I am a historian of 19th and 20th century China, with a particular interest in the development of the modern Chinese economy, the history of finance and electricity in China, and modern China’s connections to the world. My research spans economic and business history, global history, and the history of technology.

I am an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. Before, I was a JSPS International Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Economics, The University of Tokyo.

In 2022, my first book, Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919, came out with Cambridge University Press. In 2023, the book was a finalist for the Hagley Prize in Business History. In 2024, it received the Honorable Mention for the Ralph Gomory Prize and was the co-winner of the First Monograph Prize in Economic and/or Social History of the Economic History Society. I was also awarded the Faculty Research Award for Junior Tenure-track Professoriate Staff (for cumulative research activity over a 3-year period) for 2024 by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. My current major research and book project deals with the history of the electrical and electronics industries in China from the 19th century to the 1970s. In addition, I am also writing a book tentatively titled “A Business History of Modern China: c. 1800 to the Present,” which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Together with my colleague Prof. John D. Wong, I run the Chinese Business History Research Cluster at IHSS. This includes the Chinese Business History Webinar, which hosts regular talks by scholars working on different aspects of the historical development of business and entrepreneurship in modern China. We also organise a regular lecture series as part of the Delta on the Move research project at IHSS. Finally, I currently also organise the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar at IHSS. The series features talks by a wide array of scholars mostly from Hong Kong. Recordings of many of these talks can be found on the IHSS YouTube page. I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I have been a visiting scholar at the Department of History, East China Normal University, Shanghai, the Department of History, Fudan University, Shanghai, and at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taibei. During the spring semester 2026, I will be a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

I was trained at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, where I received a BA in Chinese Studies in 2012 and a PhD in Modern Chinese History in 2017 under the supervision of Prof. Hans van de Ven. My doctoral dissertation was awarded the Coleman Prize of the Association of Business Historians and the Herman E. Krooss Prize of the Business History Conference. It was also nominated as a finalist for the Dissertation Prize (Category: The Long 19th Century) of the World Economic History Congress 2018.