For the EAS Speaker Series Spring 2025, Yu Yao will speak about the topic: China’s Natural Rubber Plantation in the 1950s: A Global View.

In the 1950s, China started its road towards becoming a major natural rubber producer. However, China’s natural rubber plantations in this decade fluctuated sharply with costs, mainly because the Chinese Communist Party’s cadres could not balance knowledge and technologies from the Soviet Union, the West, and Southeast and South Asia well.

Yu Yao is a Professor from the Department of History at East China Normal University, Shanghai, China and a 2024-2025 Visiting Scholar of Harvard-Yenching Institute.