Yifan Zheng

Yifan Zheng is a historian of ancient China specializing in social, legal and institutional history of the early Chinese empires. His research examines how legal and administrative practices shaped the lives and identities of people across the social spectrum in the Warring States, Qin, and Han periods, with particular attention to marginalized groups and to the frontier regions.

Yifan is currently working on the manuscript for his first book, which analyzes excavated manuscripts, transmitted texts, and archaeological materials to explore how early imperial governments identified, categorized, and managed populations. By reconstructing state mechanisms such as registration systems, penal labor regimes, and frontier control, the book shows how these groups navigated state authority and reshaped the boundaries of belonging in early Chinese society. Adopting a bottom-up, periphery-to-center perspective, it uses a case study of a town in the periphery of the empire to explore how imperial policies were put into practice. In terms of narrative approach, Yifan aims to present a holistic, panoramic account of the region under study.

Yifan joined the History Department in Autumn 2025, after serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore. During his graduate studies, he was a visiting scholar at Kyoto University (2019) and the Yuelu Academy (2021). In his future research, Yifan plans to integrate geographical, economic, and environmental factors into his work, while extending the chronological scope into the early medieval period to develop a broader, more comprehensive understanding of ancient Chinese history.