Yue Cui

Profile

I am a PhD candidate in history at the University of Leeds. My research examines Japanese imperial governance in Manchuria, with a particular focus on narcotics policy as a technology of biopolitical control over labouring populations.

My dissertation, The Crucible of Empires: Governance, Labour, and Narcotics in Manchuria, analyses how the Manchukuo state produced, managed, and abandoned different colonial populations through interconnected mechanisms, including the role of Taiwanese colonial intermediaries, the mobilisation and medical exclusion of conscript labour, and the administration of the opium monopoly.

Drawing on multilingual archival sources in Chinese, Japanese, and English, as well as oral history collections, my work explores how colonial regimes governed populations through systems of addiction, labour conscription, and differential access to medical care. I also engage with digital humanities approaches, including OCR, NLP, and GIS, in the analysis of historical materials.

Research interests

My research interests lie in the history of the Japanese Empire and its colonial governance in Manchuria and Northeast Asia between 1905 and 1945. I am particularly concerned with how imperial states governed populations through biopolitical mechanisms, including the regulation of labour, migration, narcotics, and public health.

My work explores the intersection of social history, the history of medicine, and political theory, examining how colonial regimes structured systems of control and inequality through practices of bodily regulation, medical exclusion, and fiscal extraction. I am also interested in broader questions of state capacity and regulatory governance, as well as the historical foundations of contemporary policy systems and geopolitics in East Asia.

Research Keywords

• Japanese Empire, Manchukuo, and colonial governance in Northeast Asia
• Narcotics policy, labour mobilisation, and biopolitics
• Colonial intermediaries and the history of medicine

Conference Presentations

“Governing Ambiguity: Taiwanese Migrants and the Politics of Imperial Subjecthood in Japanese Manchuria.”
18th International Conference of the European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS), Poznań, Poland, August 2026 (accepted)

“Health at the Border: Mobility, Classification, and the Politics of Care in East Asia’s Twentieth-Century Regimes.”
Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) Biennial Conference, University of Leeds, July 2026 (accepted)

“Competing Truths and Colonial Technologies: Economic Knowledge, Governance, and Social Memory in Japanese-Occupied Manchuria.”
Asian Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS), Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic, November 2025

“Double-Edged Affect and Embodiment: Taiwanese Migrants, Layered Selves, and Colonial Biopolitics in Manchuria.”
New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS) Annual Meeting, SUNY Brockport, October 2025

Affiliations

• European Association for Japanese Studies (EAJS)
• British Association for Japanese Studies (BAJS)
• Association for Asian Studies (AAS)

Qualifications

• PhD, History, University of Leeds (Current)
• Certificate in Public Policy Analysis, LSE (UK)
• MA, History, University of York (UK)
• BA, History, Jishou University (China)