Yang Zhan
Biographic Data
| ID | 629963 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yang Zhan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yang |
| FAMILY NAME | Zhan |
| SIGNATURE | ZHAN Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7357-7861 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Hydrological Intensification Decouples Crop Production From Ecological Integrity: Identifying Biophysical Limits in an Arid Agro‐Ecosystem
Hydrological intensification in desert oases decouples food production from aridity, yet how irrigation‐supported blue‐water consumption (BWC) reshapes nonlinear trade‐offs among ecosystem services remains uncertain. We examined crop production (CP), soil conservation (SC), and water purification (WP) in the Hetao Irrigation District from 2001 to 2023 using multisource earth observation, generalized additive models, pairwise interaction analysis,…
Promise-making with rural tourism: A temporal perspective on rural development in China
This article focuses on “not-yet successfully touristified villages” in rural China. While rural tourism has been on the rise resent years, many villages have not yet benefited from the tourism growth but mire in aborted or suspended projects. Through an ethnographic case study of a northern Chinese village, we reveal how the preparatory process of tourism has reshaped a village long before tourists or gentrifiers arrive. Conceptualizing this pro…
Integrating network pharmacology and multi-omics to explore the potentiating effect and mechanism of Shenlingcao oral liquid on cisplatin chemotherapy in Lewis lung cancer mice
Urbanization’s mediator: Reassembling rural Tibetan lives through pig breed changes
On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China
We Are All Implicated: An Interview With Korean Anthropologist Mun Young Cho
This interview with Professor Mun Young Cho, a leading cultural anthropologist at Yonsei University, explores her intellectual journey and research on poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. Trained in South Korea and the United States, Professor Cho reflects on her encounters with socialism, neoliberal reforms, and the intellectual shifts between these contexts. The conversation delves into her work bridging academic sch…
Taking distinction practices seriously: Methodological reflections on ethnographic distance in fieldwork with marginalized people
Anthropologists often consider the distinction from our interlocutors a barrier, assuming that overcoming the distance allows us to understand our interlocutors. Other times, ethnographers intentionally maintain ethnographic distance to avoid "doing harm" to our interlocutors. In either case, ethnographers are assumed to be responsible for maintaining a proper distance from our research participants. As two cultural anthropologists who work with …
Aesthetic Governance and China's Rural Toilet Revolution
This article addresses aesthetic politics in the Chinese rural toilet revolution. Toilet retrofitting is conventionally regarded as an issue of sanitation improvement, but in the emerging trend of rural post-productivism transformation, toilets have become contested sites of aesthetic governance in rural development. Using the case of a village in Northern China, the authors show that, in order to beautify the rural environment, toilet identifica…
China in and out of World Anthropologies: Epistemic Politics Amidst Historical Ironies and Contemporary Realities
Since the early 2000s, scholars have proposed the notion of "world anthropologies" to expose the pluralistic nature of anthropology, and to counter the colonial legacy embedded in knowledge production. This paper discusses how anthropological knowledge in and of China contributes to, is distant from, and challenges, such intellectual movement at both intellectual and institutional levels. First, unlike Western anthropology which shifts from colon…
Seeking clarity at a time of confusion, through world anthropologies
A section called “World Anthropologies” within American Anthropologist (AA) itself speaks to an apparent paradox: the difficulty of going beyond the US-centric perspective to see the plural. But this task is more urgent than ever as American anthropology is engaged in soul-searching that demands serious changes to our practice. As Negrón et al. (2024) summarize, these changes include, among others, decolonizing the ways research is done, addressi…
Can anthropologists get humor? A collaborative experiment on empathetic knowing at a time of predicaments
As a pandemic-era collaborative writing project undertaken amid rising geopolitical tensions, this article demonstrates understanding humor in contemporary China as an ethnographic project leading toward deep, empathetic knowledge at a time when in-person fieldwork became difficult. Through deciphering and translating layered meanings "encrypted" in and intentions signaled by humor in a new comedy program launched in 2021, we dive deep into the l…
Epistemic Labor: Narratives of Hyper-Uncertainty and Future-Making on China's Urban Fringe
This article conceptualizes storytelling as epistemic labor that is critical to the everyday meaning-making and future-making of Chinese rural migrants. Compared to stories told by scholars and migrants turned writers and artists, those told by migrants in a quotidian setting are largely overlooked because of their lack of representational value. However, narratives of success, fortune, and the future that circulate on China's urban fringe are es…
Protein intake from different sources and cognitive decline over 9 years in community-dwelling older adults
