CV Starr Fellowship

Wentong Chen, Economics

The Power of Reserve Tiering: Financial Institution Heterogeneity and Monetary Policy Pass-through

Wentong’s paper investigates the impact of reserve tiering, which remunerates different reserve tiers at varying rates, on monetary policy transmission to the loan market. Data from Japan reveals a significant increase in low-interest-rate loans and a decline in medium-interest-rate loans. The analysis indicates that financial institutions’ diverse interest rate exposures to the tiered system drive these changes. Larger, more liquid, and less leveraged banks with lower deposit ratios hold a higher proportion of negative interest rate reserves, while non-depository institutions face de facto negative rates. This enables small banks to secure cheaper funding from non-depository institutions and larger banks through interbank trading, leading to lower-rate loans. Consequently, the loan market becomes riskier as small banks with lower negative rate ratios reduce loan rates, while larger banks with higher negative rate ratios engage in riskier lending practices. Using a heterogeneous agent model to link interbank and loan markets, the study decomposes reserve tiering transmission into liquidity, interest rate, bank interest margin, and loan risk channels, offering policy recommendations for effective transmission. The paper suggests that to cool an overheating economy, the central bank should implement reserve tiering with ascending interest rates, which proves to be more effective, less costly, and better at stabilizing the financial system than the alternatives.

Eric Lee, History

Accidental Status: A Social History of Elite-Making through the Protection Privilege in North China, 900-1127

Eric’s current project intervenes in a dominant historiographical narrative that portrays middle and late imperial China as a meritocracy created and maintained by the civil service examination system. Against an earlier scholarly emphasis on the emergence of social fluidity in the eleventh century, his research reveals systemic mechanisms for ruling elite social reproduction, and their consequences for the state-society relationship. In particular, his project analyzes the role of the protection privilege system, or yinbu 蔭補, in northern China during the Northern Song (960-1127). As a main channel of bureaucratic recruitment for the state, protection privilege granted hereditary access to political status and social privilege to family members of qualified officials. Its recipients constituted at least one-third of the entire Song official roster. However, for such a statistically significant method of social reproduction, protection privilege has yet to receive attention proportionate to its social implications. By reconceptualizing protection privilege as a major vehicle for state penetration and local elite making, this project challenges an oversimplified view of the Tang-Song transition as a shift from aristocracy to meritocracy. It foregrounds the key role protection privilege played in the rise of new elite families and their social reproduction that coincided with the six-decade-long imperial re-formation amidst the Tang-Song transition. He thus seeks to delineate both long-term continuity and gradual change that resulted from sustained efforts in strengthening the monarchy and ongoing formation of local power nexus.

Nianpo Su, Linguistics

Marking Definiteness in Classifier Languages: A Case-study of Nuosu Yi and Chinese

Nianpo’s research focuses on Nuosu Yi, a minority language spoken in the southern mountainous region of Sichuan, China. Nuosu Yi is typologically exceptional in that, unlike most other classifier languages such as Chinese and Japanese, it has an overt definite determiner su, corresponding to the definite determiner “the” in English. Nianpo’s study aims to experimentally investigate whether anaphoric and unique definiteness can be expressed both through the definite determiner and bare nouns in Nuosu Yi. The findings from her project contribute to the understanding of Nuosu Yi's grammar and its unique mechanisms for expressing definiteness. Furthermore, her project highlights the role understudied languages can play in testing and refining theoretical as well as psycholinguistic theories.

Mengzheng Yao, Global Development

The Emergence of the “New Rural Gentry” in China: Evidence from Zhejiang Province

In response to the complexities of a globalized and market-oriented era, China is reshaping its rural policies to address the risk of rural areas becoming hollowed out and potentially ungovernable. To counter these issues, the government has implemented a series of reforms that encompass the deployment of government and party cadres as village first party secretaries, reduction of tax and fee burdens on peasants, and the introduction of incentive schemes in agriculture, environmental conservation, and cultural heritage preservation. A notable initiative promotes establishing a “new rural gentry”’ which encourages individuals to return to rural areas and assume leadership roles in village governance. Zhejiang Province has systematically leveraged this resource for economic development, grassroots governance, cultural heritage preservation, societal ambiance, and philanthropy. The rise of the 'new rural gentry' marks a pivotal change in rural governance, introducing an elite-led, yet democratically inclined, institutional framework. Mengzheng’s dissertation explores three key questions: 1) What factors have contributed to the emergence of the 'new rural gentry'? 2) How does this new approach differ from previous efforts in terms of effectiveness? 3) In what ways do the "new rural gentry" fulfill their roles at the grassroots level?

Diverse Knowledge East Asia

Jingya Guo, History

Strange Births, Deviant Deaths: Vernacular Knowledge, Medically Anomalous Female Bodies and Gender Politics in Late Imperial China, 1500-1890

Driven by her interests in the history of gender and sexuality, and history of medicine in late imperial China, Jingya Guo’s dissertation asks how the tension between the unitary, normative, prescriptive framework of women’s reproductive bodies and women’s embodied, individualized, and myriad bodily experiences unfolded in late imperial China. By investigating medical manuscripts, medical recipe collections, vernacular literature, and case histories, Jingya shows how the norms of illnesses and temporality in women’s bodies are constantly negotiated by multiple historical actors’ perspectives in late imperial China.

