moon: Looking for China’s Rich Legal Tradition,” in the Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Research (2018). Her doctoral dissertation, “Law and Local Autonomy at the International Mixed Court of Shanghai,” brought to light for the first time archival materials related to this multinational court that tried millions of cases. As a member of the law faculty at Florida State University, she regularly teaches courses in Chinese Law, International Business Transactions, Comparative Law, Civil Procedure, and International Trade Transactions, a course she developed with faculty at the Shanghai University of International Business and Economics and supported by funding from the Shanghai Municipal Government. The course links American students and Chinese students in simulated commodity trades.

Lee has taught at the University of Minnesota Law School, Notre Dame Law School, and Loyola University Chicago School of Law as the Wing Tat Lee Chair in International and Comparative Law. She held the positions of Pew Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and Associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and is currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School’s East Asian Legal Studies. Lee received her J.D. from Yale Law School and her Ph.D. in History from Yale University. She has chaired committees of the Association of American Law Schools and the American Society for Legal History.

Yong Xue

on February 28, 2022

Yong Xue is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Suffolk Unviersity, where he teaches Chinese history, Japanese history, and cultural contact in world history. He received a B.A. in Chinese Language and Literature from Peking University, and an M.A. in East Asian Studies and Ph.D. in History from Yale University.

In Xinjiang’s Tech Incubators, Innovation Is Inseparable from Repression

By Jessica Batke on February 28, 2022

Innovation and its benefits to society in Xinjiang have come to encompass both the use of big data to enhance cross-border trade and the use of big data to monitor people inside their own homes. Official documents promoting innovation in Xinjiang make no distinction between tools to help facilitate ethnic and religious repression and those designed to advance good governance. The broad use of the term “innovation” to embrace such seemingly incompatible intentions also reveals why they are not incompatible at all.

Chen Changwei

on February 22, 2022

Chen Changwei is an Associate Professor of Diplomacy and Foreign Policy at the School of International Studies, Peking University. He was the inaugural participant in the program for visiting doctoral students between Peking University and Yale in 2005.

When Paul Robeson Sang for China

An Excerpt from ‘Arise, Africa! Roar, China!: Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century’

By Gao Yunxiang on February 22, 2022

In November 1940, Paul Robeson received a phone call, perhaps from the noted Chinese writer Lin Yutang, asking him to meet a recent arrival from China: Liu Liangmo. Within half an hour, Robeson was in the caller’s apartment. Liu recalled Robeson “beaming over me with his friendly smile and his giant hands firmly holding mine.” They became fast friends. When Robeson inquired about the mass singing movement that Liu had initiated in China, Liu related the backstory behind the new genre of Chinese fighting and folk songs he had helped to invent for war mobilization, singing some examples. Robeson’s favorite was “Chee Lai!” or “March of the Volunteers,” because, as he explained, “Arise, Ye who refuse to be bond slaves!” expressed the determination of the world’s oppressed, including Chinese and Black people, to struggle for liberation. Listening intently to Liu’s rendition of the song, Robeson wrote down some notes, and left with a copy.

Jo-shui Chen

on February 18, 2022

Jo-shui Chen received his B.A. in History from National Taiwan University in 1978 and his Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 1987. He has since taught and worked in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Taiwan. He has worked as a regular faculty member at the University of British Columbia, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and National Taiwan University, and taught on a temporary basis at Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Tokyo. He is presently a Distinguished Professor of History at National Taiwan University, and also holds the title of NTU Chair Professor. He specializes in medieval Chinese history and intellectual history of China with a comparative approach, and he is the author of five books and many articles. A former Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at NTU, he has served on many administrative and advisory positions, mostly in Taiwan.

Niu Dayong

on February 18, 2022

Niu Dayong (牛大勇) is a Professor at Peking University. Among the few senior China scholars, he has studied the American, European, and Japanese policies toward China during the Chinese national revolution and cold war period, modern Chinese political history, and the evolution of higher education. Among his international experience, he has served as a guest professor at universities in Japan, the U.S., Italy, and Hong Kong, and as a manager of the Universitas 21. Niu was a visiting fellow with the Cold War international history project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1993) and at Harvard Yenching Institute (1997-1999). His most recent main publications focused on the interactions among China, the U.S., and Japan in the late era of the Cold War, as well as China’s political and social changes within the international context in the 20th century.

Ryan Dunch

on February 18, 2022

Ryan Dunch (唐日安) is a Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, Classics, and Religion at the University of Alberta. He earned his B.A. in Asian Studies at ANU (1987), M.A. in History at the University of British Columbia (1991), and his Ph.D. in History at Yale University (1996). A specialist in modern Chinese history, he is the author of Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857-1927 (Yale University Press, 2001), as well as articles and chapters relating to Chinese Christianity and Christian missions in modern world history. He is co-editor (with Ashley Esarey) of Taiwan in Dynamic Transition: Nation Building and Democratization (University of Washington Press, 2020). His principal area of research is on missionary publishing in Chinese before 1911.