Objectives: To examine the association of protein intake from different sources with cognitive decline. Methods: Our analysis included 3,083 participants aged 55-93 years from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. Cognition was assessed in 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, and 2015. Diet intake was assessed using weighing methods in combination with 24-h dietary recalls for three consecutive days at each survey. Results: Participants consumed 13.94% of en…
When It's Dark in the East, It's Light in the West”: Lifelong Venturing and Accelerated Temporality in Beijing's Urban Villages
For decades, Chinese rural migrants have been understood as engaging in dagong 打工 (working for a boss), or the selling of their waged labor, conditioned by the global production chain, dormitory regimes, and exploitive labor relations within and beyond factories. Meanwhile, chuangdang 闯荡 (venturing) as a life project that either opposes or extends dagong has been neglected in scholarly studies. Venturing refers to a spatiotemporal condition defin…
Building community-centered social infrastructure: A feminist inquiry into China’s Covid-19 experiences
Gratitude Education: ’ Aid-as-Gift and the Agency of Recognition in Chinese Ethnic Governance
Previous studies on disaster aid emphasize on how aid as gift forms hierarchical relations and thus perpetuates political and symbolic domination. This article, however, highlights the diverse possibilities and capabilities emerged in disaster aid. Based on a 15-month fieldwork, the authors focus on the ethnic minority Qiang’s post-earthquake experience throughout the unprecedented aid and state-sanctioned ‘Gratitude Education’ campaign. This art…
Beyond neoliberal urbanism: Assembling fluid gentrification through informal housing upgrading programs in Shenzhen, China
Suspension 2.0: Segregated Development, Financial Speculation, and Waiting among Resettled Peasants in Urban China
Since the late 2000s, many rural-to-urban migrants in China have lost their rural land to development plans, resettled in designated areas, and acquired formal urban residency. They stopped migrating, and have apparently ended their life of "suspension," namely protracted mobility. While most existing research literature on this population foregrounds the issue of land dispossession, this article argues that, following resettlement, these former …
The moralization of philanthropy in China: NGOs, voluntarism, and the reconfiguration of social responsibility
Neo-liberalism shifts social responsibility to individuals. The practice of neo-liberal governmentality in China confirms this worldwide trend. This is evident when government retreats from the responsibilities of providing social welfare for rural migrant workers and leaves them to privately funded philanthropy programmes. However, the Chinese case also presents an anomaly in that the shifting of responsibilities under neo-liberalism results not…
Gifting as Governance: NGO Service Projects and Disciplinary Power in Rural Migrant Settlements in China
In contemporary China, migrant workers have gathered in urban villages and formed communities of their own. The regulative power of the state has not fully penetrated these enclaves, thus creating opportunities for NGOs to shoulder many of the ongoing welfare responsibilities. The primary goal of this study was to explore how NGO service projects can generate a new type of disciplinary power through give-and-take practices. I argue that service p…
Plasticity and Susceptibility of Brain Morphometry Alterations to Insufficient Sleep
Sleep is less frequently studied using imaging techniques than neurological and psychiatric disorders. Whether and how acute and chronic sleep loss affect brain morphology remain largely unknown. We used voxel-based morphology method to study brain structural changes in healthy subjects over multiple time points during sleep deprivation (SD) status and in patients with chronic insomnia. We found that prolonged acute SD together with one night sle…
The urbanisation of rural migrants and the making of urban villages in contemporary China
In the past decades, urban villages proliferate in major cities of China. These marginalised places not only are home to many local villagers, but also host millions of rural migrants. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the spatial and social production of Chinese urban villages. It discusses urban village residents’ detailed tactics in developing/participating in the informal housing market, service market and labour market. By so do…
Science as Gift: NGO-Supported Informal Science Education for Rural Migrant Children in Contemporary China
This article explores informal science education (ISE) for rural migrant children in the Chinese context. Many of them are restricted from the public schools due to political exclusions enforced by the household registration system and their economic standing. As a result, they are often enrolled in quasi-legal migrant children schools with limited access to education in science. In response, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have stepped in t…
“My life is elsewhere”: Social exclusion and rural migrants’ consumption of homeownership in contemporary China
The urbanisation of rural migrants and the making of urban villages in contemporary China
In the past decades, urban villages proliferate in major cities of China. These marginalised places not only are home to many local villagers, but also host millions of rural migrants. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the spatial and social production of Chinese urban villages. It discusses urban village residents’ detailed tactics in developing/participating in the informal housing market, service market and labour market. By so do…
