Student summer research presentations

Each semester, APSI organizes several events under the banner of our Asia-Pacific Forum. These informal sessions are opportunities for students, faculty, and members of our community to gather and discuss topics of interest, including research projects and opportunities.

At this event, four students will share findings from their summer research: Daniel Zhang; Jerry Zou; Lingxiang Sun; and Montyn Huisman.

Lunch will be provided to registered participants.

Presenters + Abstracts

Montyn Huisman—“Inequality and Redistribution in Xi’s China”

abstract

Why do countries without genuine elections redistribute to lower and middle classes? What types of inequality do such regimes care about? In this project, I study these questions in the case of contemporary China. Reform and Opening resulted in, paraphrasing Deng, some Chinese people getting much richer than others. China became so unequal in the post-1979 period that its Gini-coefficient overtook that of the US. Counterintuitively, this deviation from socialism did not cause widespread resentment. Instead, public opinion research from the early 2000s found a broad-based belief in the fairness of inequalities. Yet, a decade later redistribution has become central to Chinese politics under Xi Jinping. Under Xi, the Chinese Communist Party has focused on reducing the rural-urban gap through the Rural Poverty Alleviation and Rural Revitalization campaigns. While the CCP appears serious about redistributing to the rural poor, less attention has been paid to the economically marginalized in urban areas. In this project, I study why nondemocratic governments redistribute to certain groups outside the selectorate but not to others. I plan to combine qualitative with experimental methods. Ultimately, I hope to compare the case of China with other countries undergoing market transitions to draw more general inferences about redistributive policies.

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Lingxiang Sun—“Love Gamble: Chinese Female K-pop Fan’s Emotional Engagement and Participation
Practice”

This study examines the emotions and behaviors of young female K-pop fans in China. Through interviews with fans, observations of events such as concerts and fansigns, and the collection of social media information, I found that the para-social relationship between idols and fans is constantly evolving into new forms of activity and communication patterns in response to changes in media formats and consumer markets. Under the commercialized logic, fans and idols navigate the relationship between interpersonal and para-social interactions, which becomes trickier, more dangerous, yet also more dynamic. Beyond singing and dancing, idols are now expected to provide more private and intimate fan service interactions.
Meanwhile, the competition and friendship within fan groups are complex. As social media has become a tool for fans to build their self-image as well as surveil and compare each other, this war from online to offline has become more intense, more widespread, and harder to resolve. Differences in economic status, nationality, and level of participation among fans have led to sharp divisions.
The emotions fans project onto their idols are diverse. When interactions commonly found in ordinary intimate relationships are introduced into this relationship, which has traditionally been considered “para-social,” virtual emotional attachment and the desire to escape loneliness are insufficient to describe fans’ choices. These young girls struggle while indulging, and remain calm while acting recklessly. The pursuit of self-fulfillment, the construction of ideal emotions, and other dimensions surge within their hearts.
 

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Daniel Zhang—“Shifting Paradigms of ‘Chinatown’: Language and Space in Japan’s New and Old Chinatowns”

abstract

Using linguistic landscape as a key point of entry, this presentation explores Japan’s “new” and “old” Chinatowns — take Ikebukuro in Tokyo and Yokohama’s historic Chinatown as examples — from the perspective of spatial anthropology. By documenting and analyzing signs, menus, posters, and other public texts, I examine how language visibility and spatial arrangements reveal negotiations of identity, belonging, and power. In Yokohama, multilingual and decorative signage performs “Chinatown” for a broad, mixed audience, reinforcing its role as a curated tourist destination. In Ikebukuro, Chinese-only signs, in-group puns, and subtle blends of Chinese and Japanese script cater to a specific community, often making the space invisible to outsiders. Beyond physical streetscapes, I also consider online communities and digital platforms — from food delivery apps to social media — as increasingly important arenas where diasporic networks sustain and even expand the idea of “Chinatown” in a globalized world.

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Zhihui (Jerry) Zou—“Computational Approaches to Asian American Short Stories”

abstract

Computational literary studies provides a wide set of tools to approach literature from fresh angles. Using tools such as database curation and Natural Language Processing, this project seeks to use a scaled approach to study Asian American short stories published in serial literary journals between 1974 and 2024 with two goals in mind. First, this project hopes to curate an online and public-access database of Asian American short story metadata, as no such database focusing on Asian American literary metadata and not the actual content of the archived items have existed before. Second, this project aims to use a quantitative approach to describe the changes in Asian American writing styles and linguistics. Currently, this project has collected over 560 short stories from 30 different literary journals.