Excellence in Commentary/Op-Ed/Perspective
Yangyang Cheng, “To Outlive Tyranny,” Dissent
ABOUT THE WORK: How should one live and persist in the United States today, while the country teeters on the brink of authoritarianism? This essay addresses this urgent question from a unique, personal angle: as a Chinese immigrant who has experienced state oppression firsthand and is still contending with the cost of exile, and as a scholar and educator who faces students at a time when “both encouraging and advising against active resistance can feel like miseducating the youth.” Reflecting the author’s transnational and multidisciplinary background, the essay draws from examples in contemporary Chinese history, including WWII and the Tiananmen movement, as well as from a moving account of teaching Chinese at prisons in Alabama.
Published in Dissent magazine’s Fall 2025 issue, themed “Authoritarianism and Resistance,” and featured on its cover, this is an essay of this moment and for this moment. Patrick Iber, editor of Dissent, called it a “powerful essay” and highlighted it in the editor’s introduction to the issue. Widely read and praised since its publication, the piece has been shared on social media and in newsletters across the US, as well as in countries as far as Spain and South Korea. An attorney advisor at the US Department of Justice who has since left their position wrote to the author to thank her for writing this piece. The essay is also being included in discussions on “responding to injustice” in the course “Citizenship in the 21st Century,” part of Stanford University’s core freshman curriculum.
Yangyang Cheng is an award-winning writer and interdisciplinary scholar, where her research focuses on the history of science in China and US-China relations. Currently, she is a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Her essays have appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, and have received several awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA), Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Her literary criticism has received the 2024 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from The Washington Monthly and a 2022 People's Choice Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is an editor at the Made in China Journal and hosts its Gateway to Global China podcast. She is also a co-host, writer, and producer of the acclaimed narrative podcast series, Dissident at the Doorstep, from Crooked Media. She has served on the jury for the Baifang Schell Book Prize from Asia Society since the prize's inception in 2024 and has been a judge for the James Beard Journalism Awards. Born and raised in China and trained as a particle physicist, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider for over a decade. In Fall 2025, she was a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics.
Honorable Mention: Jennifer Chowdhury, “A Police Officer's Death Divides Bangladeshi Americans,” new Lines Magazine
New or renewing members will be acknowledged at Gala and may not be reflected here.