Gus Tsz-kit Chan

Gus Tsz-kit Chan graduated with a B.A. in Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2014 and practiced journalism at a local television station. In 2016, he got an opportunity to further his studies in Global Studies at the University of Freiburg. After graduating from the M.A. program, he joined the Graduate School Global and Area Studies (GSGAS) at Leipzig University with a doctoral research on Late Qing finance. The mixed academic background led him to develop an interest in studying the historical media portrayal of China’s national finance. His studies on the semantic choices in tax debates in Late Qing and early Republican China turned in a new direction after discovering that similar questions were asked in both Chinese and Western societies when their tax regimes encountered a new statistical paradigm: How does a state justify a new tax to its people? What is an effective system to reckon tax revenue and supervise the collection? How does the central government encourage honesty from local reports? With a new comparative framework in mind, he is glad to join “Sin-aps” as a postdoctoral researcher. He is currently revising his dissertation “Taxes and China’s Capitalistic Transformation: The Changing Narrative on Lijin (1875–1931)” for publication.