Chris Chung

Chris Chung is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, in Chinese history at the University of Toronto. He graduated from his PhD program in History at the University of Toronto in November 2022, which he conducted under the supervision of Professor Li Chen. Using the South China Sea islands dispute as a case study, he investigates how the global flow of ideas and activities of everyday people vitally informed Chinese state conceptions of space and sovereignty in the maritime frontier since the late eighteenth century.

His doctoral dissertation, "Fluid Realms: Chinese Visions of Maritime Space in the South China Sea Islands," explores the pivotal roles that non-government actors across the globe played in Qing and Republican claims-making over the Pratas, Paracel, and Spratly Islands, such as fishers, merchants, and community organizations. Drawing from largely unused Chinese archival files, "Fluid Realms" traces how these non-official actors compelled government adoption of their views by fusing disparate Qing notions of maritime space with incoming Western and Japanese ideas of geography, international law, and the nation-state. Chinese officials, he argues, were regularly forced to negotiate their political worldviews with the non-official narratives they relied on to understand the islands, their place within the emerging nation-state — and indeed, what constituted China itself.