My current project, Collaboration amidst Conflict: Rural Communities and the Making of a Sustainable Waterscape in the Lower Yangzi Delta, 1500-1850, unravels the interaction between human institutions, vernacular technologies, and environmental dynamics and explores community-based solutions for environmental sustainability.

It argues that through institutional and technological innovations, many rural communities efficiently responded to environmental challenges and negotiated tensions between collective action and the temptation to free ride, sometimes even informing the scholarly approach to hydraulic technologies. Intersecting with but not overwhelmed by the more visible storm of conflict and violence, a strong current of resilience and collaboration persisted. The community-centered water governance provides an alternative to the classic models of resource management that emphasizes either the state intervention or the enclosure of the commons.

In addition to published materials, the study relies on river records, legal cases, agricultural and hydrological manuals, and genealogies that I have discovered in archival research and fieldwork, as well as the Digital Humanities tools and methods to create and maintain the database, analyze sources, and visualize and map the findings.