Yujie Li is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. A historian of modern China, her research explores labor, technology, and political economy in China since the late 19th century, with a focus on the socialist period (1949-1976). Prior to joining the Hamilton faculty, she was Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her work has appeared in Technology and Culture, Twentieth Century China, and Artefact.
Li is currently working on her book manuscript Foolish Old Man Moves the Mountains: Labor and Technology in the Muscle-powered Sphere of Maoist China, 1949-1979. It examines how the Chinese Communist Party struggled to support a modernizing and revolutionary agenda with peasants’ muscle power and predominantly rural, pre-modern technologies.
“Mass Labor and Tools Reform: Contradictions in Maoist Knowledge Production,” in Christine Ho and Sigrid Schmalzer eds, A Revolution Across Art and Science: Participatory Knowledge Production in China’s Great Leap Forward 藝科共躍：中國大躍進時期的參與式知識產生, under consideration at Hong Kong University Press.
“‘Fixing the Huai River: Technology of Labor Formation in Maoist China, 1950-53,” Technology and Culture 65, no.1 (2024): 177-209
“Birth of the phoenix: Petty capitalists in the socialist transformation of the Shanghai bicycle industry,” Twentieth-Century China 47, no.3 (2022): 266-286
“From craftsmen to laborers: A history of carpet making in Republican China,” Artefact: Techniques, History and Human Sciences, no.8 (2018): 49-67
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