PI: Haoyang Xie

Faculty Advisor: Shaoda Wang

Partner Institution: Chengdu Municipal Public Security Bureau

Proposal: China's 2025 food delivery subsidy war—over RMB 100 billion in platform discounts—surged order volumes and rider workload, driving a fivefold increase in rider traffic accident rates. Using linked police accident records and platform delivery logs from Chengdu (2020–2025, 9,148 on-duty accidents), this dissertation studies two questions. First, how does station managers' real-time discretion over order allocation create heterogeneous safety outcomes across riders—through protection or discrimination? Second, why do 23% of new riders exit within 10 days of an accident, with no-fault riders exiting at higher rates than at-fault riders—a pattern inconsistent with rational learning? The methodology combines administrative data analysis with fieldwork: qualitative interviews (60–80 riders) to
elicit allocation decision rules and post-accident narratives, a pilot survey (150–200 riders) on risk perceptions and working conditions, and station observation to document informal dispatching practices. This research provides the first evidence linking platform price competition to worker safety externalities.

PI: Tyler Neenan

Faculty Advisor: Brook Ziporyn

Partner Institution: East China Normal University

Proposal: My dissertation project centers around a strange "eminent and special" body, which crops up in a series of polemical exchanges between the pre-eminent master of Song Dynasty Tiantai, Zhili and his once de facto dharma heir turned renegade, Renyue. This body has received little to no attention in Western scholarly discourse. I am proposing a trip through the major sites of Tiantai Buddhist learning, both monastic and otherwise, in Southeast China, to consult their textual archives (many of which are not digitalized, and cannot be found anywhere else) and to get muchneeded feedback on my research from the experts in all of the following places, in a series of short residences, starting off in East China Normal University in Shanghai, making my way gradually Westward: the Zhejiang Buddhist Learning Academy in Hangzhou; Wu Zhongwei at Suzhou University; Master Lixian at Putuo Mountain; the many eminent scholar-monks at the Tiantai Buddhist Learning Academy at Wannian Temple; the Pure Land Buddhist Learning Academy at Donglin Temple in Jiujiang (Jiangxi Province); and the Zhiyi Research Institute at Yuquan Temple in Dangyang (Hubei Province). 

PI: Muyu Xie

Faculty Advisor: Kenneth Pomeranz

Partner Institution: UChicago Center in Beijing

Proposal: My dissertation examines how large-scale socialist construction proceeded in China’s interior during the late Mao era through the Xiang-Qian and Zhi-Liu railways in western Hunan. This round of research focuses on sources that must be collected in Beijing and then connected with local evidence from the railway region. In Beijing, I will consult central-level materials at the National Archives and in major university libraries, especially documents on Third Front planning, railway policy, labor mobilization, and central debates over construction and coordination. I will also gather published and internal materials that are difficult to obtain elsewhere. I will then connect these sources with follow-up archival research and interviews in Hunan and neighboring provinces. Through local archives, oral history, and comparative materials, the project reconstructs how non-expert actors carried out railway construction on the ground, and how repeated improvisation, negotiation, and reporting gradually hardened into new rules of coordination in the socialist hinterland.

PI: Yangqiao Lu

Faculty Advisor: Thomas Lamarre

Partner Institution: Peking University

Proposal: My research project investigates the reconfiguration of knowledge production with indigenous cosmology in contemporary media art in China. Specifically, I am studying the singular practice of Chinese Mao Chenyu whose multi-media practices across visual ethnography, installations, social media engagement, and writing engage with orientations of land in Chinese indigenous cosmological knowledge systems. Mao's work is physically and conceptually linked to the practice and system of rice cultivation as knowledge production. With a profound investment in discourses on rural China, Mao actively engages with questions about how the regulatory regimes by the nation-state have been in multiple ways severing the spiritual bond between peasants and land and how such alienations of modernism with Chinese characteristics are responsible for the vast environmental damage. My research methodology mainly entails interview and observation. I will interview Mao and two Beijing-based Chinese scholars. I will also visit the paddy region for first-hand observation of how farming techniques and belief systems shape each other in the area.

