Research
I work on China since 1500 and on empire as a comparative problem. One question runs through both: how ideas about governing survived the journey from the capital to the county, and what they looked like on arrival. Three areas make up most of my current work; articles drawing on them are in preparation.
Baojia and the boundaries of political community
My first book, developed from my dissertation, takes up baojia, the Qing framework for registering households and organizing neighborhoods for mutual responsibility and local security. Standard accounts treat it as an institution in slow decline. I read it instead as a contest, in which emperors, officials, local elites, and ordinary households pressed on the question of who belonged to a political community and on what terms. A case study of Jiangxi anchors the argument. The work draws on state archives and documents, legal cases, local gazetteers, and diverse literary sources and private writings.
The lives of ideas in the Qing state
A second area follows the knowledge officials actually used. Magistrate handbooks, collected works, and statecraft writing carried a practical literature on how to hold office: how to manage subordinates, read a register, run an inspection, govern a place one had never seen. I want to know how that literature was organized, how it changed over the dynasty, and how far it shaped what officials did. My article on Dai Zhaochen, a prefect in Shandong and Guangdong in the 1860s, is the published entry point: an intellectual biography of one bureaucrat, and an account of what statecraft ideas looked like once they had to be executed.
Quantitative History & Data
My research on Qing governance raises broader questions about how historians use data. Much of the surviving record of Qing local governance takes the form of long, repetitive documentary series: contracts, registers, regulations, bibliographies. Any one document is thin. In aggregate they answer questions about distribution, variation, and change that close reading of a few cases cannot. Building datasets from such series raises its own problems: how to transcribe and code the data, the biases of survival and publication, and how to report statistical findings. I am a contributing author on HistBench and HistAgent, a benchmark and agent for multimodal historical reasoning, and in 2024–2025 I co-organized an AI and History Working Group at Princeton.
Publications
Articles
- “Dai Zhaochen Learns to be an Official: Statecraft Ideas and Local Governance in Late Qing China.” Journal of Chinese History 中國歷史學刊 (2025): 1–22.
- 《清高宗远征缅甸中的调马理路——以“马力”为中心》 (“Horse Provisioning for Qianlong's War in Burma, with a Focus on ‘Horsepower’”). 《华大史学论坛》 Proceedings of the Central China Normal University History Forum 8 (2021): 104–120.
- “The Problem of China: Orientalism, ‘Young China’, and Russell's Western Audience.” Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 35, no. 2 (2015): 154–176.
Preprints and collaborative work
- “On Path to Multimodal Historical Reasoning: HistBench and HistAgent.” arXiv preprint 2505.20246 (2025). One of numerous coauthors.
Dissertation
- “Baojia: A Policy for Household Registration and Community Policing in Qing China, c. 1723–1839.” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2026.
Selected talks
- “The Ghosts of Wittfogel: Recategorizing Early Modern Systems of Neighborhood Governance.” American Historical Association, January 2026.
- “Baojia's Mutual Responsibility Provisions in Qing Legal Practice: Evidence from Legal Cases.” International Society for Chinese Law & History, July 2025.
- “The Flow of Policy Information in Late Qing China: The 1813 Baojia Reforms in Practice.” Involution and Revolution: Information in Nineteenth Century China, Peking University, June 2025.
- “Li Yanzhang's Baojia Policy in Late Qing Guangxi.” Association for Asian Studies, Cincinnati, March 2025.
- “The Qing Dynasty Baojia System in World History, c. 1680–1780.” World History Association, San Francisco State University, June 2024.
- “Policy Drift: The Spread of Collective Responsibility (Baojia) in China, c. 1723–1768.” Regulatory Governance in a Changing World, University of Pennsylvania Law School, June 2024.
A complete list of talks and professional activities is in the CV.