Email: yan_hairong@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn

Affiliation: Professor at Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor at the Department of Sociology.

Nationality: Chinese

A Brief Note:

Earlier, I studied rural-urban labor migration, an important feature of contemporary China's development and social transformation. In 1998, I found in field research that many rural young women left the countryside with the determination of "having to go out." This crisis of self and subjectivity could not be explained as a function of the ordinary rural-urban disparity. I couldn't help but wonder what kind of modernity and what kind of rural-urban relationship makes the countryside unable to carry the future of youth subjectivity, and even makes the countryside no longer be entrusted with the upbringing of the next generation. (Many of my generation were sent to the countryside by their parents and entrusted to the care of their grandparents.) Through these women’s migration at the turn of the century, I examined the rural-urban, gender, and class relations, and wrote New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (Duke University Press, 2005).

Since 2005, I have conducted field research in Africa to understand the migration of people, goods, and capital from China to Africa. As China has been accused of practicing "neo-colonialism" by mainly Western entities, Prof. Barry Sautman of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and I. co-authored China in Africa: Discourses and Practices (China’s Social Science Literature Press, 2017), which identifies how China's “going out” differs from that of the West, and how China's “going out” affects countries in the Global South.

Meanwhile, rural China is still undergoing unprecedented changes. Since China's accession to the WTO, the countryside has become more closely connected to the global market. The soybean crisis, termed as such by Chinese media around 2005, is a signaling event. I re-initiated rural research in 2013, this time focusing on China's food sovereignty, agrarian changes and the rural cooperative/collective economy. With like-mined people, I have been exploring the pathways to rural revitalization and sustainable development.