OYCF Announces the OYCF-Stilwell Fellowship on US-China Relations

The Overseas Young Chinese Forum (OYCF) is pleased to announce the launch of the OYCF-Stilwell Fellowship on US-China Relations. This new initiative is supported by the OYCF-Stilwell Education Fund and aims to advance understanding between the U.S. and China. 

OYCF-Stilwell Fellowships are intended to support students, scholars, professionals and practitioners who engage in research and/or public-facing projects that explore US-China exchange. These projects include scholarly or policy writing, documentaries, plays, podcasts, and other activities that contribute to mutual understanding and people-to-people exchange between the US and China.

Applicants must be currently enrolled in a U.S. university, or, if not a student, must have a demonstrated interest in US-China relations. One to two fellowships, totaling up to $10,000, will be awarded annually through a competition that takes place in the winter quarter.

Stay tuned for application details. A call for proposal will be issued in early 2025. 

Overseas Young Chinese Forum (OYCF) congratulates the following five recipients of the 2024 OYCF-Chow Fellowship for Field Research in China:

Yingru Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Her project examines the transformation of elderly care in China, focusing on the integration of technological innovation into senior care and its impact on existing care practices and relationships.

Junyi Han is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Yale University. Her research examines the rise and fall of the Sino-Vietnamese alliance during Cold War through the prism of Yunnan province.

Shumeng Han is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego. Her project studies the politics of agricultural innovation in modern China by tracing the history of wheat seed development, production, and circulation from World War II (1931–1945) until the 1970s in Shaanxi province.

Pamela Tsui is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her project draws on a transnational framework to explore how Hong Kongers in Hong Kong and Toronto use money to construct and negotiate boundaries during turbulent times.

Liubing Xie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His project explores how China's crafting of the affordable rental housing market is one of the emerging governing techniques to govern the heterogeneous migrant populations in large cities.

In this field report filed by Jiangjiang Wu, PhD candidate in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she reflects both on the rise of luxury retirement homes in China today and on the evolution in her own thinking about the institution. 

Overseas Young Chinese Forum congratulates the following five recipients of the 2023 OYCF-Chow Fellowship for Field Research in China:

Niall Chithelen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego. He studies the history of concrete in Mao-era China, and his project examines the relationship between construction, design, technology, and the natural environment in twentieth-century China.

Zhuang Han is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. His project explores the life of Chinese non-workers (San He Da Shen) to review the labor relation in the time of industrial restructuring from the perspective of reproduction.

Hsu Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. His project investigates how technological advances are made in a non-western context, drawing on the case of COVID vaccine development in China and Russia.

Xiangyi Ren is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Adopting a processual approach, her project empirically aims to explain the divergent organizational development of specialized trial organizations in China and theoretically aims to contribute to the literature on legal change.

Tong Xin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research project seeks to understand the making of crisis and hope in contemporary China by following gender and sexuality knowledge production in sex education programs, educational spaces, and children’s everyday life.

OYCF is pleased to announce that 2023 OYCF-Chow Fellowship for Field Research in China is open for application. 

Since 2018, Overseas Young Chinese Forum (OYCF) has provided several fellowships to support field research in China, funded by the generous donations by Gregory C. and Paula K. Chow to OYCF.  The fellowship provides up to $5,000 to graduate students in humanities and social sciences in a U.S. or Canadian university to conduct fieldwork in China for their thesis projects.  

Priority will be given to research projects focusing on contemporary economic, social, cultural, or political issues in China, but historical or comparative studies with substantial amount of fieldwork to be conducted in China are also eligible for consideration.

Fellowship recipients will be announced on the OYCF website as OYCF-Chow Fellows.

The Overseas Young Chinese Forum is pleased to announce the 2022 OYCF-Chow Fellows. The fellowship aims to support the following research projects.

Ran Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. Her project involves multi-method functional analysis of the stone tools from the Peiligang site in North China, to discuss the changes of technology in the origin and development of early agriculture, and explore the dynamic relationships between humans and the environment in East Asia.

Teng Ge is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. His project examines how local stratifications contribute to global sociopolitical hierarchy based on an empirical study of Chinese professional basketball labor market. 

Yen-Ting Hsu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His project seeks to illuminate urban character formation in the era of neoliberalism by looking at the urban politics and governance of heritage-making in 21st-century Taipei.

Fan Li is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His project investigates the political economy of conservation and development in contemporary China in its high-profile, new National Park system through the case of the recently declared Giant Panda National Park.

Xiaogao Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Their project examines credibility struggles and jurisdictional conflicts in outlining what constitutes appropriate healthcare for transgender people in China through a multi-sited ethnography.

Overseas Young Chinese Forum congratulates the following five recipients of the 2021 OYCF-Chow Fellowship for Field Research in China: 

Ke Nie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the governance of artistic creativity in China in the context of the rapid digitization of Chinese cultural industries. 

Catherine Park is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research probes the phenomena of globalizing education in urban China by discerning how linkages between urban development, novel educational practices in K-12 education, and everyday aspirations of parents and students constitute experimentations towards globality at various different levels of Chinese society. 

Danping Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. Her research traces the anti-cancer efforts of the Chinese Communist Party and the experience of Chinese cancer patients, with a special focus on the case study of esophageal cancer in Linxian, Henan province. 

Bolun Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His research explores the similarities and disparities of informational capitalism across different political-economic regimes via a multiple sites ethnography with a Chinese cloud computing company in its various projects overseas.

Mengyang Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research documents and analyzes the rise of platform video game work in China, which includes a wide array of online video game services attracting millions of gig workers during the past decade.

In this fieldwork report, Harvard sociology PhD candidate Fangsheng Zhu explains how his turn away from China's education policy led to interesting encounters with schools for migrant children, tutoring agencies, and reformist schools in China.