Student Spotlight - Xiaoyu Gao, Winter 2026

What drew you to your work on the intersections of economy, state, and society in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China and what do you find most compelling about it now?

I’m an economist-turned-historian, and my interest in the intersections of economy, state, and society began with lived experience. My parents grew up in rural China and eventually attended leading universities, while I spent most school breaks before age eighteen in a small village in North China with my grandparents. Many of my childhood friends did not finish high school. Watching our life trajectories diverge so sharply was my first encounter with social stratification and the reproduction of inequality—why some people can change their life chances while others may never leave a small county. The contrast made disparities impossible to ignore and pushed me toward studying how economic structures and institutions strongly shape everyday life. In college, I majored in actuarial science and minored in applied mathematics.

What I find most compelling now in my research now is to situate China both within its long imperial history and within global systems. My dissertation focuses on the underexplored transition period of 1800–1850, when structural fragilities emerged before “the Century of Humiliation (1840-1949),” regarded by many Chinese in the 20th and 21stcenturies. It also revises the standard “silver-only” narrative of 19th-century China economy (particularly the Daoguang Depression) by showing how global copper flows—Chilean copper ores entering Asia and Qing copper coins flowing to Southeast Asia—destabilized China’s bimetallic order (silver and copper currencies). In short, from my view, understanding 19th- and 20th-century China requires analyzing state capacity and global political economy together—through both silver and copper. If we want to understand China in the 21st century—especially how China understands itself and how it has reemerged as a major global power—we need a firmer grasp of the 19th and 20th centuries. We still live within a geopolitical order shaped by the past two hundred years.

What questions did you begin with as you were starting your dissertation research and where has the process taken you? What changes have you made and why?

I began dissertation research with a largely China-centered question and, step by step, it became a transnational and global project spanning China, Britain, the United States, Chile, and India.

My starting point was my MAPSS thesis in early 2017, which examined the decline of the Yunnan copper industry between 1800 and 1850. Yunnan supplied copper to the Qing Empire and reshaped a frontier zone through large-scale Han migration for mining, yet scholarship had focused far more on the industry’s 18th-century expansion than on its rapid downturn under the Daoguang reign (1820–1850). I reconstructed mine finances by comparing revenues and expenditures in the 1770s and 1840s and found that profitability depended on smuggling. Because the Qing state regulated that 90% of output must be sold to the state at only one-third to one-half of market prices, illicit sales were essential to survival. I estimated that 20–30% of output was smuggled in the 1770s, rising to around 40% by the 1840s as easily accessible ore and forests for charcoal were depleted and costs increased. At that stage, it was still primarily a domestic political-economy story.

The project changed after a conversation at the AAS 2017 Conference meeting with Prof. Yuda Yang from Fudan University, who suggested that Chilean copper may have entered China in the mid-19th century through smuggling—leaving no records in Chinese. I began searching British archival databases and, after finding scattered references and price data, realized that Chilean copper was cheaper and purer than Yunnan copper. That implied a new mechanism: imported copper could have undercut the smuggling margin that sustained Yunnan mining, contributing to the collapse of an industry that employed a few million workers.

This insight drove my dissertation’s archival strategy. Between August 2023 and October 2024, I conducted roughly fourteen months of global fieldwork which revealed a broader cast of actors and a wider geography of commercial exchange—British merchant bankers collaborating with American traders (especially from Boston) to ship Chilean copper to Asian markets, with China and India as major buyers. In total, I visited and collected primary sources from 14 archives across Mainland China, the US, Britain, Taiwan, and Chile.

As a result, my questions shifted from “why did the Yunnan copper industry decline?” to a larger global set: with the fall of the Spanish Empire and the rise of the British Empire, how did British and American networks occupy post-Spanish Latin American trade and redirect Chilean copper into Asia, and how did this metal shock reshape Qing mining, minting, and the bimetallic monetary order of copper cash and silver? Ultimately, my dissertation argues that explaining mid-19th-century Qing monetary turmoil requires tracking the international flows of both copper and silver, rather than relying on a silver-only narrative centered on opium.

To strengthen your dissertation research, you even conducted laboratory work in chemistry labs. What did this involve?