Beyond neoliberal urbanism: Assembling fluid gentrification through informal housing upgrading programs in Shenzhen, China
Suspension 2.0: Segregated Development, Financial Speculation, and Waiting among Resettled Peasants in Urban China
Since the late 2000s, many rural-to-urban migrants in China have lost their rural land to development plans, resettled in designated areas, and acquired formal urban residency. They stopped migrating, and have apparently ended their life of "suspension," namely protracted mobility. While most existing research literature on this population foregrounds the issue of land dispossession, this article argues that, following resettlement, these former …
Gratitude Education: ’ Aid-as-Gift and the Agency of Recognition in Chinese Ethnic Governance
Previous studies on disaster aid emphasize on how aid as gift forms hierarchical relations and thus perpetuates political and symbolic domination. This article, however, highlights the diverse possibilities and capabilities emerged in disaster aid. Based on a 15-month fieldwork, the authors focus on the ethnic minority Qiang’s post-earthquake experience throughout the unprecedented aid and state-sanctioned ‘Gratitude Education’ campaign. This art…
The moralization of philanthropy in China: NGOs, voluntarism, and the reconfiguration of social responsibility
Neo-liberalism shifts social responsibility to individuals. The practice of neo-liberal governmentality in China confirms this worldwide trend. This is evident when government retreats from the responsibilities of providing social welfare for rural migrant workers and leaves them to privately funded philanthropy programmes. However, the Chinese case also presents an anomaly in that the shifting of responsibilities under neo-liberalism results not…
Can anthropologists get humor? A collaborative experiment on empathetic knowing at a time of predicaments
As a pandemic-era collaborative writing project undertaken amid rising geopolitical tensions, this article demonstrates understanding humor in contemporary China as an ethnographic project leading toward deep, empathetic knowledge at a time when in-person fieldwork became difficult. Through deciphering and translating layered meanings "encrypted" in and intentions signaled by humor in a new comedy program launched in 2021, we dive deep into the l…
China in and out of World Anthropologies: Epistemic Politics Amidst Historical Ironies and Contemporary Realities
Since the early 2000s, scholars have proposed the notion of "world anthropologies" to expose the pluralistic nature of anthropology, and to counter the colonial legacy embedded in knowledge production. This paper discusses how anthropological knowledge in and of China contributes to, is distant from, and challenges, such intellectual movement at both intellectual and institutional levels. First, unlike Western anthropology which shifts from colon…
We Are All Implicated: An Interview With Korean Anthropologist Mun Young Cho
This interview with Professor Mun Young Cho, a leading cultural anthropologist at Yonsei University, explores her intellectual journey and research on poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. Trained in South Korea and the United States, Professor Cho reflects on her encounters with socialism, neoliberal reforms, and the intellectual shifts between these contexts. The conversation delves into her work bridging academic sch…
Taking distinction practices seriously: Methodological reflections on ethnographic distance in fieldwork with marginalized people
Anthropologists often consider the distinction from our interlocutors a barrier, assuming that overcoming the distance allows us to understand our interlocutors. Other times, ethnographers intentionally maintain ethnographic distance to avoid "doing harm" to our interlocutors. In either case, ethnographers are assumed to be responsible for maintaining a proper distance from our research participants. As two cultural anthropologists who work with …
Aesthetic Governance and China's Rural Toilet Revolution
This article addresses aesthetic politics in the Chinese rural toilet revolution. Toilet retrofitting is conventionally regarded as an issue of sanitation improvement, but in the emerging trend of rural post-productivism transformation, toilets have become contested sites of aesthetic governance in rural development. Using the case of a village in Northern China, the authors show that, in order to beautify the rural environment, toilet identifica…
Seeking clarity at a time of confusion, through world anthropologies
A section called “World Anthropologies” within American Anthropologist (AA) itself speaks to an apparent paradox: the difficulty of going beyond the US-centric perspective to see the plural. But this task is more urgent than ever as American anthropology is engaged in soul-searching that demands serious changes to our practice. As Negrón et al. (2024) summarize, these changes include, among others, decolonizing the ways research is done, addressi…
Epistemic Labor: Narratives of Hyper-Uncertainty and Future-Making on China's Urban Fringe
This article conceptualizes storytelling as epistemic labor that is critical to the everyday meaning-making and future-making of Chinese rural migrants. Compared to stories told by scholars and migrants turned writers and artists, those told by migrants in a quotidian setting are largely overlooked because of their lack of representational value. However, narratives of success, fortune, and the future that circulate on China's urban fringe are es…
Building community-centered social infrastructure: A feminist inquiry into China’s Covid-19 experiences
