Dr Tehyun Ma

My main research interest is in the history of state-building in China and Taiwan, with a particular focus on how state-building and propaganda fostered legitimacy at home and abroad. Currently Tehyun is working on two research projects. 

My first project explores the development of 'Free China' on Taiwan in the early Cold War, as well as the role of American sponsorship in regime consolidation. I focus on how the challenge of mobilising a disaffected island population to meet an invasion by the People’s Liberation Army shaped the way Chinese Nationalist leaders tried to produce authority in the early Cold War period. 

My second project focuses on the designs for rehabilitation and reconstruction in China before and after the Japanese surrender in 1945. I have looked here at the transnational influences on Chinese social policy, such as the American Social Security Act and the British Beveridge Report, and have argued that the adaptation of such ideas became a significant aspect of Republican China's foreign and domestic policy.

Both projects are interested in questions about the performance of statecraft. I look at reformers working within authoritarian regimes who believed that political authority came out of the process and comportment of government, rather than the legitimation of majority rule.

In keeping with my interest in state formation, I have also written on the long history of imperial rule and colonial intervention in China between the eighteenth century and the Communist takeover in 1949.