China and the World Seminar Series
This seminar series brings together leading academics to discuss issues of public policy research across China and other countries.
The Precarious Refusal: The “Sanhe Gods” and The Search for Meaning among China’s Marginalized Youth
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE
Thursday 22 January 2026, 1.00pm-2.30pm, OLD 2.21, Old Building, LSE. WC2A 2AE.
Presenter: Dr Zhuang Han (LSE)
Chair: Dr Tim Hildebrandt (Department of Social Policy, LSE)
Abstract: Zhuang Han’s current project investigates how structural economic change and cultural transformation shape the lives and aspirations of marginalized youth in post-reform China. Focusing on the Sanhe Gods – young migrant workers in Shenzhen who reject long-term factory employment in favor of daily-paid, precarious work – it analyzes how slowing economic growth, demographic transition, and an evolving labor regime have reshaped the moral meanings of work, success, and mobility. Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, the study situates the Sanhe subculture within China’s exit from its demographic dividend. As stable manufacturing jobs contract and mobility prospects recede, many youth confront a widening mismatch between educational attainment, labor demand, and life chances. The Sanhe Gods respond through withdrawal rather than protest, constructing low-cost lifestyles that reject the long-standing ethic of “eating bitterness” (吃苦). Linking micro-level survival strategies to macro-level shifts in China’s development trajectory, the dissertation proposes a framework of Human Capital Transition to explain the growing disjuncture between rising education and shrinking opportunity. It argues that the Sanhe Gods exemplify a broader youth critique of meritocratic ideals under conditions of structural stagnation, prompting a reconsideration of labor, value, and dignity in the post-industrial era.
Presenter bio: Zhuang Han is a Research Fellow at the LSE–Fudan Global Public Policy Hub in the Department of Social Policy. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University, where his research bridged social inequality, cultural and economic change, and digital labor using mixed methods. His work has appeared in Population and Development Review, The Journal of Pediatrics, and edited volumes. Zhuang also contributes to United Nations initiatives, including the UNEP-led Global Environment Outlook 7, applying his expertise in social policy and data analysis to advance inclusive and sustainable development.
This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.
Past Seminars
Embedded networks of Chinese private capital internationalisation
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 3 December 2025
China-Africa economic engagement has entered a new phase centred around the internationalisation of private capital. Private businesses are not only seemingly ubiquitous in African markets, but also deeply embedded in the African political economies in which they operate. This paper foregrounds the centrality of embeddedness to firm internationalisation by introducing a typology of embedded networks – defined as the configurations of firms’ (in)formal linkages with different actors in a particular operational context. It outlines how the modalities of Chinese private capital internationalisation are mediated by different network configurations and how these translate in varied development outcomes.
Speaker: Elisa Gambino (Global Development Institute University of Manchester, UK)
Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy)
This seminar is open to LSE staff and students only.
The Making of the Chinese Working Class: From Gig Workers to Sanhe Gods
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 19 November 2025
In this seminar, Professor Pun Ngai will be joined by two interlocutors to discuss her new book project on the remaking of the Chinese working class. Entering history, entering movement; this book project is contextualized within a conjunction of infrastructural capitalism in China and the formation of the Chinese working class. Turning the concept of infrastructural power upside down, she developed the notion of labour infrastructural power to move beyond the dichotomous view of capitalism and labour. Taking a relational class analysis seriously, while the class force could, in certain circumstances, affect or subvert spatial fixes in terms of economic zones, specific sectors, industries, or workplaces at certain times, the labour agency is deeply ingrained in the structure and context of infrastructural capitalism as a dialectical process between capital and labour continuously shaped by class struggles.
Speaker: Professor Pun Ngai (Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University).
Discussant: Dr. Zhuang Han, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Centre
.Chair and Discussant: Professor Bingchun Meng, Department of Media and Communications, LSE; Director of LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Center.
Subversive Circulation: Songs of the “Streets and Alleyways” in urban Jiangnan
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 22 October 2025
This seminar examines the commoner verse (folksongs, in other words) that pervaded the urban spaces of 16th and 17th century Suzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing. It uses these sung poems, some of which have been recorded and continue to be sung in variant forms today, to present an alternative view of where politically worthy speech might have been situated in premodern China. Although later 20th and 21st century examinations of folksongs in China tended to reproduce the same problematic binaries driving European folksong collecting, such as urban/rural and folk/elite, these early modern songs broke through north/south, urban/rural, and public/private divides. In doing so, their circulation challenges elite dominance of two interrelated practices meant to induce moral and political regulation: “literature” (wen) and “custom” (fengsu). By turns boisterous, sexy, and mournful, the songs coming out of commoner mouths disrupted the harmonious workings of an ideal city, and brought to elite attention those features of commoner life they found at odds with ritual orthodoxy. The conclusion of my talk gestures toward the contemporary relevance of my findings, noting Xi Jinping’s own interest in the folksongs of this region and their relationship to his “Global Civilization Initiative.”
