We continue our series of Q+As introducing you to the Fairbank Center’s new Fellows with Jason Chan, whose research is being supported by a 2024-25 Desmond and Whitney Shum Fellowship. Jason is a Ph.D. candidate in modern Chinese history at Harvard University. He is researching the history of cold, arid, and high-altitude environments and sciences in the People’s Republic of China, in particular the histories of glaciology and permafrost science. More broadly, Jason is interested in the history of earth sciences in modern China and the Soviet Union; the environmental histories of China and Central Eurasia; and polar history.
Jason is spending this academic year conducting research in the PRC. His first line of inquiry focuses on the development of glaciology in China through the concept of glacial periods, or glaciation (冰期), from the late Qing to the present. His second line of inquiry traces the circulation of permafrost engineering knowledge across the People’s Republic, the Soviet Union, Shōwa Japan, the post-war US and Canada, and post-colonial Greenland. This project excavates Maoist and post-Mao China’s role in the global history of infrastructure development across the world’s three polar regions. Together, both projects seek to unearth Chinese participation in—and contribution to—the development of global cryospheric, polar, and Earth sciences.
In this Q+A, Jason illuminates the path that led him to his research focus, identifies the Harvard professors—and their formative courses—that shaped his current projects’ trajectories, and even offers up an interesting new lens through which to view Netflix’s new Three Body Problem adaptation, for those of us who haven’t gotten to it yet.
How did you come to be interested in a subject like high-altitude sciences?
Maybe because I grew up in Hong Kong, and grew tired of its subtropical heat, I have always been fascinated by anything cold: ice, snow, glaciers. This fascination only turned academic after I entered university in Hong Kong and became interested in the history of the Soviet Arctic. Then, in northern Finland—where I read Arctic Studies as a visiting undergrad—I became drawn to the history of the Cold War in the circumpolar North (i.e., not just the Soviet, but also European and North American Arctic).
“Maybe because I grew up in Hong Kong, and grew tired of its subtropical heat, I have always been fascinated by anything cold: ice, snow, glaciers.“
At that time, I was keen to explore the history of cooperation across what some Nordic historians called the “Glacial Curtain” in the Cold War Arctic. I wanted to delve deeper into Soviet glaciologists’ role therein for my MPhil at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted my archival research in Russia. Quite unexpectedly, I then pivoted from the North Pole to High Mountain Asia (aka the “Third Pole”) and the arid environments that bracketed it. While I relied on Soviet glaciological publications available online, I discovered that many of them had indeed been produced in relation to water security in arid Central Asia.
My geographic attention has since moved across the Tian Shan, from the Soviet Union to the PRC, but in many ways, my doctoral research combines and continues what I started in Hong Kong and Cambridgeshire: It entangles the two—North and Third—polar regions by looking at the role mountain glaciologists from the “Third Pole” had played in shaping trans-polar cooperation and producing dialogues on planetary changes.
Which of your Harvard courses most influenced the development of your project?
I had originally planned to study the history of environmental surveillance and Earth system modelling in the socialist world. It was Professor Arunabh Ghosh’s “Histories of Infrastructures” seminar, and my encounters outside the classroom during my G1, that returned me to histories of ice and snow. Professors Michael Szonyi and Mark Elliott each told me separately that they remembered me as an applicant who had studied the Arctic, glaciology, and ice-related stuff. That was the moment when I re-discovered my academic identity and shifted the focus of my study back to the history of the cold.
Prof. Szonyi’s proseminar on rural China has further inspired me to delve deeper into the history of peasants’ utilization and reworking, since the Qing, of glacial meltwater in arid Gansu Province. This is a history that Chinese glaciologists wrote had grounded their work during the Great Leap Forward. To situate the Chinese domestication of Soviet glaciology—not only in global but also local, rural contexts—this is also a history that I wish to follow up in my upcoming fieldwork year.
What excites you the most about this research?
I’m excited to continue networking with people and making my way through the archives in China (all generously funded by the Fairbank Center). Indeed, I have come to enjoy these processes that, in many cases, have involved finding creative solutions on the ground.
Institutions in China run on the arbitrary use of personal power—i.e., a staff member can easily allow access to the most sensitive documents or deny access to the most mundane ones. As a Hong Kong resident affiliated with an American university conducting research in the PRC amidst chilly relations across the Pacific, I have often run into research challenges. There have been instances where my identity drew extra administrative attention. But many of these instances actually ended with good conversations, sometimes also leading me to people who closed some doors on me while opening up others.
“It was Professor Arunabh Ghosh’s ‘Histories of Infrastructures’ seminar, and my encounters outside the classroom during my G1, that returned me to histories of ice and snow.“
To be sure, the absence of disappointment is never guaranteed. But the beauty of doing research in China lies in that “never knowing”—being unsure about a project’s final outcome. The uncertainty surrounding tightened archival access has certainly shocked the field. Beyond that, one can never quite plan ahead as to whom they may meet, and in which direction the people they meet may take them. The space to manoeuvre in these situations has undoubtedly shrunk; but “grey areas” still exist for those who dare to talk their way through challenges. After all, as a professor I met in Beijing once told me, “China is a society run on favors.”
Which places in China are you most excited to visit this time, and why?
As a historian of glaciology, I do wish to actually go and see the glaciers that will appear in my dissertation with my own eyes: the July First Glacier in the Qilian Mountains, Ürümqi Glacier No.1 in the Tian Shan, and the glaciers beneath Mt. Shishapangma in the Himalaya. Besides those, I mentioned earlier that I am interested in the history of local uses of glacial meltwater in Gansu Province, where, according to some Chinese glaciologists, peasants organized themselves to melt the Qilian Mountains’ glaciers for irrigation. Some experts argue that this could not have been possible. Nonetheless, I look forward to actually following the Chinese glaciologists’ writings, visiting and checking out those oasis communities myself.
As I am working simultaneously on another project on the history of permafrost science, I am also planning to visit the Greater Khingan Range across Heilongjiang Province and Inner Mongolia’s borders. It is where Japanese engineers learned how to mitigate permafrost hazards from their Soviet counterparts across the range. It is also where, throughout the Mao era, Chinese scientists tested Soviet permafrost knowledge before transplanting it to the Tibetan Plateau. What’s more, in the 1970s, before inviting Canadian and American permafrost engineers to the Tibetan Plateau (still closed to foreigners at that time), the Chinese engineers always brought them first to the Greater Khingan Range for a tour. The Greater Khingan Range, in other words, was not only the birthplace of Japanese and Chinese permafrost science and their practitioners’ proxy testing site, but also the zone of mediating international scientific exchanges in the late Mao and early reform years, which in and of itself makes it worth a visit.
Did you read any books or articles this summer that you would like to recommend?
I had always wanted to read Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem. When I watched the first episodes of its Netflix adaptation, I was stunned to find that it’s the Greater Khingan Range where the Chinese military and astrophysicists conducted deep space research. This fits what I knew about the range: that the Chinese military and scientists first conducted permafrost research as it related to foresting (the environmental consequences of which Liu’s protagonist was concerned about; oops, spoiler?). For this reason, I began reading Liu’s trilogy this summer, and I would highly recommend anyone who has read it (or those who have watched the Netflix series), to rethink why Liu chose the Greater Khingan Range to be the site of the Red Coast Base. Perhaps it would be helpful to think about the historical role the range (or “Manchuria” in general) has played in the production of both natural resources and scientific knowledge, as well as the cultural imaginations “Manchuria” has inspired as it relates to other “hostile,” “untamed,” or “extreme” environments, be they polar or deep space.