Darren Wan, History

Documenting Belonging: Citizenship Claims and Bureaucratic Encounters in Malaya during the Cold War

Darren’s dissertation traces how working-class racial minorities articulated citizenship claims to newly independent states carved out of former British colonies in Maritime Southeast Asia from 1946 to the present. He focuses on citizenship and statelessness to tell a bottom-up history of decolonization and the Cold War, themes that in Southeast Asian historiography are primarily explored through top-down approaches like diplomatic and intellectual historical methods. His approach reveals that decolonization and anticommunism operated as racializing discourses that shaped minority identities and majoritarian politics across postcolonial Southeast Asia. Darren pays particular attention to how claimants, who were largely illiterate and poorly documented, interacted with bureaucratic institutions in the polities known today as Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Australian Indian Ocean Territories. During his term as a Diverse East Asia Knowledge Fellow, he will focus on a dissertation chapter that deals with Chinese diasporic claimants across these territories, with particular attention to how they were stereotyped as communist sympathizers and hence as potential subversives. In their attempts to navigate newly formed bureaucratic institutions staffed by mistrustful state officials, many Chinese working-class subjects—of whom few were fluent in languages of the state like Malay and English—pursued creative strategies ranging from seeking help from literate intermediaries to forging documents in a bid to make their claims more persuasive. In so doing, Darren builds on recent scholarship on Chinese diasporic communities, bringing to bear insights from East Asian studies and especially Sinophone studies to rethink race and racialization in Southeast Asian historiography.

Hu Shih Fellowship

Zhen Cheng, Performing and Media Arts

Avant-garde on the Edge: Chinese and Chinese Diasporic Theaters and Performances

Zhen’s research delves into contemporary Chinese and Chinese diasporic avant-garde performances, highlighting the often underestimated dimensions of gender, geopolitics, and race in conceptualizing the revolutionary potential of performance and artistic practices. Her project investigates the avant-garde as a global discursive genre and a political instrument, drawing from a wide range of sources, including performances, theatres, exhibitions, manifestos, and criticism. By examining the transcultural and transnational production of avant-garde in the post-Cold War era, the project uncovers its diverse implications and intricate multiplicity. The Hu Shih Fellowship will provide essential support for the archival research, interviews, and translations that are central to her work.

Lee Teng Hui Fellowship

Zhipeng Zhou, Sociology

Market Transition, Employment Precarity, and Income Inequality in Contemporary China.

When China's market-oriented economic transition meets global trends in precarious work, how do the market and redistributive coordination regimes in China's labor market collectively shape the mechanisms of resource allocation, alter the social stratification order, and lead to income inequality at both individual and societal levels? This study, by leveraging the widespread use of precarious work in China, explores how the evolution of precarity in employment characterizes both the persistence of the redistributive regime and the growth of the market regime in determining individuals’ life chances. Using China as a case, this project contributes to the literature on social stratification in post-socialist societies and precarious work in emerging market economies. Moving forward, this study aims to uncover the implications of precarious work experiences over the life course for social inequality and work values, and how those relationships are structured by social institutions beyond the market regime.

Robert J. Smith Fellowship

Hyo Joo Lee, Sociology

Consequences of Low Fertility and Gender Inequality in South Korea: Focusing on Childcare Center Availability

Hyo Joo’s dissertation project delves into the implications of rapid demographic shifts, focusing on South Korea, a nation grappling with one of the world’s lowest fertility rates. While much of the existing research highlights the repercussions of declining fertility on population aging and economic growth, her project sheds light on the often-overlooked institutional and infrastructural transformations that directly impact the everyday lives of mothers and young children, particularly the availability of childcare centers. Using administrative data, Hyo Joo seeks to enrich the discourse on fertility decline by exploring the evolving landscape of childcare availability and its critical role in shaping gender inequality in the labor market.

Hao Liang, Sociology

Causes, Patterns, and Consequences of Ethnic Residential Segregation in Japan

This study examines the causes, patterns, and consequences of immigrant and ethnic minority residential segregation in Japan, an emerging new global destination facing severe population decline and labor shortage. Research in global new immigrant destinations, where new places become immigrant-receiving countries, has often been descriptive and limited to case studies. This approach has not fully uncovered the systematic patterns of immigrant integration in these societies. Residential patterns, an important aspect of immigration and a benchmark for other integration outcomes, are especially overlooked as most studies focus on labor and economic outcomes. To address this gap, this study uses six waves of restricted-access census microdata from Japan (covering the years 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020). This approach allows for a comprehensive examination of ethnic and immigrant residential segregation at different scales: individual micro-level decisions on residential choices(whether to live in an ethnic neighborhood), group meso-level differences(whether and why some groups are more integrated or segregated than others),and macro-level trends (how the segregation of immigrant groups compared to the Japanese majority has changed over the decades). This research is the first systematic investigation of immigrant residential segregation and integration in the Japanese context, offering insights and implications for other global new destinations facing similar demographic challenges.

Language Study Grants

Daria Badger, Computer Science

Daria spent her summer furthering her knowledge in Mandarin Chinese at National Taiwan University’s International Chinese Language Program while exploring Taiwan’s history and natural landscapes. As a rising junior studying Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences with a minor in East Asian Studies, she is especially interested in using Mandarin as a tool to research how language learning intersects with rapid developments in technology and what AI tools mean for the future of cross-language communication.

McKenna Norton, Asian Studies

This summer, McKenna spent eight weeks in Taipei, Taiwan taking a language class at the International Chinese Language Program (ICLP), housed at National Taiwan University. Her goal of achieving fluency in Mandarin has been supported by teachers, classmates, and diverse course activities like visiting a traditional character foundry and historical sites, but also through exploring Taiwan independently. She had the opportunity to engage with Taipei’s cultural life through attending lectures hosted at local bookstores, visiting museums, viewing performances of traditional art forms, and talking with locals at religious festivals.