August 21, 2026
Seeing the Software:
Dr. Jingdong Yu’s journey from a rural village in northern Jiangsu to a fellowship placement at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is anything but conventional. Growing up in a farming family where his father shifted from carpentry to factory work and his mother never held a formal job, he seemed destined for a very different path. What changed his trajectory was an inspiring primary school teacher who channelled the “talkative boy” into social science knowledge competition winner, opening the door to history, geography, politics and other disciplines far beyond his village.
By the time he entered Nanjing University, Jingdong had discovered that his curiosity was drawn not to physics or engineering—fields he once enjoyed but felt hampered by weak mathematics—but to the questions of power, ideas and institutions that lie at the heart of political science, a rare choice in a landscape dominated by science and business majors.
Teacher Yu with students in Ningxia, 2011
Jingdong first learned about the United Board Fellows Program through announcements at Nanjing University and, more concretely, through a colleague in the office of alumni affairs who had herself participated in the program. He had kept the program in mind while concentrating on research and publication, but when a new cohort was announced in late 2024 he decided the time was right to apply. Following the Summer Leadership Institute in Singapore that kicked off the cohort of 2025-26, he chose CUHK as the site of his Asian placement, seeing it as a place where his interests in university history, political geography and governance could be explored in a new context.
Jingdong presenting at Summer Leadership Institute, 2025
His placement is built around two research projects that link his training in European history with the realities of contemporary East Asia. The first grows out of his doctoral work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French cartography and infrastructure, now reoriented toward a modern case: an enclave located in the city of Nanjing but administratively under the jurisdiction of Shanghai.
Travelling with French teachers, 2012
Working with Prof. Nelson Lee in CUHK’s School of Governance and Policy Science, Jingdong is developing a study of this “Feidi”(enclave) to ask how the drawing of boundaries, the allocation of resources and the management of space shape relationships between local communities and authorities. In parallel, he is engaging with Lee’s work on Hong Kong’s water infrastructure, planning both a review and further reflections on how such “hidden” systems influence relations between science, technology and politics.
The second project examines the historical development of universities, colleges and specialized “schools” in the West, using CUHK’s collegiate origins in Chung Chi, United and New Asia Colleges as a comparative lens for understanding how institutional forms influence academic culture, student life and governance. Visits to the college museums and educational histories that link Hong Kong and Nanjing are already feeding into papers he plans to complete after returning home.
This is not Jingdong’s first encounter with Hong Kong. In 2008, as a student in a leadership programme on climate change, he experienced the city as a fast, expensive and somewhat intimidating megacity, especially compared with mainland cities at the time. Returning now as a United Board Fellow, he finds that the price gap with Nanjing has narrowed, but more importantly his attention has shifted from the “hardware” of skyline and infrastructure to the “software” of services, management and the ordering of everyday lives.
Hong Kong welcomes Jingdong, then an undergraduate, 2008
CUHK’s campus, with its multiple libraries, staggered class schedules, dispersed canteens and efficient shuttle buses, has become a living case study of how institutional design can ease daily pressures and enhance the student and staff experience. For a political scientist of institutions and governance, these observations offer concrete examples of how policy and planning can turn abstract commitments to “student-centered education” into daily reality.
Always a modest diner, usually taking a light breakfast of coffee and something simple in his staff quarters near Shaw College, CUHK, Jingdong is nonetheless very aware of the contrast between Jiangsu’s culinary culture and those in Guangdong and Hong Kong, even if he rarely indulges in lavish meals himself. At a dim sum lunch in the Chung Chi College Staff Club, he embraced the local custom of rinsing bowls and chopsticks with tea—“for psychological needs,” he remarked—linking it to the broader trend of open kitchens that respond to diners’ desire for visible cleanliness.
As barbecued pork, shrimp dumplings, vegetables in soup and seafood udon arrived at a small table surrounded by larger, noisier groups, his conversation with this writer flowed from the use of public and private chopsticks on the meal table and generational misunderstandings to traditional family structures and the enforcement of patriarchal norms by mothers themselves. Ideas came so quickly that he sometimes forgot about the food in his bowl, a small sign of how fully the placement has immersed him in new ways of thinking about old questions of authority, culture and everyday life.
Walking by Lake Ad Excellentiam and its winding bridge on Chung Chi campus after lunch, Jingdong pointed out an invasive fish lying motionlessly at the bottom of the pond—an apparently casual remark that fits a pattern: he notices the details that do not align, whether in ecology, family expectations or academic publishing. His instinct is consistently reformist: to ask how systems might be adjusted to better serve students, scholars and the broader public.
For a scholar whose field remains somewhat off the mainstream, the United Board Fellows Program and his placement at CUHK offer more than a temporary change of scenery. They show what such an experience can do for a scholar with a distinctive career path: connecting rural experience to global debates, linking historical research to contemporary institutional practice, and equipping him with insights and partnerships that he hopes will bring about positive changes at his home institution and beyond.
Jingdong (first right) with 2025-26 cohort of United Board Fellows