AP Forum: East Asian Studies MA Thesis Presentations—Spring 2026

During this in-person forum, graduating students from the MA in East Asian Studies program will present their culminating work.

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Jiayang Cai

Fiction, Friction: A Sengoha Encounter in Lotus

Abstract

Japanese leftist writers participated in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and its literary journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writing for three decades, contributing poems, short stories, and critical essays alongside writers from across the decolonizing world. This understudied history is what this thesis examines, tracing the terms on which Japanese writers entered a movement gathered in the name of anti-colonialism, what those terms made possible in the pages of Lotus, and what they foreclosed.

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Jia'er Liu

Under the Influence: Visibility, Interpretation, and Embodied Pleasure in Contemporary Chinese Heels Dance

Abstract

This thesis examines heels dance practice in contemporary China as both a visually mediated and morally contested display of the female body and an embodied, sensorial dance experience. Methodologically, this research draws on interviews with heels dancers, online ethnography through observing their video practices on digital platforms, and offline participant observation in a dance studio in Shanghai. Although this approach is analytically divided into online and offline components, the two cannot be neatly separated in practice. While attending to this intertwining nature, the structure of this thesis can be understood as a movement from the online environment, where the female body is often framed as an object of display and evaluation within a visual regime, toward embodied experience, where dancers’ sensory and lived experiences complicate such visual interpretations.

In this context, this thesis explores how different interpretations of heels dance and sexuality produced in the Chinese context, and how they take shape in digital practices. Simultaneously, it investigates the ways in which heels dancers negotiate these competing readings in order to make sense of and justify their dancing. This thesis further examines how, while the interpretations of heels dance are often grounded in a visual regime that frames the female body as an object of display and evaluation, other sensorial dimensions of dance complicate such readings. Finally, it probes into the kind of pleasure that sustains dancers’ continued engagement with heels dance under the pressures of public discourse and platform regulation.

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Meilin Long

Divergent Memories of the “Refugee Student”: Trauma, Politics, and Identity in the Memoirs of Chi Pang-yuan and Wang Dingjun

Abstract

This thesis investigates the memory reconstruction of “refugee student” (liuwang xuesheng 流亡學⽣) in the memoirs of first-generation waishengren (mainlanders) intellectuals in Taiwan, taking Chi Pang-yuan and Wang Dingjun as case studies. Despite sharing similar socio-historical backgrounds as educated elites displaced by the same wars, these authors developed strikingly divergent political orientations and historical narratives. This study argues that such ideological divergence is rooted not necessarily in political conviction, but in distinct modes of trauma processing.

Drawing on Dominick LaCapra’s distinction between “acting out” and “working through,” this thesis demonstrates that Chi constructs the image of a “Disciplined Student” to “act out” the trauma of exile. By sacralizing the Party-State and emphasizing order, idealized heroism, and patriotic ideology, her narrative functions as a protective shield against the chaos of history. In contrast, Wang presents the image of a “Dissenting Student” to “work through” the past. His narrative employs satire, critical distance, and self-critique to demythologize the wartime experience, exposing the chaotic reality of the state apparatus.

Ultimately, this thesis reveals that the internal divergence within the “refugee student” community cannot be reduced to simple factionalism, but reflects a spectrum of responses to collective trauma, offering a nuanced portrait of the wartime generation.

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Leo Lyu

On Schoolyard Tearfests and a Digital Hospice in China 

Abstract

What happens when institutions fail to care, and people manufacture care on their own? This talk presents two studies of grassroots emotional life in contemporary China. 

The first examines "gratitude education" speech events—large-scale school assemblies where hired speakers draw mass tears from students, parents, and teachers through dramatic storytelling, synchronized chanting, and guided guilt. 

The second follows a Douyin group chat of dying pneumoconiosis patients—migrant workers whose lungs have been destroyed by industrial dust—observing how they build flows of care and police survival knowledge in the shadow of institutional abandonment. Drawing on affect theory, ritual studies, and digital ethnography, I ask what these improvised caring architectures achieve—and where they break down.

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Lingxiang Sun

Gambling for Love: Chinese Women's Engagement in K-pop Fandom

Abstract

This thesis is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork on Chinese fans’ participation in K-Pop fandom and in-depth interviews with young female fans. Each chapter explores a particular facet of fandom: requirements for service and construction of intimacy between idols and fans, the negotiation of place and boundaries through transnational participation, and the dynamics of unity and conflict within fan communities. Together, they show how fandom operates as a complex relational system through which intimacy, fulfillment, and selfhood are continuously produced and negotiated.

The thesis situates Chinese K-pop fandom within broader discussions of love, intimacy, and emotional life in contemporary society, arguing that fandom offers young women a space to pursue pleasure, connection, and emotional renewal while simultaneously reproducing the inequalities, hierarchies, and anxieties of postfeminist consumer culture.

