HONG Xincheng
洪鑫诚

Hong Xincheng is PhD candidate (Chinese Studies) and Graduate Teaching Fellow (Asian Studies) at NUS. His research explores the intersection of the modern histories of South China and Southeast Asia through Chinese internal and overseas migration, with particular attention to the agency of crops and cultivators on marginal lands.

His PhD thesis traces socio-economic and environmental changes before and after the emergence of a Qiaoxiang (migrants’ hometown) village in Fujian’s coastal hinterland, where households’ inherited fruit trees on hillsides sat uneasily with the grain-centered priorities of socialist collective farming under production teams. By examining how the state later made ancestral mountains legible and governable through gradual learning of local knowledge and pragmatic compromise with various lineage segments, the thesis joins recent reflections on Chinese collectivization and its complex legacy in the era of Reform and Opening. At the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he will develop a new project, “Settlers Halfway: Chinese Farming Smallholders and the Shifting Diasporic Ecologies in Transwar Singapore and the Malay Peninsula (1929–1984),” which follows grassroots Chinese migrants’ continued journey of mobile livelihoods and embodied engagements with land, water, crops and animals in Southeast Asia from the Great Depression to the Cold War decades of state-led reterritorialization.

He is the author of a book (Hanlu Book on behalf of National Taiwan University, 2018), with other works published or forthcoming in peer-review journals such as Theoretical Horizon, East Asian Studies and Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (forthcoming).