Yong Chen

Professor, History UC Irvine

  • Irvine CA

Yong Chen is Professor of Hist. He also served as the Associate Dean of Curricular and Student Services in the School of Humanities.

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UC Irvine experts available to discuss wide range of China-U.S. relations, from politics to education, food to movies

Emily Baum: Chilling academic exchanges between China and the U.S. Emily Baum is an associate professor of modern Chinese history and director of the Long U.S.-China Institute, which aims to bridge the gaps between academia, journalism and the public sector. Baum says the pandemic will likely affect study abroad for years to come, in both directions, with negative impacts on both sides. There was already a significant disparity with roughly 370,000 Chinese students studying in the U.S. and only 11,000 Americans studying in China annually. “A drop in Chinese enrollments will have major consequences for the future of higher education in the U.S., where many schools rely on the full tuition paid by international students to stay afloat,” Baum says. But equally worrisome: “The educational decoupling that had already begun before COVID-19 — and will be greatly exacerbated by it — means that there will be far fewer opportunities for each country’s students to gain firsthand knowledge of, and mutual understanding about, the other.” Reach Baum at: emily.baum@uci.edu Wang Feng: China has passed its peak Wang Feng is a professor of sociology and an adjunct professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He is an expert on global social and demographic changes and social inequality. He has served on expert panels for the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, as well as he served as a senior fellow and director at the Brookings Institution Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy. Wang sees the ascendance of China in the last 40 years as the result of a unique confluence of circumstances: a dynamic leader in Deng Xiaoping, plus a significant rural population that moved to cities and provided a huge labor force. In the last 20 years, China has produced 600 billionaires — and gaping wealth disparities. “When China was poor, people thought it would be poor forever. Now that China is rich, people think it will be rich forever. But China has passed its peak,” he says. “The headwinds of an aging population, the legacy of the one-child policy, and tremendous social inequality will present enormous internal challenges in the years ahead.” Reach Wang at fwang@uci.edu. Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China’s box office changes Hollywood portrayals Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Chancellor’s professor of history. A specialist in modern Chinese history, he has testified before a Congressional-Executive commission on China, conducted a State Department briefing on contemporary Chinese politics, and worked with the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. His articles have been published by TIME, The Nation, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times and others. Wasserstrom notes that Hollywood films and TV often negatively present whichever East Asian country is most feared at the time. However, the power of China’s box office is changing that. “Due to concern with the massive market for movies in the People’s Republic of China, you do not often see negative portrayals of that country on American screens,” says Wasserstrom. “A telling example of our living in a new era is that when filmmakers were setting out to make a new version of ‘Red Dawn,’ a film that originally portrayed a Russian invasion of the U.S., the plan was to have Chinese soldiers serve as the enemies. Concern about PRC box office receipts led to a change in nationality — the enemies became North Korean soldiers.” Reach Wasserstrom at: jwassers@uci.edu. Yong Chen: Chinese food in the U.S. and China Yong Chen is the author of several books including "Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America" (Columbia University Press, 2014). He also co-curated “‘Have You Eaten Yet?’: The Chinese Restaurant in America” in Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia (2006), and the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, New York City (2004–05). He is professor of history. He points out that the COVID-19 pandemic hastened changes to culinary habits that were already underway in China, including less consumption of wild animals, greater demand for fast food, and a shift away from communal or “family style” meals. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Chinese restaurants have been hit hard by anti-Asian sentiments, while also showing signs of resilience thanks to the popularity of Chinese takeout. “If the seriously strained relationship between China and the US continues to deteriorate, it is possible that more people in America will lose their appetite for Chinese food, to say the least,” Chen says. Reach Chen at: y3chen@uci.edu.

Yong ChenWang Feng

Biography

Yong Chen is Professor of History and Chancellor’s Fellow at UCI, where he served as the Associate Dean in the Office of Research and Graduate Studies (1999-2004). He is the author of Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America (Columbia University Press, 2014); Chinese San Francisco 1850-1943 (Stanford, 2000) and The Chinese in San Francisco (Peking University Press, 2009), and co-editor of New Perspectives on American History (Hebei People’s Publishing House, 2010). He was also the co-curator of “‘Have You Eaten Yet?’: The Chinese Restaurant in America” in Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia (2006), and the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, New York City (2004–05). He serves on the National Landmarks Committee of the advisory board of the National Park Service of the United States.

