Jiaqi Yao is a lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, specializing in modern Chinese literature, media, and popular culture.

Her first book project, In Search of the Real China: Republican Travelers in the Western Borderlands, 1921–1945, offers a compelling re-evaluation of how China’s “authentic” identity was constructed at its periphery. The project argues that this national knowledge emerged not merely from top-down state propaganda, but through a decentralized multimedia network of travelers, publishers, and local elites. Their collective works—including pictorials, films, and travel magazines—transformed encounters in the borderlands into the very authentications of the Chinese nation.

Building on her study of travel and cultural production in the Sino-Tibetan borderland, Yao is developing her second book project, The Softest Power: Pandas in the Modern World. This work explores how the giant panda has become our era’s most paradoxical celebrity. Yao examines the cultural power dynamics in transnational narratives of pandas. The animal now exists more vividly in cultural works, zoos, emojis, and livestreams than in the wild, serving as a growing Asian metaphor that illuminates contradictions of nation’s soft power and cultural agency in the contemporary world.

Yao, Jiaqi. “In Search of Authentic Borderlands: Zheng Junli and His Wartime Documentary Long Live the Nation (1943).” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, no. 37.2 (December 2025): 263-93.

Modern Chinese Fiction in Translation, History of Chinese Cinema, Fiction and Film from Taiwan, Chinese Popular Culture