Short Biography

Shipeng Li, a doctoral candidate from the Department of History at Tsinghua University in China, is a visiting doctoral student at Heidelberg University during the summer semester of 2025. His research interests encompass the societal and cultural dynamics of late imperial China through to contemporary China. Currently, his main research focus is on the history of the Mao era. His dissertation, provisionally titled “Building Our New Great Wall: Forests and State Building in Northern China (1937-1987),” seeks to analyze the political and social dimensions of Socialist China through the lenses of technological history, environmental history, cultural history, and global history.

Project

Building Our New Great Wall: Forests and State Building in Northern China (1937-1987)

Environment and technology have been highly emphasized in historical research in recent years. Although research on environmental history in China has been developing for many years, forest history is still in its infancy. Overseas research on forest history is growing rapidly, and many scholars focusing on forests in late imperial China to modern China. In recent years, scholars such as David A. Bello, Meng Zhang 张萌, Ian Matthew Miller, and Koji Nakashima have published a number of important monographs. In addition, Pitts, Dr Larissa Noelle, and Dr Han Kyuhyun in the United States have completed relevant doctoral theses. In my thesis, I attempt to approach the politics and society of Socialist China from the view of technological history, environmental history, cultural history, and global history. I have collected a large number of newspapers, magazines, and government documents from archives and libraries in Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Shaanxi, Beijing, Tianjin, and Gansu. I have also purchased many folk materials, diaries, photos, and other materials from private collectors. Since 2022, I have conducted field work and investigations in some areas such as the Greater Khingan Mountains, and have interviewed some forestry experts, forest rangers, and farmers. I hope to collect more archival materials in Europe in the future to complete my thesis writing.