Modern and Contemporary Chinese Culture Talk Series 2023: The China Resources Company and Cold War Hong Kong

Philip Thai is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies at Northeastern University. A historian of Modern China and East Asia, he has research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history. He is the author of China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State and recent articles in the journals China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State and China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State. During the 2022-23 academic year, Philip Thai is in residence at Harvard Radcliffe Institute as an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Frederick Burkhardt Fellow working on his new project, a history of shadow economies across “Greater China” during the Cold War.

John D. Wang is Associate Professor in the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Modern Languages and Cultures at The University of Hong Kong.  His research focuses on the flow of people, goods, capital and ideas with a particular interest in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta/Greater Bay Area. He is the author of Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System(Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century: The House of Houqua and the Canton System(Harvard, 2022). His recent publications have appeared in business history journals such as Business History Review and Business History Review, as well as journals with a focus on area studies such as the Business History Review, Business History Reviewand Business History Review.