Research

Dissertation

Darwin Goes East: Evolutionism and Imperialism in the Formation of Modern Chinese Political Thought

This project explores the circulation and transformation of social Darwinian ideas between England and China and their entanglement with imperialism, racism, and revolution at the turn of the twentieth century. Theoretically, I challenge the conventional alliance of social Darwinism and Euro-American imperialism in the history of political thought and instead conceptualize Darwinism as an ideologically elastic world view that involves innovative interpretations and enables anti-imperial struggles in global contexts. Substantively, I investigate the works of Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, and Benjamin Kidd and their political and discursive influence in China via the translational and interpretive efforts of Yan Fu, Zhang Taiyan, Liang Qichao, and other Chinese intellectuals. Methodologically, this project instantiates a transnational approach to political theory that foregrounds the travel and traction of ideas across national and cultural boundary as a transformative process.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Wang, Yuanxin. 2026. “Reconfiguring the Global Color Line: The Paradoxical Discourse of Race in Zou Rong’s Revolutionary Army.” American Political Science Review: 1–15. doi: 10.1017/S0003055426101464.

This article examines the racial discourse of Zou Rong, a 20th-century Chinese radical intellectual, and the puzzling rendering of transnational racial politics at work in his pamphlet The Revolutionary Army. In this text, Zou employs the imported concept of race to refashion Han Chinese identity within a politically motivated global racial taxonomy. He then problematizes the “double enslavement” of the Han race at the trans-imperial nexus of domestic Manchu domination and global white supremacy. Finally, he urges a multifront revolution in China by discursively vindicating Han Chinese racial uplift within a newly reconfigured system of racial hierarchy. In reconstructing the formation and broader political stakes of Zou’s racial discourse, this article centers the deeply contingent and paradoxical alignment of racism and imperialism and the nuanced power relations between peoples of color. It also exemplifies a transnational approach to comparative political theory that focuses on the circulation and negotiation of ideas.

Works in Progress

“Surviving Imperialism(s): Social Darwinism as Anti-Imperial Discourse in Modern Chinese Political Thought” (Draft available)

“Beyond the People: Familial Imaginaries and American Democracy.” (Draft available)