Areas of Expertise

Chinese American Experience
Immigration History
Food
Asian-American History
Cultural History

Education

Cornell University

PhD

1993

Media Appearances

Is the ‘American dream’ still alive for Chinese students under Trump?

Think China  online

2025-03-24

Yong Chen, a professor of history and the associate dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine believes that the US would still be the top destination for Chinese students when it comes to studying abroad …. Chen said, “The ‘American dream’ varies a lot, but the idea that this is… a most desirable place to work and live… will remain for quite some time. The American dream is still alive.”

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Tastes Like Home

Los Angeles Review of Books  online

2024-09-20

However, in 1915, a federal court ruled in United States v. Lee Chee that restaurant owners could gain merchant status. The legal decision marked a pivotal moment for Chinese food in the United States. Plates of lo mein paved a path for Chinese people to emigrate and bring in their families. As UC Irvine historian Yong Chen elucidates in his 2014 book Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America, Chinese eateries also helped democratize dining in the US and provided a haven for the marginalized and the misfits.

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Law and Order in O.C.: Six Nationally Known Cases

Orange Coast Magazine  online

2023-05-01

“This is a very sensitive and complex issue,” says Yong Chen, a history professor at UC Irvine. “Identity in Taiwan has multiple layers.” Chou is what people in Taiwan refer to as “born-outside people”—the descendants of those from the mainland who fled to Taiwan in 1949 after the Communist takeover of China. Initially, they were the “government elite,” Chen says, adding that eventually the “born-here people” assumed more control and power in Taiwan, and the “born-outside people” felt a “sense of loss and believed they were treated unfairly.”

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Articles

Highly skewed current–phase relation in superconductor–topological insulator–superconductor Josephson junctions

npj Quantum Materials

Morteza Kayyalha, Aleksandr Kazakov, Ireneusz Miotkowski, Sergei Khlebnikov, Leonid P. Rokhinson & Yong P. Chen

2020

Three-dimensional topological insulators (TIs) in proximity with superconductors are expected to exhibit exotic phenomena, such as topological superconductivity (TSC) and Majorana-bound states (MBS), which may have applications in topological quantum computation. In superconductor–TI–superconductor Josephson junctions, the supercurrent versus the phase difference between the superconductors, referred to as the current–phase relation (CPR), reveals important information including the nature of the superconducting transport.

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Tuning Insulator-Semimetal Transitions in 3D Topological Insulator thin Films by Intersurface Hybridization and In-Plane Magnetic Fields

Physical Review Letters

Yang Xu, Guodong Jiang, Ireneusz Miotkowski, Rudro R. Biswas, and Yong P. Chen

2019

A pair of Dirac points (analogous to a vortex-antivortex pair) associated with opposite topological numbers (with
±π Berry phases) can be merged together through parameter tuning and annihilated to gap the Dirac spectrum, offering a canonical example of a topological phase transition. Here, we report transport studies on thin films of BiSbTeSe2, which is a 3D topological insulator that hosts spin-helical gapless (semimetallic) Dirac fermion surface states for sufficiently thick samples, with an observed resistivity close to h/4e2 at the charge neutral point.

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Microscopic investigation of Bi2-xSbxTe3-ySey systems: On the origin of a robust intrinsic topological insulator

Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids

Hyoungdo Nam, Yang Xu, Ireneusz Miotkowski, Jifa Tian, Yong P Chen, Chang Liu, M Zahid Hasan, Wenguang Zhu, Gregory A Fiete, Chih-Kang Shih

2019

One of the most important challenges in the field of topological insulators (TI) is to find materials with nontrivial topological surface state (TSS) while keeping the bulk intrinsic (insulating). In this letter, we report microscopic investigations of BiSbTeSe2 (1112) and Bi2Te2Se (221) alloys which have been proposed as candidates to achieve an intrinsic bulk. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) confirms previous macroscopic experiments that 221 is an ordered alloy with a Te-Bi-Se-Bi-Te sequence.

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