University of Chicago history PhD candidate Spencer Stewart explains how he stumbled upon archives about Lumian No. 1 (鲁棉一号), an important variety developed by Chinese cotton scientists in 1961-76, during his fieldwork investigation of cotton science and rural reform in war-time China.

University of Southern California sociology PhD candidate Shang Liu shares stories about three NGO workers in China during his 2019 fieldwork in China.

University of Maryland political science PhD candidate Jiun-Da Liu shares his 2019 fieldwork observations about the development of "green bond" market in China, its role in environmental financing and climate change governance, and the question of coal.

A 2018 OYCF-Chow fellow, Di Wang is a Phd candidate in the department of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. In this fieldwork report (in Chinese), she explores the complexities of gender and sexuality by relating stories of gay and lesbian couples in China.

A 2018 OYCF-Chow fellow, Kevin Luo is a PhD candidate in the department of history at University of Toronto. In this fieldwork report (in Chinese), he explores the role of land reforms in the state-building processes in mainland China and Taiwan. 

A 2018 OYCF-Chow fellow, Peter Hick is a PhD student in the History Department at Stanford University. He describes his field trip to Guangdong's Siyi 四邑 region where he tried to track down family genealogies and other local archives that could shed light on the experiences of ordinary people at the end of the Qing dynasty.

A 2018 OYCF-Chow Fellow, Jiling Duan is a PhD student in the department of Gender Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She filed this fieldwork report (in Chinese) after completing her fieldwork in China.

Overseas Young Chinese Forum (OYCF) is pleased to award the 2020 OYCF-Chow Fellowship for Field Research in China to the following four recipients:

Yuan Gao is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Georgetown University. Her research project focuses on the history of cotton in Xinjiang during the Qing Empire. It compares the history of cotton cultivation in Russian Central Asia (Uzbekistan), and China's Xinjiang region, to explore various shared and different practices of Russian and Qing empires in response to global changes, the clashes between imperial and local practices in frontier zones, and the exchanges of knowledge and material goods across borders.

Chuncheng Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His research project aims to examine the design and implementation of the Chinese social credit system with multiple methods. Building the theoretical framework from science and technology studies, he is particularly interested in the politics of quantification in these processes.

Tiantian Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His research project explores the uneven social impact of the Chinese state’s ambitious project of agricultural modernization. By situating rural land commodification in the context of China’s overall capitalist transformation, it looks at how different dynamics of rural-to-urban labor migration have shaped the development of large-scale commercial farms across regions.

Jiangjiang Wu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research project studies the role of emerging elite retirement homes in producing shifting notions and practices of aging in urban China. It examines how various actors, such as the elderly, their families, the institutional staff, and the state, bring together overlapping and competing rationalities that constitute a novel form of elder care which is also a privileged way of living.

The 2019 OYCF Annual Meeting successfully concluded on July 7, 2019.  Interspersed with public talks by three distinguished experts on women in China, three startup “social organizations” from China presented their work to the OYCFers in attendance.  These organizations are chosen from a competitive pool of applicants to present their work in the U.S.  They have distinguished themselves for working to promote women’s power and gender equality in China today. The annual meeting culminated in the presentation of social innovation awards to the three organizations and fellowship awards to the graduate students.

Click here for Chinese news coverage of the annual meeting, and here and here for English coverage by two local women's organizations in San Diego.