About

He Bian is an associate professor of late imperial and early modern Chinese history at Princeton University. She earned her PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University in 2014 and holds a master's degree in Human Nutrition from the University of Illinois at Chicago as well as a bachelor's degree in Biological Science from Peking University. Her research interests encompass topics related to authority and variation in China's traditional culture, with a particular focus on medicine and the natural sciences between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. She aims to write a new kind of Chinese cultural history that emphasizes knowledge across various domains, contextualized by institutional, social, and economic conditions of the period. Her first book, 'Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Early Modern Culture in China, 1500-1800,' was published by Princeton University Press in 2020. Currently, she is working on her second book project, 'The Formula of Happiness: A Social History of Medical Recipes in China’s Long Eighteenth Century,' supported by a Henry Luce Foundation / ACLS Early Career Fellowship and additional funding from the National Endowment for Humanities. She is also collaborating on a co-authored book on Manchu plant and animal names with Dr. Mårten Söderblom Saarela at Academia Sinica. At Princeton, she teaches courses on Modern East Asia, Early Modern China, and Medicine and Society in China, and advises students on topics related to Ming-Qing history, East Asian science, technology, medicine, and Manchu Studies. She has been elected President of the Manchu Studies Group.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Sociology
• Family medicine
• Medicine
• Art history
• Economic history
• Media studies
• World Wide Web
• Traditional medicine

Selected publications

• Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China

  Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Art history

  Review| April 01 2022 Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China: A Review of Recent Works Mary Augusta Brazelton. Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China. Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2019. 258 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-1-5017-3998-9. $47.95Arunabh Ghosh. Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China. Histories of Economic Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2020. 360 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-0-6911-7947-6. $45.00Sigrid Schmalzer. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China. London: University of Chicago Press. 2016. 320 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-0-2263-3015-0. $45.00. He Bian He Bian History and East Asian Studies, Princeton University. hbian@princeton.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (2022) 52 (2): 265–275. https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2022.52.2.265 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation He Bian; Science and Really Existing Socialism in Maoist China: A Review of Recent Works. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1 April 2022; 52 (2): 265–275. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2022.52.2.265 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentHistorical Studies in the Natural Sciences Search On January 31, 1979, Michel Foucault made an offhand remark during a lecture at the College of France: “I do not think that there is an autonomous socialist governmentality. There is no governmental rationality of socialism.…One can, moreover, reproach it…but it has lived, it has actually functioned, and we have examples of it within and connected up to liberal governmentalities.” In this rare reference to socialism in The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault framed it as “the internal logic of an administrative apparatus” in which the “governmentality of a police state” forms “a fusion, a continuity, the constitution of a sort of massive bloc between governmentality and administration.”1 One can read this remark as dismissive, slotting socialism as a pseudo-ideology subsidiary to an all-encompassing global history of capitalism. And in the three decades since the end of the Cold War, such readings of socialism have only multiplied—not least due... You do not currently have access to this content.

  DOI

• Realization of unpinned two-dimensional dirac states in antimony atomic layers

  Nature Communications · 2022 · 25 citations

  • Physics
  • Quantum mechanics

  Abstract Two-dimensional (2D) Dirac states with linear dispersion have been observed in graphene and on the surface of topological insulators. 2D Dirac states discovered so far are exclusively pinned at high-symmetry points of the Brillouin zone, for example, surface Dirac states at $$\overline{{{\Gamma }}}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mover> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>Γ</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mo>¯</mml:mo> </mml:mover> </mml:math> in topological insulators Bi 2 Se(Te) 3 and Dirac cones at K and $$K^{\prime}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>K</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>′</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:math> points in graphene. The low-energy dispersion of those Dirac states are isotropic due to the constraints of crystal symmetries. In this work, we report the observation of novel 2D Dirac states in antimony atomic layers with phosphorene structure. The Dirac states in the antimony films are located at generic momentum points. This unpinned nature enables versatile ways such as lattice strains to control the locations of the Dirac points in momentum space. In addition, dispersions around the unpinned Dirac points are highly anisotropic due to the reduced symmetry of generic momentum points. The exotic properties of unpinned Dirac states make antimony atomic layers a new type of 2D Dirac semimetals that are distinct from graphene.

  DOI

• Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China

  2020 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Medicine
  • Traditional medicine

  A cultural history of the concept of pharmacy, both the material nature of drugs and the trade in medicine, in early modern China Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China's early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy. In the history of science and civilization in China, pharmacy-as a commercial enterprise and as a branch of classical medicine-resists easy characterization. While China's long tradition of documenting the natural world through state-commissioned pharmacopeias, known as bencao, dwindled after the sixteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Chinese pharmacy shops around the world today testifies to the vitality of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Rejecting narratives of intellectual stagnation or an unchanging folk culture, He Bian argues that pharmacy's history in early modern China can best be understood as a dynamic interplay between elite and popular culture.Beginning with decentralizing trends in book culture and fiscal policy in the sixteenth century, Bian reveals pharmacy's central role in late Ming public discourse. Fueled by factional politics in the early 1600s, amateur investigation into pharmacology reached peak popularity among the literati on the eve of the Qing conquest in the mid-seventeenth century. The eighteenth century witnessed a systematic reclassification of knowledge, as the Qing court turned away from pharmacopeia in favor of a demedicalized natural history. Throughout this time, growth in long-distance trade enabled the rise of urban pharmacy shops, generating new knowledge about the natural world.Bringing together a wealth of primary sources, Know Your Remedies makes an essential contribution to the study of Chinese history and the history of medicine

• Realization of Symmetry-Enforced Two-Dimensional Dirac Fermions in Nonsymmorphic α-Bismuthene

  ACS Nano · 2020 · 67 citations

  • Physics
  • Condensed matter physics
  • Quantum mechanics

  Two-dimensional (2D) Dirac-like electron gases have attracted tremendous research interest ever since the discovery of free-standing graphene. The linear energy dispersion and nontrivial Berry phase play a pivotal role in the electronic, optical, mechanical, and chemical properties of 2D Dirac materials. The known 2D Dirac materials are gapless only within certain approximations, for example, in the absence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC). Here, we report a route to establishing robust Dirac cones in 2D materials with nonsymmorphic crystal lattice. The nonsymmorphic symmetry enforces Dirac-like band dispersions around certain high-symmetry momenta in the presence of SOC. Through μ-ARPES measurements, we observe Dirac-like band dispersions in α-bismuthene. The nonsymmorphic lattice symmetry is confirmed by μ-low-energy electron diffraction and scanning tunneling microscopy. Our first-principles simulations and theoretical topological analysis demonstrate the correspondence between nonsymmorphic symmetry and Dirac states. This mechanism can be straightforwardly generalized to other nonsymmorphic materials. The results enlighten the search of symmetry-enforced Dirac fermions in the vast uncharted world of nonsymmorphic 2D materials.

  DOI

Awards & honors

• Henry Luce Foundation / ACLS Early Career Fellow (2020-21)
• National Endowment for Humanities funding (2020-21)

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