Yujie Li

Yujie Li 李玉洁 is a historian of modern China and East Asia. Her current research focuses on labor, technology, and political economy in China’s socialist era. She is writing a book manuscript that investigates the crucial role muscle-powered transportation technologies played in Maoist political economy. In this book, she asks how the People’s Republic of China built a labor regime to support its revolutionary and modernizing agenda, and how Maoist China’s use of predominantly rural, pre-modern technologies shaped this labor regime and made it so enduring.

Li received her PhD from the University of Chicago. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, among others.

Li's publications include:

“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.