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Contributors: Issue 2, 2022

Marine BROSSARD completed a PhD in Chinese Studies in France in 2018. Her thesis, entitled ‘The riverscape of the Yangzi’s Three Gorges: Landscape and the national imaginary in the People’s Republic of China (1994–2014)’, examines the fate of a transformed national landscape and the exhaustion of the concept of ‘landscape’ by state capitalism in contemporary China, arguing for the subversive potential of the imagining of a new landscape appreciation in opposing the commodification of reality. 

Darren BYLER is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2021) and In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports, 2021), as well as the co-editor of Xinjiang Year Zero (ANU Press, 2022). His current research is focused on state power, policing and carceral theory, infrastructure development, and Global China.

Corey BYRNES is an Associate Professor of the Humanities, Comparative Literary Studies, and Chinese Culture at Northwestern University. He is the author of Fixing Landscape: A Techno-Poetic History of China’s Three Gorges (Columbia University Press, 2019), which won the 2018 First Book Award from the Weatherhead Institute for East Asian Studies at Columbia University and Honorable Mention for the 2020 Harry Levin Prize for outstanding first book from the American Comparative Literature Association. His current book project, Cultures of Threat, examines the relationship between China and a global environmental imaginary in which the former is increasingly treated as an existential threat. 

Jenny CHAN is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is the co-author, with Mark Selden and Pun Ngai, of Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers (Haymarket Books and Pluto Press, 2020; translated into Korean by Narumbooks, 2021). She also serves as Vice-President (2018–present) of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Labour Movements. Her current research on informal employment and logistics labour platforms is funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the East and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies.

Howard CHIANG is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018), which received the International Convention of Asia Scholars Humanities Book Prize and the Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021), a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Finalist and a Bullough Book Award winner. Between 2019 and 2022, he served as the Founding Chair of the Society of Sinophone Studies.

Christopher CONNERY teaches in the Literature Department at the University of California Santa Cruz and in the graduate programme in Cultural Studies at Shanghai University. He has been a member of the Grass Stage theater troupe since 2010, participating as writer, actor, political consultant, brick carrier, and other roles. He has also worked as a psychogeographer in Shanghai, on projects that included The Alley Plays (巷子戏, 2012) and the ongoing Suzhou Creek Project (走河, 2015–). He has published on early imperial Chinese culture, the figure of the ocean in capitalist geo-mythology, the global 1960s, and contemporary China. Recent essays have appeared in boundary 2, Historical Materialism, 热风学术, and the New Left Review

Giulia DAL MASO is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She has published in Historical Materialism, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Journal of Cultural Economy. She is the author of Risky Expertise in Chinese Financialisation: Returned Labor and the State–Finance Nexus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Brian DeMARE teaches modern Chinese history at Tulane University. A cultural historian, he is primarily interested in exploring how Chinese citizens have navigated everyday life under Communist Party rule. His books include Mao’s Cultural Army: Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2019), and the latest Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman (Stanford University Press, 2022). 

Ivan FRANCESCHINI is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. His current research focuses on Global China as seen from the vantage point of Cambodia. His latest books include Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (ANU Press and Verso Books, 2019), Xinjiang Year Zero (ANU Press, 2022), Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour (Verso Books, 2022), and Global China as Method (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With Tommaso Facchin, he co-directed the documentaries Dreamwork China (2011) and Boramey: Ghosts in the Factory (2021). He is a founder and chief editor of the Made in China Journal, The People’s Map of Global China, and Global China Pulse. Since 2022, he is also the managing editor of the Asia-Pacific Journal (Japan Focus)

Ting GUO is a scholar of religion and Chinese/Sinophone studies, focusing on religion, politics, ideology, and gender. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh and was a research fellow at the University of Oxford and Purdue University. Her first book monograph, Politics of Love: Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press.

Stevan HARRELL is an interdisciplinary environmental scholar who conducted research in Taiwan and China for many decades and taught at the University of Washington from 1974 to 2017. His next book, An Ecological History of Modern China, will be published by the University of Washington Press in 2023. He is now writing a memoir of the Yangjuan Primary School in Yanyuan, Sichuan, and has started research for a possible book on the history of farming in Whatcom County, Washington.

Brian HIOE is one of the founding editors of New Bloom, an online magazine founded in Taiwan in 2014 in the wake of the Sunflower Movement to cover activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific. He is a freelance journalist and independent scholar, as well as a translator.

