Philip Thai is a historian of Modern China and East Asia with research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history. He is currently working on his new book tentatively titled, “In the Shadows of the Bamboo Curtain: Trade, Travel, and Trafficking across Greater China during the Cold War.” He is the author of China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842-1965 (Columbia University Press and a Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, 2018) and several articles in the journals Diplomatic History, Enterprise and Society, Modern Asian Studies, and Law and History Review.