Mian Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of History, Northwestern University. His research focuses on the making of Communist propaganda machines in twentieth-century China. His dissertation combines political history, printing history, and global history to examine how domestic and transnational interpersonal networks and the burgeoning print culture contributed to the rise of Communist propaganda in China from the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 through the period of high socialism in the 1960s.