Borned and raised in China's Northeast, I am interested in the history of my homeland and the coming into being of this region, both politically and intellectually. In history, the place of China's Northeast, also known as Manchuria, was both the center of the Qing empire's homeland and the important borderland of modern China. I am now working on the history of China's political transformation from an empire into a modern nation state, and how that grand process of historical change intertwined with the regional history of Manchuria through the periods of empire, nation-states, and colonial times from the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century.