PI: Liying Huang

Faculty Advisor: Zhiying Ma

Partner Institution: Shenzhen Pengxing Anti-Family Violence Center

Proposal: Intimate partner violence (IPV) encompasses physical, psychological, sexual, and financial abuse against a current or former partner. As a major public health issue, IPV causes severe consequences for survivors' health, financial stability, and social networks. In mainland China, despite legislative progress, state institutions still rely heavily on mediation (tiaojie) to resolve IPV disputes. Critics argue that mediation frequently prioritizes dispute resolution over individual rights, potentially jeopardizing survivor's safety when mediators lack gender awareness or fail to understand abusive power dynamics. To examine the operation and impact of state-promoted mediation, my dissertation employs ethnographic methods. This includes on-site observation of mediation sessions, in-depth interviews with survivors and mediators, and discourse analysis of relevant policy and program materials. This preliminary trip is essential to establish working relationships with social service agencies and local Women’s Federation offices. By strengthening these connections and conducting initial site visits to observe daily operations, I will ensure the feasibility of my dissertation proposal.

PI: Lucie Lollkova

Faculty Advisor: Alice Yao

Partner Institution: Yunnan Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology

Proposal: Since the 1950’s, excavations around Lake Dian have revealed bronze and lacquer objects associated with textile production in elite female graves of the Dian polity (600 BC-109 BC). These finds, along with weaving imagery on funerary objects, suggest that craft production may have been a key marker of identity. However, spinning and weaving have often been dismissed as household maintenance activities, labelling women as non-specialists, incompatible with attaining social status through their craft. Recent settlement data from archaeological projects at Dian shell-mound sites have yielded numerous spindle whorls and bone tools associated with textile production from domestic contexts. My dissertation project uses a taskscape approach to combine use-wear and microbotanical residue on textile tools, together with intra-site and landscape patterning of archaeobotanical and textile data from both mortuary and household contexts. By centering the productive actions involved in plant processing, spinning, and weaving, it seeks to illuminate how textile technologies were embedded in landscape, labour, gender, and identity in Bronze Age Yunnan.

PI: Jiebiao Wang

Faculty Advisor: Harold A. Pollack

Partner Institution: Tsinghua University

Proposal: This project examines how rehabilitation service subsidies for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs), affect maternal employment and caregiving responsibilities in China. While many local governments provide financial support for rehabilitation services, it remains unclear whether these subsidies alleviate caregiving burdens or instead shift greater responsibility onto mothers, thereby influencing their labor force participation. The study will use a mixed-methods approach combining administrative data collection and qualitative interviews. First, I will work with local partners to obtain relevant administrative records and policy documents.Second, I will conduct semi-structured interviews with families of children with IDDs and service providers. These interviews will focus on how rehabilitation services are delivered in practice, how caregiving responsibilities are allocated within households, and how mothers adjust their employment decisions in response to subsidy availability. The analysis will primarily be descriptive and exploratory identifying patterns in
how subsidy policies interact with family dynamics and maternal larbor supply.

PI: Yunjun Zhou

Faculty Advisor: Judith Zeitlin

Partner Institutions: Zhejiang Library; Tianjin Library (Rare Books and Special Collections Department)

Proposal: My dissertation, News, Novels, and Serialization in the Late 19th–Early 20th Century Chinese Press, examines how publishing fiction in daily newspaper installments changed how novels were written, read, and remembered in China between the 1870s and 1920s. This trip supports the chapter on the Yang Naiwu case, which traces how multi-year newspaper coverage of a wrongful-conviction case generated later novelistic adaptations and shaped literary memory. My methodology combines archival research, comparative textual analysis, periodical study, and attention to the material history of print. In Hangzhou, I will examine the Zhejiang Library’s 1900 lithographic copy (call number 817.27); in Tianjin, I will consult the 1902 lithographic edition held under call number T10123; and in Shanghai, I will conduct follow-up work on Republican-era retellings and visit the China Museum of Modern Press and Publishing to study the lithographic technology that produced these texts.