Speaker: Leigh Jenco (Department of Government. LSE)
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).
Authoritarian Teleology
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 7 May 2025
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the withering away of planned economies, the 20th-century literature on communism shifted decisively toward the 21st-century literature on authoritarianism. Iza Ding argues that, while the field of comparative politics appears to have moved on from communism, enduring questions and concepts have lingered through their doppelgängers, with the modifier "communist" now replaced by "authoritarian." Paradigmatic thinking about communism has find expression in contemporary studies of authoritarianism. Ding identifies two threads connecting these two literatures: first, the centrality of questions surrounding non-democratic legitimacy and regime resilience; and second, binary assumptions about authoritarian states and their citizens. She critiques this paradigm on two grounds: first, a functionalist tendency in explanations of legitimacy and resilience; and second, incommensurability between dueling binaries about states and citizens.
Speaker: Dr Iza Ding (Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University)
Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy)
The Art of Storytelling in Authoritarian Regimes: Crafting Mainstream Consensus on Chinese Social Media
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub and the Department of Social Policy, LSE on 3 March 2025
This paper introduces the theoretical framework of "event-based narratives" to analyse pro-regime messages by opinion leaders with the case of Chinese social media. We randomly sampled verified Weibo users and collected approximately three million posts from government, media, and celebrity users between January and May 2022. Using the subject-verb-object extraction, we reverse-engineer these messages to uncover the stories of "who does what to whom" and infer underlying strategies and beliefs. Our findings show that domestic events emphasize benevolent leadership, while international events highlight national unity. In state-led events, positive narratives are coordinated, while unexpected events see scapegoating and blame-shifting strategies. Furthermore, we trace the spread of specific narratives over time by comparing the timestamps of their dissemination by different opinion leaders online. We offer new insights into consensus-building and its role in propaganda and political campaigns within and beyond authoritarian regimes.
Speaker: Dr. Yan Wang (Assistant Professor of Social Statistics at The University of Manchester)
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).
Military Assistance in mid-20th Century Asian Warfare
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 17 February 2025
The ongoing conflict in Ukraine highlights both the impact and limitation of military assistance in warfare. The mid-20th Century Asian warfare also witnesses rich experience in military assistance, including those from great powers or among countries in the region during the Second World War, Chinese Civil War, Korean War, and Indochina Wars. In particular, China was either recipient or provider of military assistance in these conflicts. The talk will assess and compare the impact of the military assistance on Asian warfare, and their long-term impact on Asian military modernization as well as regional security.
Speaker: Professor Li Chen (Renmin University of China)
Chair: Dr Qingfei Yin (Assistant Professor of International History, LSE)
Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics - How Economic Bureaucrats Make Policies and Remake the Chinese State
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 10 December 2024
Markets with Bureaucratic Characteristics offers a new account of economic policy making in China over the past four decades that reveals how bureaucrats have spurred large-scale transformations from within. Yingyao Wang demonstrates how competition among bureaucrats motivated by careerism has led to the emergence of new policy approaches. Second-tier economic bureaucrats instituted distinctive—and often conflicting— "policy paradigms" aimed at securing their standing and rewriting China’s long-term development plans for their own benefit. Emerging from the middle levels of the bureaucracy, these policy paradigms ultimately reorganized the Chinese economy and reshaped state-market relations. Drawing on fine-grained biographical and interview data, Wang traces how officials coalesced around shared career trajectories, generational experiences, and social networks to create new alliances and rivalries. Shedding new light on the making and trajectory of China’s ambitious economic reforms, this book also provides keen sociological insight into the relations among bureaucracy, states, and markets.
Speaker: Professor Yingyao Wang (Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia)
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).
Renegotiating Boundaries: The Political Economy of Territorial Urbanization in China
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 19 November 2024
This talk will explore the political economy of territorial restructuring between large cities and small counties in China's urbanization process. Over the past two decades, approximately 200 counties and county-level cities have been absorbed into larger cities, as the latter sought to expand their territorial control and undertake ambitious transformation projects. How can we understand the shifting boundaries and changing jurisdictional sizes in a political system where top-down decisions often override local preferences? Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative evidence, this talk argues that while a city’s standing in the political hierarchy largely determines its ability to initiate city-county mergers, counties can still resist or delay full territorial integration. Original boundaries may persist despite formal mergers, unless the changes are seen as providing tangible economic benefits to local society.
Speaker: Professor Jianzi He (Duke Kunshan University)
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).
