Koji Hirata is a Senior Research Fellow & Senior Lecturer in History at Monash University. He earned his PhD in history at Stanford University. Before joining Monash, he was a Research Fellow (JRF) at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on modern China, Japan, and Russia/Soviet Union with broader implications for the global economic history. His latest book, Making Mao's Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in August 2024.

Hongzhe Wang (b. 1983, Anshan, China) is a media historian and associate professor of Journalism and Communication at Peking University. He received a PhD in communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include media history, the Cold War, cybernetics, information society, and labor studies. He has long been involved in advanced studies in media-centered humanities, social sciences, and art history. He is the founder of Beijing Media Group and Game Manual, and co-founder of Assembly. He lives and works in Beijing.

Jinyi Chu is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University where he is also affiliated with the European Studies Council, the Council on East Asian Studies, and the International Security Studies program. Chu holds a PhD from Stanford University. His research interests span Russian poetry, socialist culture, Russo-Chinese relations, memory studies, and translation studies. Chu’s first book, Fin-de-siècle Russia and Chinese Aesthetics: The Other is the Universal (Oxford UP, 2024) shows that modernism in Russia emerged from a sustained dialogue with Chinese culture. He has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles and public essays on the writing of Lenin, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Pasternak. Now he is working on a book project on the aesthetics of reform in 1980s Soviet Union and China.