Yuxi (Alicia) Zhong is a historian of business and the state in Mexico, trained in world history at Shanghai University. Her master's research compares two pillar firms of Porfirian Monterrey, the Fundidora steelworks and the Cuauhtémoc brewery, to show how companies bargained with and reshaped state policy during early industrialization. Her current project carries the same question into the present: drawing on six months of fieldwork in Monterrey, Mexico City and Guadalajara, she studies how Chinese firms navigate regulation and compliance in nearshoring-era Mexico. Now moving among digital-nomad communities across Chinese cities, she is also developing comparative research on the East Asian developmental state, taking China as a representative case and digital nomadism as one lens on how state policy, rural revitalization and poverty alleviation shape new forms of mobile work, in comparison with Southeast Asia (Thailand, the Philippines) and Mexico.