My dissertation uses natural science research methods–chemical analysis of ancient Asian coins–to supplement those of the social sciences and humanities. Between 2022 and 2025, in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Department of Chemistry and the University of Science and Technology of China, I collected and analyzed 170 copper cash coins circulated in 19th-century China, including issues from Song and Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and the Nguyễn Empire of Vietnam. Using laboratory-based elemental analysis, I measured the accurate composition of each coin—copper, zinc, lead, iron, and tin—to trace changes in coinage quality over time. The results show a pronounced mid-19th-century debasement of Chinese copper currency, aligning closely with documentary evidence of fiscal stress and metallurgical deterioration. I am especially grateful to my friend Wen Li, a PhD candidate in Chemistry at UChicago, for his invaluable help in the UChicago lab in early 2023. I would also like to thank Dr. Hanyu Liu (PhD’24, Yale), who provided essential support for my chemical testing in the summer of 2025.

You have been quite successful in securing fellowships, grants, and awards. Would you mind sharing details about some of these with us, including their significance to the field and personal value for you? 

Between 2022 and 2025, I was very luck to receive eight external fellowships and fifteen internal grants. Externally, I received support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), Harvard Business School, the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS), the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), the Esherick–Ye Family Foundation, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and Middlebury Language School, among others. Internally, I am deeply grateful for strong support from the Center for International Social Science Research, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Department of History.

One award that has been especially meaningful is my success in securing a major graduate fellowship from the North American Conference on British Studies, as scholars working on East Asia are still very rare among recipients. For me, this recognition mattered not only as material support, but also as a signal that my project—while starts from China—speaks directly to core questions in British and imperial history.

I want to emphasize that I could not have secured this level of fellowships without sustained mentorship and friendship. Prof. Kenneth Pomeranz and Prof. Jacob Eyferth wrote multiple recommendation letters across years, and their patience and advocacy have always been indispensable. Many of my cohorts generously shared information and fellowship application materials that helped me learn the fellowship landscape and strengthen my proposals. I am very grateful for the great support from Stephanie Painter, Niuniu Teo, Yasser Nasser, Gabriel Groz, Spencer Stewart, Yujie Li, and Eduardo Romero. Our cohort solidarity is the key for success.

In short, I feel very lucky: these fellowships supported my luxurious global fieldwork and enabled me to trace questions I am genuinely interested in and care about.

What have you found to be the most rewarding aspect of your experience at UChicago?

When I joined UChicago in autumn 2016 as a MAPSS student, I never imagined that I would stay here one decade. The most rewarding part of these ten years has been the warmth and growth I experienced with my professors and cohort. No matter what challenges arose, I could always count on their unwavering support.

My professors consistently encourage me to think boldly and ambitiously. For graduate students, it is risky to choose a transnational and global project as a dissertation project, but I always feel trusted, supported, and intellectually inspired by Prof. Pomeranz, Prof. Eyferth, Prof. Johanna Ransmeier, Prof. Susan Burns, Prof. Steven Pincus, and Prof. Jonathan Levy. Equally important, my PhD cohorts provided vital emotional support during moments of stress—whether academic or personal. Their companionship and encouragement gave me a very strong sense of belonging in the History Department and at UChicago.

Looking back, I have grown into the very person I was eager to become one decade ago: someone who can think systematically, understand herself better, and explore social sciences with both rigor, sharpness, and empathy. I feel truly privileged and lucky to have spent this formative decade at UChicago.

And, finally, just for fun, do you have any favorite hang-outs in the city? Any places you’d recommend others try out?

Yes! I have developed a list of hobbies to improve my work-life balance. Life beyond Regenstein Library and Hyde Park is of vital importance for my academic productivity in the long run. I love the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and have enjoyed classical music around once every two weeks during the academic year in the past decade. Besides, I love top rope climbing at Movement Lincoln Park, often with UChicago PhD friends in Chemistry, Physics, and Biology (sometimes I represent the entire Social Sciences and Humanities). 

Also, I enjoying taking photos, especially seizing the important and touching moments of life. In spring and summer, I bike along the Lake Michigan with my friends —one of the best ways to experience the city. I highly recommend physical exercise. Academic work asks us to sit still for long stretches, and for me the best antidote to mental fatigue is movement. Balancing stillness and motion is my secret weapon for academic breakthroughs.