Zhang, Li

Li Zhang 
Professor, PhD, Cornell University, 1998

Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, California 95616, USA

lizhang@ucdavis.edu
Telephone: (530) 752-1595
Fax: (530) 752-8885
Office: 311 Young Hall

Education
I received my doctoral degree in anthropology from Cornell University in 1998 and a M.A. degree in social relations from UC Irvine in 1993. Before coming to the U.S., I studied Chinese literature and literary theory at Peking University and received my B.A. and first M.A. there. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University (1998--1999).

Research Interests
My earlier research traces the profound transformations of space, power, and social networks within China's "floating population" in the context of late socialism and globalization. Recently I have completed my second book manuscript that examines the spatial, cultural, and political consequences of privatizing and commercializing urban housing regime and the rise of the new middle classes in postsocialist China. I have also co-edited a volume with Aihwa Ong, which explores how social technologies of privatization and neoliberalism articulate with diverse areas of life and politics in China. My next research project will explore the "inner revolution" brought by the market transition through examining an emergent mass-individualized psychotherapy and psychological counseling movement in urban China. I am interested in how the technoscientific formulation of the person through professional talk therapy gives rise to a new conception of the private self and new forms of self-management.

Recent Publications

Books

In Press  In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis, Cornell University Press.

2008  Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar, edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong, Cornell University Press.

2001  Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford: Stanford University Press (Winner of the Robert E. Park Award, presented by the Community & Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association in 2002).

Articles and Book Chapters

In Press "Postsocialist Urban Dystopia?" in Noir Urbanism: Dystopic Images of Modern Cities, edited by Gyan Prakash. Princeton University Press.

2009  "Chinese Workers Confront Capitalist Labour Relations," Labour/La Travail Vol. 63: 221-229.

2008  "China's Ascent As a Theoretial Question," AAA Anthropology News, November.

2008  "Introduction: Privatizing China: Powers of the Self, Socialism from Afar," (co-authored with Aihwa Ong) in Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar, edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong, Cornell University Press.

2008  "Private Homes, Distinct Lifestyles: Performing a New Middle-Class," in Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar, edited by Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong, Cornell University Press.

2006  "Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late Socialist China," Current Anthropology, 47 (3): 461-484.

2006  "From the Mountains and the Fields: The Urban Transition in the Anthropology of China" (co-authored with Alan Smart). China Information Vol XX (3): 481-518.

2004  "Forced From Home: Property Rights, Civic Activism, and the Politics of Relocation in China," Urban Anthropology, Vol 33(2-4): 247-81. 

2002 “Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China,” Public Culture 14 (2): 311-334.

2002 “Urban Experiences and Social Belonging among Chinese Rural Migrants” in Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, 275-299, Perry Link, Richard Madsen, Paul Pickowicz, eds. The Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

2001 “Migration and Privatization of Space and Power in Late Socialist China.” American Ethnologist 28 (1): 179-205.

2001 “Contesting Crime, Order and Migrant Spaces in Beijing” in Ethnographies of the Urban in Contemporary China, 201-222, Nancy Chen et al, eds. Durham: Duke University Press.

2000 “The Interplay of Gender, Space, and Work among China’s Floating Population” in Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Household, and Gender in China, 171-196, Gail Henderson and Barbara Entwisle, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press.