HKBU's Professor Yang Chun receives Ministry of Education second-class award for outstanding scientific research — one of only two from Hong Kong

Professor Alex Wai (right),President and Vice-Chancellor and Professor Lyu Aiping (left), Vice-President (Research and Development) of HKBU pose a photo with Professor Yang Chun

Professor YANG Chun, Associate Dean (Research) and Chair Professor of Human Geography at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) has been honoured with the Second-class Award in Publications in the 10th Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award (Humanities and Social Sciences) by the Ministry of Education (MOE), China. 

Professor Yang is one of only five scholars from Hong Kong higher education institutions to receive this prestigious national accolade, which recognises outstanding achievements in basic and applied research and represents the highest standards of research excellence in humanities and social sciences across the nation.

Professor Yang’s award-winning paper, co-authored with her former PhD student Dr David Chan Yuen-tung, is titled "Geopolitical risks of strategic decoupling and recoupling in the mobile phone production shift from China to Vietnam: Evidence from the Sino-US trade war and COVID-19 pandemic" and was published in Applied Geography (2023, Vol. 158, 103028). Drawing upon the Global Production Networks (GPN) 2.0 theory, the study develops a multi-scalar analytical framework to investigate how smartphone manufacturing shifted from China's Pearl River Delta to Vietnam's Red River Delta during the dual disruptions of the Sino–US trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The research challenges the oversimplified narrative of total "decoupling" from China, demonstrating that transnational corporations (TNCs) have predominantly adopted a "China + 1" strategy to balance cost-capability ratios against volatile risk environments in times of geopolitical and geoeconomic uncertainty.

Professor Lyu Aiping, Vice-President (Research and Development) at HKBU, shared his warm congratulations and highlighted the institutional significance of this award: "This accolade underscores the impact of HKBU's research in the humanities and social sciences and represents our active response to the nation's need to better understand world trade from both theoretical and practical perspectives."
 

Professor Yang is one of only two awardees from Hong Kong higher education institutions to receive the Second-class Award in Publications in the

10th Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award (Humanities and Social Sciences) by the Ministry of Education (MOE), China. 

The awarded paper is part of Professor Yang's decades-long research tracing how manufacturing transnational corporations have reconfigured cross-border production networks across East and Southeast Asia. Her extensive work maps these regional shifts from the Four Asian Tigers—Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—to China's coastal regions, including the Pearl River Delta in the 1980s, onward to the Yangtze River Delta in the 1990s, inland China in the 2000s, and, more recently, across selected Southeast Asian economies. Her research captures these movements before, during, and after the Sino–US trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic, amidst heightened geopolitical and geoeconomic uncertainty.

Professor Yang’s awarded research paper on Applied Geography : Geopolitical risks of strategic decoupling and recoupling in the mobile phone production shift from China to Vietnam: Evidence from the Sino-US trade war and COVID-19 pandemic - ScienceDirect

Professor Yang’s research profile: 
https://scholars.hkbu.edu.hk/en/persons/CHUNYANG
https://geog.hkbu.edu.hk/people/academic-and-teaching-staff/prof-yang-chun.html