Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Urban In-Between

I received my Ph.D. degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Prior to my doctorate, I earned a B.A. in International Relations at the University of California, Davis, where I developed my love for the anthropology of China. As a young student, I was compelled by the classic ethnographies written by Margery Wolf. Her cultural analysis of “the uterine family” was particularly inspirational for me. Wolf’s deep engagement with Chinese women and their kin-based relationships led me to pursue anthropology, gender studies, and critical theory as a life-long endeavor.

Primarily trained in the anthropology of post-socialist China and the ethnography of global supply chains, I specialize in the intersecting topics of transnational capitalism, migration (transnational and domestic), counterfeit culture, gendered labor, industrialization, and urbanization.

My current book manuscript examines how Chinese, African, and South Korean migrant entrepreneurs in Guangzhou, China synchronize their life trajectories and changing subjectivities of labor with the boom and bust cycles that link the global commodity chains of fast fashion. Taking the tempos of market volatility as its objects of ethnographic analyses, my project provides an ethnographic case study of the heterogeneous and uneven rhythms that comprise the speculative dynamics of supply chain capitalism.

My work aims to demystify the globally-recognized “Made in China” label and show how the proliferation of small-scale and informal garment workshops and wholesale sites link China with other countries across the Global South. The devaluation of human lives and their labor across the developing world calls for finely tuned historical and ethnographic analyses of the spatial and temporal intersections between China’s post-socialist transformations and the emergence of transnational subcontracting.

I am an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Cultural Anthropology. My early research focused on ethnicity, nationalism, and post-socialism in China. I published articles on nationality theory in China, memory work, and ethnic politics in the post-Cold War global order, on gender and film, photography, and popular culture. Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (Duke University Press, 2000) was the first major ethnographic study to examine the work and writing of minority intellectuals in the imagining of post-socialist futures.

Over the last decade or more my research has focused on activism and advocacy work around the environment, labor, migrant education. I have published essays on the transnational and media dimensions of anti-dam protest in southwest China; on global environmental NGOs and the privatization of nature; on self-immolation among Tibetans; on transnational activism directed at Apple and the companies that source its supply chain; and on the emerging field of global media ecologies.

The Cultural Anthropology special online issue, “Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet” https://culanth.org/fieldsights/93-self-immolation-as-protest-in-tibet  was for several years the most downloaded in the history of the journal Cultural Anthropology’s “Hot Spot” series.  “The Labor Question in China: Apple and Beyond” http://saq.dukejournals.org/content/112/1/172.abstract  was the most downloaded article in the South Atlantic Quarterly in 2013.  I am the co-editor of Ghost Protocols: Development and Displacement in Global China (Duke University Press, 2016).  I am currently working on two book projects, Migrant Futures: Education and Labor in Global China, and Black Lung: An Ethnography of Dust, a collaborative project with former students, miners and labor activists in China.  

Service to the discipline and the university has been a major priority for me. From 2001-2007, I directed Duke’s Asia/Pacific Studies Institute. During this period, I raised over five million dollars for East Asian studies programming at Duke, send the first Duke students in Trinity College to China and other East Asian countries with funding for research and internships, developed APSI’s MA program in East Asian Studies, worked to found the rural education non-profit Dream Corp International (http://www.dreamcorps.org/en/our_programs.html), and the student-led newspaper and now web-based magazine, Duke East Asian NEXUS (http://www.dukenex.us). I also worked with Duke’s Development Office to write the successful application for the Oscar Tang Named Professorship (now held by Professor Prasenjit Duara in Duke’s History Department). From 2007-2008 I co-directed the Mellon-Sawyer seminar, “Portents and Dilemmas: Health and the Environment in China and India, A Comparative Study.”

I have been deeply involved in raising Duke's profile in China. From 2008-2015, I directed the Duke Engage Migrant Education project, a ten-week immersive project at a middle school for the children of migrant workers on the rural-urban fringes of Beijing http://www.dandelionschool.org/a/ENGLISH/general/2011/0105/general_info.html. From 2011-2013, I co-directed the India-China Global Semester Abroad program, and an Environment, Health, and Development seminar at Beijing University. In 2013, I was awarded the Howard Johnson Excellence in Teaching Award, and, in the same year, the Duke Engage Excellence in Student Mentoring Award. for many years I was on the advisory board of the Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), the leading trans-regional labor activist organization in East Asia (http://sacom.hk). I serve on the editorial board of the China Environment and Wealth Series at the University of Amsterdam Press, the journal Identities, and several other press and online ventures.

I have has served on curriculum, hiring, and assessment committees at the Duke Kunshan campus in China, and was a core member on the committee that authored DKU’s global liberal arts curriculum. I offer courses on "Global Apple, “Migrant China,” “Environmental, Health and Development in China,” “Anthropology and Film,” “Global Environmentalism and the Politics of Nature,” “Theorizing the Anthropocene." My most recent new course, offered in the Spring of 2022, is “Under Surveillance: Everyday Digital Life.”  

