Yangyang Cheng is a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her work focuses on the development of science and technology in China and U.S.-China relations. Her essays on these and related topics have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Statesman, WIRED, VICE, MIT Technology Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications, and have received awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA), Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Born and raised in China, Yangyang received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor’s from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“In a world where women are free as all people are free, a stone is not a weapon and water is not a commodity; the most prized power is not the efficiency to kill but the ability to heal.”
In the wake of the March 16 shootings in Atlanta, Yangyang Cheng reflects on life as a Chinese immigrant amid escalating racial violence and geopolitical tensions. Caught between an authoritarian homeland and an increasingly hostile U.S., how does one live conscientiously? Who grieves, and what makes a life grievable?
Two decades after first encounter, Yangyang Cheng revisits The Lord of the Rings trilogy and explores new lessons about state power, climate crisis, exile, and allegiance.
How does one tell a story about the COVID-19 pandemic? In his new documentary ‘76 Days,’ set primarily at Wuhan hospitals, director Hao Wu chooses to push back against the prevalent approach in foreign coverage of China, where the gaze is fixed on the government and art falls into a false binary of protest or propaganda.
What is the meaning of citizenship, and who deserves to be a U.S. citizen? The new documentary "First Vote" is a rare, close look at the Chinese-American community and their political participation. As Americans go to the polls, Yangyang Cheng explores the country's fraught history with immigration and conditional citizenship, and asks: How much should our personhood be determined by the types of paper we carry?
The Democratic and Republican National Conventions have just concluded. Yangyang Cheng reflects on her introduction to American politics, and shares her hopes and concerns for this election. Living in historic times, what is one's responsibility as an individual? Beneath the distorted realities, how do we reclaim the bond that is deep and intimate with this world and each other?
What is it like to watch "Hamilton" in 2020, when the romanticized version of an optimistic, inclusive America feels detached from reality? Yangyang Cheng explores what Lin-Manuel Miranda's hit musical has meant to her over the years, how the election of 2016 compelled her to repurpose her life, and the enduring power of the written word.
Whom, or what, do borders and the military protect? As COVID-19 alters the world as we know it, and governments exploit the crisis to amass power, Yangyang Cheng argues that we must rethink safety versus security, and reimagine community beyond the confines of a state.
Mo Hailong stole corn and went to jail for it. But — as documented in Mara Hvistendahl’s new book "The Scientist and the Spy" — his story is about so much more: Greed and compliance, political and corporate self-interest, a transnational struggle between two superpowers, and the failure of the American promise.
“April is the cruelest month,” so goes the opening line to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” And so it is that April has been exceptionally...