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Lilia Yining Yan

Love by Commission: Performing Intimacy in Chinese Otome Game Fandom

Abstract

This thesis examines the emerging practice of “cosplay commissions” (cos委托 cos weituo) within the fandom of Chinese otome games. Otome games refer to romantic simulation games primarily targeted at female audiences. In China, the rapid success of titles such as Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice (2017), Light and Night (2021), and Love and Deepspace (2024) has fostered vibrant fan communities. Within these communities, some players extend virtual romance into embodied encounters by paying female cosplayers to portray their favorite male characters in staged “dates”. These commissioned meetings replicate in-game scenarios, but also generate new interactions, allowing participants to further personalize their romantic fantasies. As a form of paid encounter, cosplay commissions intertwine affective performance, emotional labor, and monetary exchange.

Drawing on ethnographic observation and interviews within the Chinese otome game fandom, this thesis analyzes how cosplay commissions function as a cultural practice through which participants experiment with mediated forms of romance. Although the practice may appear visually transgressive, it remains embedded within broader heteronormative romantic imaginaries. At the same time, the monetary dimension of cosplay commissions complicates the boundary between affection and service, raising questions about the commodification of emotion in performing intimacy.

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Siyu Zhang 

In the Wake of Resettlement: Reconfigurations of Space, Order, and Sociality in a Bashang Village

Abstract

Bygone Village, a settlement in the Bashang region of Hebei Province formed through a century of migration, state farming, and repeated institutional disruption, was demolished and rebuilt under China's village consolidation and relocation policy in recent years. Rather than treating the relocation as a singular administrative event or a straightforward transition from rural backwardness to modern living, this thesis argues that state-led spatial reorganization activated decades of historical contradictions accumulated within the village, transforming everyday silent grievances into public moral confrontation. The ambivalent attitude of simultaneous dependence on and distrust of cadres, doubts about distributive fairness, and resentments inherited from the village's turbulent past all surfaced as the demolition changed the conditions under which these tensions could be publicly articulated and contested.

Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily through one family's social network, this thesis traces the chain of processes set in motion by demolition. It shows how compensation negotiations, housing allocation, and the sequencing of contracts forced villagers to re-examine issues that had previously been managed through deliberate vagueness, producing fractures between cadres and villagers, among villagers themselves, and within families. It then follows two collective practices through which the fractured community sought temporary order. Funeral ritual established a moral framework binding on all participants while depositing embodied memory in a space that had no history of its own. The first post-relocation village election became a site where formal institutional procedures and informal logics of face, obligation, and accumulated grievance were continuously entangled.

What emerged after relocation was neither the modern countryside envisioned in official planning documents nor the simple disorder that a narrative of decline would predict. It was a prolonged condition in which the old order had been dismantled and the new order had yet to take shape, in which ritual practice, institutional rebuilding, and everyday adjustment operated simultaneously at different rhythms, each incomplete. This thesis challenges both the state's developmental narrative, which frames relocation as progress, and the resistance narrative common in critical scholarship, which frames villagers primarily as opponents of state power. What the fieldwork reveals is more complex: villagers are agents navigating a condition of ongoing transition, improvising temporary arrangements through ritual obligation, moral evaluation, and institutional procedure that make collective life possible without resolving its fundamental contradictions.

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Daniel Xuyang Zhang 

Negotiating Wanghuang: Chinese Gay Men’s Pornographic Practices on X

Abstract

There is a persistent tension in Chinese gay explicit content creation on X: many creators regularly post sexually explicit materials, yet refuse to be called wanghuang (网黄), a common label for those associated with pornographic content. Taking this refusal as an analytic entry point, this thesis explores the tension and dynamics surrounding the term wanghuang. 

Drawing on Georges Bataille’s distinction between the profane and the sacred, I argue that X’s platform logic functions as a profane apparatus, translating erotic posting into measurable units of visibility and exchange through metrification and monetization. At the same time, creators’ everyday micro-practices and affective ties produce a surplus that cannot be fully absorbed into this logic. In this sense, wanghuang becomes a movable line of displacement. It enables some creators to defend their legitimacy by resisting reductive readings, even as platform infrastructures continually pressure erotic practice toward measurability and exchange.

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Anqi Zheng 

Claiming Li Qingzhao’s Legacy in Modern China: Women’s Participation in Chinese Collecting Culture from 1800-1950

Abstract

Why do we conceptualize Chinese collecting culture as male-dominant, when visual and literary materials abundantly attest to women's participation? This paper argues that premodern Chinese women engaged in collecting culture primarily through the "collecting household", which focused on preserving family collections and transmitting intellectual traditions, rather than as "collectors" who were defined by acquisition and accumulation. 

Drawing on nineteenth-century female poetry and twentieth-century case studies on donors and collectors, I show how women contributed through patronage, memory, preservation and, finally, involvement in the global art market. These arguments call for a gendered reconsideration of Chinese collecting culture, and a rebalancing of our emphasis from purchase toward preservation, and accumulation toward dispersal.