Science in the Divide
Science in the Divide is a monthly column about science, civil society, and humanity caught between the conflicting cultures, political agendas, and value systems of China and the United States.
It is written by Yangyang Cheng, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, and was a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University and an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 2015, and her Bachelor’s in Science from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. She is a columnist at SupChina. Her essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, MIT Technology Review, ChinaFile, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and other publications.
More Posts
Fault Lines in Humanity
Illustration by Derek Zheng A state’s ability to protect is simultaneously its permission to do harm. The tyranny of the border is always imposing itself…
In Sickness and in Health
He Jiankui and bioethics, Chinese hospitals and patient violence, the coronavirus and lockdown of Wuhan, and politics during times of emergency. Photo: Getty Images Being ill…
I Save You in the Clouds
How should the self struggle against forgetting? What becomes of a life after it’s gone, if not for other people’s memories of it? Yangyang Cheng…
Talking to my mother about Hong Kong
I wonder how much my mother has been projecting our tortured relationship onto the events in Hong Kong over the past several months, waiting for…
The Holy and the Broken
Salam: the First ****** Nobel Laureate is a documentary currently streaming on Netflix that looks at the life of Abdus Salam, the first Muslim scientist to…
Hands That Feed
At a time when ethno-authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe, often aided by new technology, the idea that the scientist may become an…
Freedom in Dissent
As protests rage in Hong Kong, Yangyang Cheng thinks about her own experience with expression and dissent. “Are you the child of a…
‘Communism is a faith’
90 million people are officially members of the Chinese Communist Party. Why have they chosen to take the pledge? And what about those who don’t?
The Highest Exam
The gaokao is the most formidable test in the world. Literally “the high exam,” it is China’s National College Entrance Examination, taken every year by nearly…