Hekang is an advanced Ph.D. candidate in Chinese history at Columbia University, where he works with Madeleine Zelin. His research focuses on modern Chinese history in global and imperial contexts, with particular attention to political economy, frontier governance, imperial statecraft, bureaucratic institutions, state finance, and transnational trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also undertaken extensive language and area-studies training in Russian and Soviet history at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, NYU, Princeton, and Middlebury.
His dissertation project, Reinventing Frontier Commerce: China, Russia, and the World Economy, 1805–1911, examines how a historically rooted overland trade regime in Inner Asia—epitomized by the Kyakhta system linking the Qing and Russian empires—adapted to the emergence of an industrial, extraction-driven world economy in the nineteenth century. Although imperial Russia was Qing China’s second-largest trading partner in the eighteenth century, its relative importance was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by British India, the United States, and other maritime powers. Challenging the resulting historiographical marginalization of Qing–Russian commerce, the dissertation analyzes how transformations in frontier exchange—including the liberalization of cross-border trade, transnational migration, and the expansion of business ventures and fiscal extraction into imperial interiors—reshaped the political economy and practices of economic statecraft in Qing China and, to a lesser extent, imperial Russia. More broadly, the project explores how the interaction between trade and politics reconfigured sovereignty, jurisdiction, and imperial authority prior to the rise of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism.
Caixia Mao is a Doctoral Candidate in Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP. She published in journals in the field of sustainability such as Technology Forecasting and Social Change; Resource, Conservation and Recycling; Sustainability; and World Food Policy.
Prior to starting her PhD, she worked as a policy researcher at Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) in Japan to provide technical assistance to Asian governments in formulating national policies on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) under the SWITCH-Asia programme launched by the EU. She was managing projects under the 10-Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns (10YFP) adopted by the Heads of State in the Rio+20. She also worked at the United Nations Centre for Regional Development (UNCRD) to promote circular economy and sustainable transportation policy initiatives through high-level political dialogues in Regional 3R Forum in Asia and the Pacific and Intergovernmental Regional Environmentally Sustainable Transport Forum in Asia.
Caixia received a Master of Philosophy in Development Studies from the University of Oxford in the UK and a Bachelor of International Liberal Studies from Waseda University in Japan. She has native level proficiency in both Chinese and Japanese.