Xinmin LIU is an Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Cultures in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Race at Washington State University. In 1997, he received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Since 2005, he has focused his research on cultural geography, landscape aesthetics, and ecocriticism in China and the West. He published a volume of ecocritical writings titled Embodied Memories, Embedded Healing: New Ecological Perspectives from East Asia, which he co-edited with Peter I-min Huang (Tamkang University, 2021). He is currently completing a monograph entitled Reawakening the Ecological Imaginary: Interlaced Agencies in China’s Agrarian Heritages. 

Nicholas LOUBERE is an Associate Professor at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. His research examines microcredit and digital finance in rural China, and Chinese migration to Africa for resource extraction.

Matthew LOWENSTEIN is a Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He studies the economic history of modern China from the late imperial period to the early People’s Republic.

Ghassan MOAZZIN is an Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Sadia RAHMAN is Non-Resident Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Policy Research and Initiative (CAPRI) in Mumbai, India. Her research focuses on China’s domestic and foreign policy, and Chinese ethnic policies in northwest China. 

Jesse RODENBIKER (冉哲诗) is Associate Research Scholar at the Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University and Assistant Teaching Professor of Geography at Rutgers University. He is the author of Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (Cornell University Press, forthcoming in 2023). 

Sigrid SCHMALZER is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her published works include Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (University of Chicago Press, 2016, recipient of the Levenson Prize), along with a children’s picture book based on that research, Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean: Remembering Chinese Scientist Pu Zhelong’s Work for Sustainable Farming (Tilbury House Publishers, 2018). She also co-edited Science for the People: Documents from America’s Movement of Radical Scientists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2018). She is a founding member of the Critical China Scholars group and the revitalised Science for the People, and a vice-president in her faculty union.

Seiji SHIRANE is an Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York (CUNY). He received history degrees from Yale University (BA) and Princeton University (PhD) and his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Richard SMITH holds a PhD from the History Department at the University of California Los Angeles with a thesis on the contradictions of market socialism in China and held post-docs at the East–West Center, Honolulu, and Rutgers University. He is a co-founder and editor of systemchangenotclimatechange.org. His writings can be found at richardanthonysmith.org.

Holly SNAPE is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She is currently attempting to understand the Chinese Party-State relationship and how it shapes the political system. She is also interested in civil society, social activism, and political discourse.

Dorothy J. SOLINGER is Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. She has authored seven books, including Poverty and Pacification: The State Abandons the Old Working Class (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (University of California Press, 1999), and States’ Gains, Labor’s Losses: China, France, and Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980–2000 (Cornell University Press, 2009), and edited or co-edited six other books, including Polarized Cities: Portraits of Rich and Poor in Urban China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

Christian SORACE is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (ANU Press and Verso Books, 2019) and Proletarian China: One Century of Chinese Labour (Verso Books, 2022). He is currently conducting research on the urbanisation of the grasslands in Inner Mongolia, China, and ger districts in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

Peter THILLY is an Assistant Professor of Modern East Asian History at the University of Mississippi and the author of The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022).

Jeffrey WASSERSTROM is Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds courtesy appointments in Law, Literary Journalism, and Political Science and directs the Honors Program of the School of Humanities. A frequent contributor to newspapers, magazines, and literary reviews as well as academic journals, his most recent books are, as author, Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) and, as editor, The Oxford History of Modern China (Oxford University Press, 2022). He will be spending the spring of 2023 at the University of London as a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College.

Michael WEBBER is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Melbourne. An economic geographer, his recent work has revolved around economic development in rural China (Making Capitalism in Rural China, Edward Elgar, 2012), most recently delving into the political economy of China’s water management. With Jon Barnett, Brian Finlayson, and Mark Wang, he published Water Supply in a Mega-City: A Political Ecology Analysis of Shanghai (Edward Elgar, 2018) and with them, Sarah Rogers, Ian Rutherfurd, Chen Dan, and a group of graduate students, is engaged in a large project entitled ‘The Technopolitics of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project’. 

Shui-yin Sharon YAM is an Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is a diasporic Hongkonger, and the author of Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Ohio State University Press, 2019). Her research focuses on transnational rhetorics, political emotions, gender, and race.

Emily T. YEH is Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research concerns development and nature–society relations, mostly in Tibetan parts of the People’s Republic of China, including the political ecology of pastoralism, the politics of nature conservation, vulnerability to climate change, and environmental subjectivities. She is the author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Margherita ZANASI is Professor of Chinese History at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption 1500s to 1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China (The University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Jerry ZEE is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. He is the author of Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System (University of California Press, 2022). Charlie Yi ZHANG is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. His research addresses the cultural, material, and affective ramifications of neoliberal restructuring in the Asia-Pacific through the lenses of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, and explores transnational networks of resistance to imperialist and neocolonial exploitation. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, Zhang has published research articles in top-ranking journals in several fields, including the Journal of Asian Studies, American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and Feminist Formations.

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