Gordon H. Chang

About

Gordon H. Chang is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities in the Department of History at Stanford University. His research interests encompass several areas of history, including the historical connections between race and ethnicity in America and their relationship to foreign relations, as well as trans-Pacific relations in their diplomatic, cultural, and social dimensions. He has published extensively in the fields of U.S. diplomacy, America-China relations, the Chinese diaspora, Asian American history, and global history. Notably, in 2019, he published a history of Chinese railroad workers in America during the 19th century, and in 2025, he released a collection of essays titled "War, Race, and Culture: Journeys in Trans-Pacific and Asian American Histories." He continues to work closely with undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students, contributing to academic and outreach programs at Stanford.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Engineering
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Art
• Forensic engineering
• Visual arts
• Economic geography
• Transport engineering

Selected publications

• Fateful Ties

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2015-05-26 · 25 citations

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  Americans look to China with fascination and fear, unsure whether it is friend or foe but certain it will play a crucial role in their future. This is nothing new, Gordon Chang says. Fateful Ties draws on literature, art, biography, popular culture, and politics to trace America's long and varied preoccupation with China.

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• Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad

  2019-05-07 · 15 citations

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• "China and the Pursuit of America's Destiny: Nineteenth-Century Imagining and Why Immigration Restriction Took So Long"

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2012-06-01 · 14 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Traditional accounts of the exclusion of Chinese from America emphasize the racial, economic, cultural, and political hostility of whites and suggest that exclusion was an inexorable process. This essay, instead, asks why did exclusion legislation actually take a relatively long time to pass through Congress? The question helps re-cast our view of 19 th century Chinese immigration and leads us to appreciate the sentiment that welcomed the arrival of Chinese as part of the broader project of link…

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• Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia

  Journal of American History · 2019-11-12 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Credited as the “architect” of the policy of containment against the Soviet Union, George F. Kennan emerges from this illuminating study as much less an enigmatic figure than the famous Mr. X, the mysterious by-line used for his 1947 Foreign Affairs essay (“The Source of Soviet Conduct”) that publicly marked the start of the Cold War. Paul J. Heer considers some sixty years of Kennan's views toward East Asia, though three-quarters of the book are devoted roughly just to the 1947–1951 period, the…

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• The Chinese and the Iron Road

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This landmark volume sheds light on the lives and experiences of the Chinese workers who made up 90% of the workforce that built the Central Pacific Railroad—but who have been little understood and largely invisible in traditional accounts of the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad.

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Frequent coauthors

• Shelley Fisher Fishkin

  Duke Kunshan University

  5 shared

• Robert E. Lipsey

  Queens University of Charlotte

  3 shared

• Warren F. Kimball

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  3 shared

• Lloyd C. Gardner

  3 shared

• Andrew J. Crozier

  Faculty (United Kingdom)

  3 shared

• Willard C. Frank

  2 shared

• Dominic Lieven

  2 shared

• John J. Kulczycki

  2 shared

Similar researchers at Stanford University

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• David Bradyh-54
• Anthony Lising Antonioh-11