I am a cultural and economic anthropologist specialised in the study of housing and the urban environment. I completed my PhD in Anthropology at Brandeis University in 2018 and have been working as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Duke Kunshan University since then. My fields of research cover economic anthropology, political economy, human geography, and critical infrastructure studies. From 2012 to 2019, I conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork tracing the development of a low-end housing market at the urban fringe of east Nanjing, southeast China (long-term stay from 2013 to 2015, short field trips conducted in 2012 and 2019). In the field, I followed government officials, developers, real estate brokers, and homebuyers and sellers to study how diverse actors built the local housing market from the bottom up. I am particularly interested in how certain economic concepts help to bring actors together and allow for capital accumulation in the urban process. 

The project produced several articles published on peer-reviewed journals such as Positions: Asia Critique, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Urban Studies. In these articles, I explored the valuation of rural estate in land assembly and resettlement projects, the temporal orchestration of home presales, and the dominant narratives that brought diverse actors together to bring the market into existence at Nanjing's urban periphery. 

My ethnographic monograph, Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China’s Housing Market (Cornell University Press 2026), argues that China’s urban accumulation has been relying on the formation of its homeownership ideologies—developed in recent decades after its housing marketization reform—that view the residential property, paradoxically, as an inalienable and indispensable possession. The book traces the circulation of the vernacular concept called “gangxu/inflexible demand” in an emerging market of housing at the urban periphery of east Nanjing from 2013 to 2015. During this time, I conducted fieldwork studying how various actors, including government officials, developers, buyers, and real estate brokers, use “gangxu/inflexible demand” to refer to—and construct—a need for the ownership of a primary home for all urban citizens. My primary interlocutors are a group of real estate brokers who specialized in selling properties to low-income families who are presumed to have an “inflexible demand” for a first home in Nanjing. Such extractive practices targeting property-less Chinese families, I argue, produce the urban periphery as both a space and a form and product of social relationships in contemporary China. 

 Anxious Homes challenges the conceptualization of homeownership as based solely on the exclusive access to a home. In the past two decades, urban accumulation worldwide has made homes unaffordable for most people living in big cities. Scholars from multi-disciplinary fields have advocated for an approach to push discussions of housing rights beyond the logics of privatization and exclusivity. The study of homeownership ideologies in China, where the state actively contains the development of private property rights, supplies insights for this discussion. I argue that, in urban China, homeownership does not suggest independence but, rather, a fuller inclusion of citizens within the state. Developed outside the rights-based discourse, messages conveyed by the floating signifier of “inflexible demand” are partial and amorphous, yet more inclusive and effective in evoking shared sentiments, mobilizing collective actions, and inciting responses from state authorities in post-socialist China. 

I started a second project studying infrastructural breakdown and disrepair in contemporary China in fall 2023. I use multi-sited ethnography and digital ethnography to trace abandoned housing and real estate developments that are showing up in the ongoing crash of China’s housing market. Some abandoned constructions have become urban ruins, serving as spectres and spectacles that dramatize the impact of China’s economic downturn on social media. Some of these abandoned developments contain apartments that had already been sold in pre-sales to families who are still making mortgage payments today. This project follows various human and non-human actors, such as these homeowners, urban explorers, media bloggers, and the organisms thriving in some ruins, to explore how they make uses of the abandoned buildings. I am interested in how the ruination of the built environment, and the appropriation of the ruins expose the economic and ecological crisis of over-accumulation caused by China’s infrastructural investment; and how the haunting images of derelict buildings unsettle the process of the capitalization of land, time, and labor in China’s neoliberal development. 

I am holding a Ph.D in History from New York University. As a historian of modern China and a theorist of everyday life, my research is on the intellectual history of China in the late 19th century and 20th century. I am particularly interested in how Chinese non-Marxist leftists understood everyday life and conceptualized it in regards of human emancipation, modernization, democracy and mass politics in the early 20th century. My research projects include Chinese feminism, leftism, and new village movement in the 20th century China. Beyond my specific field of modern China, I am working through feminism and gender, cultural politics, the theory of everyday life, urban studies and labor history. My publications include women's singleness in China, histories of migration in East Asia in the first half of the 20th century, and mass education movement in the 1930s China. My book manuscript addresses intellectual conceptualization of new life and the new life movement in China and how the social movement responded to the global capitalism, leftism and the Chinese revolution seeking for anti-fascism, anti-colonialism, democracy and the nation-state building in the first half of the 20th century in China and in Southeast Asia. My second book project focuses on the new village movement and how it related to the state policy of urbanization, governance, citizenship and how it helped us to understand socialist and post-socialism urbanism in 20th century China.