Gifting as Governance: NGO Service Projects and Disciplinary Power in Rural Migrant Settlements in China
In contemporary China, migrant workers have gathered in urban villages and formed communities of their own. The regulative power of the state has not fully penetrated these enclaves, thus creating opportunities for NGOs to shoulder many of the ongoing welfare responsibilities. The primary goal of this study was to explore how NGO service projects can generate a new type of disciplinary power through give-and-take practices. I argue that service p…
“My life is elsewhere”: Social exclusion and rural migrants’ consumption of homeownership in contemporary China
Science as Gift: NGO-Supported Informal Science Education for Rural Migrant Children in Contemporary China
This article explores informal science education (ISE) for rural migrant children in the Chinese context. Many of them are restricted from the public schools due to political exclusions enforced by the household registration system and their economic standing. As a result, they are often enrolled in quasi-legal migrant children schools with limited access to education in science. In response, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have stepped in t…
Plasticity and Susceptibility of Brain Morphometry Alterations to Insufficient Sleep
Sleep is less frequently studied using imaging techniques than neurological and psychiatric disorders. Whether and how acute and chronic sleep loss affect brain morphology remain largely unknown. We used voxel-based morphology method to study brain structural changes in healthy subjects over multiple time points during sleep deprivation (SD) status and in patients with chronic insomnia. We found that prolonged acute SD together with one night sle…
The urbanisation of rural migrants and the making of urban villages in contemporary China
In the past decades, urban villages proliferate in major cities of China. These marginalised places not only are home to many local villagers, but also host millions of rural migrants. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the spatial and social production of Chinese urban villages. It discusses urban village residents’ detailed tactics in developing/participating in the informal housing market, service market and labour market. By so do…
Gifting as Governance: NGO Service Projects and Disciplinary Power in Rural Migrant Settlements in China
In contemporary China, migrant workers have gathered in urban villages and formed communities of their own. The regulative power of the state has not fully penetrated these enclaves, thus creating opportunities for NGOs to shoulder many of the ongoing welfare responsibilities. The primary goal of this study was to explore how NGO service projects can generate a new type of disciplinary power through give-and-take practices. I argue that service p…
The moralization of philanthropy in China: NGOs, voluntarism, and the reconfiguration of social responsibility
Neo-liberalism shifts social responsibility to individuals. The practice of neo-liberal governmentality in China confirms this worldwide trend. This is evident when government retreats from the responsibilities of providing social welfare for rural migrant workers and leaves them to privately funded philanthropy programmes. However, the Chinese case also presents an anomaly in that the shifting of responsibilities under neo-liberalism results not…
Building community-centered social infrastructure: A feminist inquiry into China’s Covid-19 experiences
Gratitude Education: ’ Aid-as-Gift and the Agency of Recognition in Chinese Ethnic Governance
Previous studies on disaster aid emphasize on how aid as gift forms hierarchical relations and thus perpetuates political and symbolic domination. This article, however, highlights the diverse possibilities and capabilities emerged in disaster aid. Based on a 15-month fieldwork, the authors focus on the ethnic minority Qiang’s post-earthquake experience throughout the unprecedented aid and state-sanctioned ‘Gratitude Education’ campaign. This art…
Beyond neoliberal urbanism: Assembling fluid gentrification through informal housing upgrading programs in Shenzhen, China
Suspension 2.0: Segregated Development, Financial Speculation, and Waiting among Resettled Peasants in Urban China
Since the late 2000s, many rural-to-urban migrants in China have lost their rural land to development plans, resettled in designated areas, and acquired formal urban residency. They stopped migrating, and have apparently ended their life of "suspension," namely protracted mobility. While most existing research literature on this population foregrounds the issue of land dispossession, this article argues that, following resettlement, these former …
Protein intake from different sources and cognitive decline over 9 years in community-dwelling older adults
Objectives: To examine the association of protein intake from different sources with cognitive decline. Methods: Our analysis included 3,083 participants aged 55-93 years from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. Cognition was assessed in 1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, and 2015. Diet intake was assessed using weighing methods in combination with 24-h dietary recalls for three consecutive days at each survey. Results: Participants consumed 13.94% of en…
When It's Dark in the East, It's Light in the West”: Lifelong Venturing and Accelerated Temporality in Beijing's Urban Villages
