Henry Lyu Cheng

Overview

Henry Lyu Cheng (ORCID: 0009-0007-4669-4836) is a Ph.D. candidate in History whose research focuses on modern China, global Maoism and the Cold War, Asian American political history, and transnational radicalism. His work examines how revolutionary ideas and political practices are transformed as they move across borders, institutions, and unequal political contexts.

His dissertation, provisionally titled Who Speaks for Revolution? Maoism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Political Authority across China, the United States, and Nepal, traces the making, displacement, and contestation of revolutionary authority from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China through the rise of Nepal’s Maoist movement. Rather than treating global Maoism as the diffusion of a coherent ideology outward from Beijing, the project asks what happened when a revolution became a state and when movements elsewhere claimed an inheritance that the Chinese party-state could no longer fully control. It examines how Mao-era China promoted revolutionary internationalism while subordinating insurgent possibilities to sovereignty, territorial security, and interstate relations; how Asian American activism, and the New Communist Movement reworked Maoism within the racial and imperial politics of the United States; and how activists after Mao’s death attempted to reconstruct an international revolutionary center through the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. The dissertation then follows these questions into Nepal, where Maoists drew on transnational revolutionary networks while developing political strategies grounded in Nepal’s own histories of monarchy, democracy, caste, regional inequality, and relations with India and China. Nepal’s People’s War ultimately became not simply a recipient of international Maoism but a site from which the meaning, strategy, and political authority of Maoism itself could be contested and revised.

His doctoral research has been widely supported by fellowships and grants from Cornell’s Graduate School, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, the Department of History, the Asian American Studies Program, and the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, including the C. V. Starr Fellowship in East Asian Studies (2026-27), Sage Fellowship(2023-24), Reppy Graduate Fellowship (2023-24), Migrations Graduate Fellowship(2026-27), and Racial Justice and Equitable Futures Fellowship (2025-26).

His publications broadly address revolution and political authority, race and transnational radicalism, religion and international politics, and the politics of memory and representation.

Committee Chair: Prof. Peidong Sun
Committee Member: Prof. Allen Carlson
Committee Member: Prof. Derek Chang