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.