For decades, Chinese rural migrants have been understood as engaging in dagong 打工 (working for a boss), or the selling of their waged labor, conditioned by the global production chain, dormitory regimes, and exploitive labor relations within and beyond factories. Meanwhile, chuangdang 闯荡 (venturing) as a life project that either opposes or extends dagong has been neglected in scholarly studies. Venturing refers to a spatiotemporal condition defin…
Epistemic Labor: Narratives of Hyper-Uncertainty and Future-Making on China's Urban Fringe
This article conceptualizes storytelling as epistemic labor that is critical to the everyday meaning-making and future-making of Chinese rural migrants. Compared to stories told by scholars and migrants turned writers and artists, those told by migrants in a quotidian setting are largely overlooked because of their lack of representational value. However, narratives of success, fortune, and the future that circulate on China's urban fringe are es…
Aesthetic Governance and China's Rural Toilet Revolution
This article addresses aesthetic politics in the Chinese rural toilet revolution. Toilet retrofitting is conventionally regarded as an issue of sanitation improvement, but in the emerging trend of rural post-productivism transformation, toilets have become contested sites of aesthetic governance in rural development. Using the case of a village in Northern China, the authors show that, in order to beautify the rural environment, toilet identifica…
China in and out of World Anthropologies: Epistemic Politics Amidst Historical Ironies and Contemporary Realities
Since the early 2000s, scholars have proposed the notion of "world anthropologies" to expose the pluralistic nature of anthropology, and to counter the colonial legacy embedded in knowledge production. This paper discusses how anthropological knowledge in and of China contributes to, is distant from, and challenges, such intellectual movement at both intellectual and institutional levels. First, unlike Western anthropology which shifts from colon…
Seeking clarity at a time of confusion, through world anthropologies
A section called “World Anthropologies” within American Anthropologist (AA) itself speaks to an apparent paradox: the difficulty of going beyond the US-centric perspective to see the plural. But this task is more urgent than ever as American anthropology is engaged in soul-searching that demands serious changes to our practice. As Negrón et al. (2024) summarize, these changes include, among others, decolonizing the ways research is done, addressi…
Can anthropologists get humor? A collaborative experiment on empathetic knowing at a time of predicaments
As a pandemic-era collaborative writing project undertaken amid rising geopolitical tensions, this article demonstrates understanding humor in contemporary China as an ethnographic project leading toward deep, empathetic knowledge at a time when in-person fieldwork became difficult. Through deciphering and translating layered meanings "encrypted" in and intentions signaled by humor in a new comedy program launched in 2021, we dive deep into the l…
Integrating network pharmacology and multi-omics to explore the potentiating effect and mechanism of Shenlingcao oral liquid on cisplatin chemotherapy in Lewis lung cancer mice
Urbanization’s mediator: Reassembling rural Tibetan lives through pig breed changes
On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China
We Are All Implicated: An Interview With Korean Anthropologist Mun Young Cho
This interview with Professor Mun Young Cho, a leading cultural anthropologist at Yonsei University, explores her intellectual journey and research on poverty, labor, development, and youth in China and South Korea. Trained in South Korea and the United States, Professor Cho reflects on her encounters with socialism, neoliberal reforms, and the intellectual shifts between these contexts. The conversation delves into her work bridging academic sch…
Taking distinction practices seriously: Methodological reflections on ethnographic distance in fieldwork with marginalized people
Anthropologists often consider the distinction from our interlocutors a barrier, assuming that overcoming the distance allows us to understand our interlocutors. Other times, ethnographers intentionally maintain ethnographic distance to avoid "doing harm" to our interlocutors. In either case, ethnographers are assumed to be responsible for maintaining a proper distance from our research participants. As two cultural anthropologists who work with …
Hydrological Intensification Decouples Crop Production From Ecological Integrity: Identifying Biophysical Limits in an Arid Agro‐Ecosystem
Hydrological intensification in desert oases decouples food production from aridity, yet how irrigation‐supported blue‐water consumption (BWC) reshapes nonlinear trade‐offs among ecosystem services remains uncertain. We examined crop production (CP), soil conservation (SC), and water purification (WP) in the Hetao Irrigation District from 2001 to 2023 using multisource earth observation, generalized additive models, pairwise interaction analysis,…
Promise-making with rural tourism: A temporal perspective on rural development in China
This article focuses on “not-yet successfully touristified villages” in rural China. While rural tourism has been on the rise resent years, many villages have not yet benefited from the tourism growth but mire in aborted or suspended projects. Through an ethnographic case study of a northern Chinese village, we reveal how the preparatory process of tourism has reshaped a village long before tourists or gentrifiers arrive. Conceptualizing this pro…
Sociology (16 works) · China (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (11 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Geography (7 works) · Law (6 works)