Yangyang Cheng is an award-winning writer and interdisciplinary scholar, whose research focuses on the history of science in China and U.S.-China relations. She is a Senior Fellow at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, and have received several honors from the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Asian American Journalists Association, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She is a co-host, writer, and producer of the acclaimed narrative podcast series Dissident at the Doorstep, from Crooked Media. She also hosts Made in China Journal’s Gateway to Global China podcast. Born and raised in China and trained as a particle physicist, Cheng received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago and worked on the Large Hadron Collider for more than a decade. From 2021 to 2026, she was a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center.

Last Updated: August 13, 2026

Conversation

11.27.18

How to Be a Chinese Scientist without Being China’s Scientist

Yangyang Cheng, Yu He & more
As trade tensions between the United States and China worsen, a new technological cold war looms, casting its shadow over American universities and research institutions. How should individual scientists of Chinese origin decide whether to accept a...

Viewpoint

11.03.17

The Future of Particle Physics Will Live and Die in China

Yangyang Cheng from Foreign Policy
“Don’t you dare kill my project.”My phone interview with a senior official at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) had started with bland, yet polite, responses. But it took a sharp turn toward audible agitation and hostility as I raised my final...