Han Cheng

Han Cheng is a senior research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Landscape Lab. Previously, he was a Max Weber Foundation fellow at the National University of Singapore and a global justice fellow at Yale University’s McMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He has also been appointed a visiting professor at the University of Turin, the Polytechnic University of Turin, and Université Laval. A former recipient of the Humboldt German Chancellor Fellowship, he completed his PhD in Geography at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, and received the Royal Geographical Society–IBG Graduate Research Award. 

Han is a human geographer interested in the political, cultural, and historical geographies of empire, especially drawing on post/decolonial critiques of geographical imagination and the geopolitics of knowledge. These theoretical concerns are explored in the context of China’s contemporary rise and its growing attempts to map, categorize, and make sense of other people and places, focusing on the spatial politics of Chinese social science inquiry into “development,” “area,” geography, and anthropology. By bringing together disparate epistemic communities and cartographic practices, his work conceptualizes Global China as an expanding apparatus of knowledge-making about the non-Western world. He has published widely on these topics in leading journals, including Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Political Geography. 

At MPIWG, he is extending these research interests to geographies of science, notably the geographical, environmental, and earth sciences, and their intersection with the geopolitics of territory and resources. He is a principal investigator of the Volkswagen Foundation-funded project “China’s Science Silk Road and the New Geopolitics of Knowledge Production” (with Anna Lisa Ahlers, MPIWG, and Hang Zhou, Université Laval), which examines the emerging practices and technologies of planetary knowledge production by Chinese scientists and science organizations along the Belt and Road Initiative. The project addresses the ways in which Chinese scientific expansion into volumetric spaces—oceanic, terrestrial, and orbital—is produced by, and productive of, geopolitical power.

He is currently developing a new project at the intersection of science and technology studies, political ecology, and development studies, exploring China’s increasing involvement in the governance of landscapes, seascapes, and spacescapes across the Global South through the translation and transfer of technical expertise, or so-called “Chinese Wisdom and Solutions.” He is a co-investigator of the project “‘Chinese Wisdom’ at Sea? Marine Spatial Planning and the New Global Ocean Governance” (with Hang Zhou and Jean-Frédéric Morin), funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The project examines how China’s domestic sociotechnical imaginaries of marine space travel into global contexts, and how they are perceived and received by different actors.

Han is an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography and a member of the editorial board for Political Geography. In addition to his scholarly work, he is engaged in the field of Global China Studies more broadly, serving as an editor of the transnational, public-facing research collective The People’s Map of Global China / Global China Pulse and on the global advisory board of Chinese in Africa/Africans in China (CA/AC) Research Network. He also collaborates on multi-sited, comparative, and grounded approaches to studying Global China, including in his co-edited volume The Material Geographies of the Belt and Road Initiative: Infrastructures and Political Ecologies on the New Silk Road (Bristol University Press, 2025).