Dr Yingchuan Yang

As a historian of modern China, I primarily work at the intersection of knowledge, culture, and politics in the People’s Republic of China. I also have adjacent interests in urban history (especially Beijing) and historical theory. I am currently preparing a book manuscript, Revolution on the Air: Radio and the Mass Infrastructure of Chinese Socialism. By investigating the construction of a nationwide radio infrastructure and its unexpected consequences from the 1950s to the 1980s, this book offers a new understanding of Chinese socialism as a mass infrastructural project. Based on archival work in almost 20 archives and libraries in China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, it will be one of the first monographs on the history of infrastructure in modern China. Research for this book has been supported by the Association for Asian Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia.

My second major project traces the origins of China’s contemporary manufacturing-centered, export-oriented development strategies to the state-directed reconfiguration of knowledge and political economy during the socialist period. Offering new portraits of prominent politicians and recovering the obscured lives of marginalized figures, this project seeks to destabilize the temporal and geographical boundaries of modern Chinese history. My side lines of research explore topics such as weather modification, urban planning, and a little-known campaign to annotate ancient Chinese texts during the late Cultural Revolution.

A native of Beijing, I grew up in and around the Temple of Earth and attended public schools near the Drum Tower. I received my B.A. in History with a minor in East Asian Studies from University of California, Los Angeles in 2016 and completed my Ph.D. in the History-East Asia Program at Columbia University in 2024, where I also worked as an Early Career Fellow and Lecturer before coming to Cambridge.