PhD, 2021, Columbia; MA, 2015, and BSocSci, 2008, NUS.

Modern China history; Political economy; Intellectual history; the Cold War and the Communist Revolution; comparative history of sacrifice

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Welcome!

My name is Huang Yanjie. I am an Assistant Professor (Presidential Young Professor) at the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore. I was a fellow in the History Department, Harvard University, where I conducted my postdoctoral research from 2021 to 2023. I received my Ph.D from Columbia University in October 2021. Before my Ph.D studies, I was based at the East Asian Institute, NUS. My research centers on the history of modern Chinese society, state-building, and political economy.

My first co-authored book, Market in State: The Political Economy of Domination in China, a monograph published by Cambridge University Press in September 2018, studies the origins of China’s contemporary state-dominated economy from the late imperial period to the reformist era.

My dissertation-based second book, A Revolution Domesticated: Austerity, Ideology, and Family in Urban China, 1959-1984, explores how China’s contemporary ideology of Xiaokang, a vision of de-politicized family-state synergy, emerged from urban family life under economic austerity and ideological mobilisation in Mao’s China. As the first book-length project to harness family letters as a primary source for PRC history, the book provides a rare bottom-up view of China’s political transformations in the 1960s and 1970s. This book is under contract with the Columbia University Press (Studies of Weatherhead East Asian Institute).

I am currently working on two related projects on war and economy in modern China. My third project, Monetary Revolution, traces the evolution of the RMB from a dozen war currencies to a full-fledged national currency in 1960s China, highlighting the roles of geopolitics and war economy in its operational logics. It will offer the first history of contemporary China’s monetary system from a set of revolutionary ideas in the early twentieth century to a full-fledged national system in the 1950s.

From January 2026, I will begin a project on China’s path to acquiring features of the Asian developmental state without changing its underlying political economy institutions of state domination.  Funded by the Singapore Social Science and Humanities Research Fellowship (SSHRF), this project examines how China learned from its Asian neighbors, such as Japan, to master the ideas and practices of the developmental state, while retaining the mobilization system built during the decades of total war and the Cold War.  

My other long-term academic projects consider modern Chinese history from the perspectives of sacrifice, empire studies, grassroots sources, information management, and national identities.

While undertaking the book projects, I am also working with a multidisciplinary network of scholars to advance a global and bottom-up approach to modern Chinese history.