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Xuyi Zhao is Assistant Professor at the Centre for China Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is broadly interested in urban anthropology, political anthropology, gender, and development. Her current book project investigates state-engineered urbanisation in Southwest China at the intersection of infrastructural urbanism, community building, and the reconfigurations of time. Combining a “studying up” approach to urban governance with a careful examination of day-to-day lived experiences, her research traces different imaginaries engendered by state planning, explores what those imaginaries mean to urban residents, and analyses how they materialise in practice to both perpetuate and change social dynamics surrounding class, family, and work. This project brings into conversation the scholarship on urban China and the growing anthropological interest in city-making as an instrument of change and an institutionalised practice that powerfully shapes and is shaped by different walks of people who come into contact with it. Besides this major book project, she also writes about migration and urban citizenship, hegemonic femininities, and the paradoxes of women’s work in contemporary China. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Boston University, an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in Political Science from Peking University.

Research Interests

• Political Anthropology
• Urban Anthropology
• Time and Temporality
• Infrastructure and Development
• Women’s and Gender Studies