About Yi Ren

Yi Ren is completing her Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation explores how the Chinese Communist Party incorporated its rural populations, especially those marginalized groups, for its propaganda work on the ground level, and demonstrates how these grassroots cultural workers made propagandists’ policies work to their benefit. Her dissertation argues that the success of CCP cultural work in the countryside depended not on ideological persuasion or a newly created political culture, but on constant and dynamic interactions with local practitioners. She publishes articles on Frontiers of History in China, Twentieth-Century China (Forthcoming October issue).