I was brought up in Hubei before moving to Oxford in 2018 for my undergraduate study in BA History and Economics. I graduated with a First Class degree in 2022 and wrote my dissertation on ‘Perceptions of Islam and the Transformation of the Muslim Communities: The Case of Quanzhou in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties’.
Then I moved on to complete the MPhil in Economic and Social History at Oxford with a distinction. My dissertation ‘Market Dynamics in Late Imperial China, 1820-1850’ won the Feinstein dissertation prize.
I started my DPhil in Economic and Social History in October 2024 to work on Property regimes in late imperial China, with a particular focus on the practices of conditional sales, using privately archived contracts in the Yongtai County, Fujian.
I am broadly concerned with the late imperial Chinese local societies, transregional market exchanges, state fiscal structures, and ecologies. I also maintain interests in premodern Chinese interactions with the wider world, the history of Chinese Muslim communities, as well as cultural and religious histories in general.
DPhil topic
'Conditional Sales in Late Imperial China: a Case Study of Yongtai, Fujian, 1539 to 1950'
My proposed research project will look at the institution of conditional sales in the late imperial rural Chinese property market through the lens of a local study on fifteen neighbouring villages in Yongtai County, Fujian, Southeastern China. Conditional sales, which prevailed in Chinese rural property transactions in Ming, Qing, and the Republican periods, allowed for discretionary charges after the sales, redemption clauses that could sometimes be indefinite and inheritable, and additional charges for turning the sale into absolute ownership. My main motivation is to understand why, despite the relative absence of parallel institutions in other premodern economies, the social frictions this complicated and prolonged process created, and the disincentive it created for the buyers, this institution was able to take root in the late imperial Chinese rural property markets and become its most dominant feature.
By employing a corpus of recently discovered 23,000 documentary items, consisting mainly of property transaction contracts, family division papers, rent and tax receipts, and account books, and linking them to extant genealogical data, I intend to undertake the first large-scale quantitative empirical study of this institution. While previous studies have focused on nailing down the legal and customary natures of different modes of property arrangements, I wish to focus on interrogating various hypotheses and assumptions to account for the rise and dominance of conditional sales in late imperial China. I will build up and examine theories such as redistributive welfare provision and insurance favouring the poor smallholders, kinship attachment to land, consumption smoothing across household lifecycles, and credit generation in the absence of well-functioning contract enforcement mechanisms. I hope to contribute to our understandings of both conditional sales in Chinese history but also premodern property right institutions and their relationship with economic development in general.