The Railpolitik: Leadership and Agency in Sino-African Railway Development
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 22 October 2024
The talk will present the speaker’s new book, The Railpolitik: Leadership and Agency in Sino-African Infrastructure Development (Oxford University Press), on the interactions between Chinese state actors and African politics. How do African politics affects foreign infrastructure projects? And what explains the variation of African state effectiveness in foreign engagement and public goods delivery? The book argues that the agency of African leaders is the central factor that determines Chinese-sponsored railway delivery. And such leadership can be generated not only from centralized developmental states, but also from leaders’ perceived threats of competitive elections in democratic states. Empirical data is collected from multi-year fieldwork in Angola, China, Ethiopia and Kenya with over 250 interviews.
Speaker: Dr Yuan Wang (Duke Kunshan University).
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).
Fast-tracked city unbound? Speed, scale, and risk in China’s overseas investment
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 14 March 2024
Fast urbanism has been one of the key aspirational characteristics of contemporary China. Speedy construction and economy of scale have enabled the rapid process of urbanisation in China. In recent years, real estate developers, who facilitated urban accumulation, have also attempted to advance into overseas markets, including London, which is the main case study for this paper. How do the experiences of speedy and large-scale urban development in China translate to overseas destinations? What risk aversion strategies do they adopt? What does this tell us about the nature and agents of capital? To address these questions, this talk engages with an in-depth empirical study of an urban redevelopment project in East London that involved a Chinese developer. By evaluating the business practices of the Chinese developer in London and tracing such practices back to China, this talk aims to shed light on the nature of urban manifestations of global China and the meaning of ‘ethnic capital’.
Speaker: Professor Hyun Bang Shin (Department of Geography and Environment, LSE) Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (Department of Social Policy, LSE)
New Thinking on Rural Development in China
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 13 February 2024
The talk will present China’s ongoing rural revitalisation program through different cases. The speaker has been working on rural development programs in Yunnan, China since 2015. Faced with challenges of rural-urban disparity and rural decline, it is critical to explore new development approach by adopting rural-urban parallel rather than sequential transformation. Rural revitalisation program is not simply increasing investment but focusing on regenerating new rural economy appropriate for small-holder farmers’ development. The speaker argues that in the past two decades, the development process from poverty reduction to rural revitalisation in rural China has produced a new development narrative. But it has been largely ignored by the development community.
Speaker: Professor Xiaoyun Li (China Agricultural University).
Chair: Professor James Putzel (Department of International Development)
Watch the video here. Listen to the podcast here.
The Evolution of China's Development Cooperation
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 25 January 2024
The talk will review three changes that drives the transition of China’s international development cooperation system: narrative change, institutional change, and strategic change. It will then analyze the recent trends of development finance between China and OECD DAC countries. It argues that, despite some conceptual and structural differences, China and DAC countries demonstrate similar patterns of development finance in aligning development and foreign policy goals.
Speaker: Professor Yu Zheng (Fudan University).
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).
Watch the video here. Listen to the podcast here.
The Role of Institutions in Urban Climate Governance: Learnings From the Global South
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 6 December 2023
Within the ecosystem of urban climate governance, Dr Deshpande seeks to understand the role of local institutions in pursuing urban climate policy or action in the Global South. Countries in the Global South are experiencing rapid urbanization and the city or municipal governments, operating under weak or under-developed governance structures, are struggling to meet the needs of a growing urban population. Under such circumstances it seems unlikely that these local institutions would possess the capacity to pursue urban climate action or policy. The aim of Dr Deshpande's research is to unpack urban climate policymaking and understand the role of local institutions in this process.
Speaker: Dr Tanvi Deshpande (Research Fellow, LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub).
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Co-Director of the LSE-Fudan Research Centre for Global Public Policy and the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).
Watch the video here. Listen to the podcast here.
Property Institutions and State Capacity: A Comparative Analysis of Chinese Agricultural Projects in Zambia
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 26 October 2023
A long-standing literature argues that African states have weak capacity, especially in regulating its land. Increasingly, scholarly work on foreign land acquisition in developing countries recognizes the ‘active state’ explanations that the African states and subnational actors have played an important and diverse role in (re)structuring access and control over land and natural resources. In this talk Dr Yang will contribute to this scholarship by focusing on the role of African property institutions and propose a theory of how land tenure regimes structure the processes of investment, including land acquisition and continued control over land after acquired.
Speaker: Dr Yuezhou Yang (Research Fellow, LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub).
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Director of the LSE-Fudan Global Policy Hub).
Communication, Culture and Rural Revitalization in China
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 4 May 2023
Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and nearly ten years of participatory action research in Jinyun County, Zhejiang Province, this talk explores the role of communication and culture in Xi-era China’s drive to revitalize the countryside after decades of GDP-driven, uneven, and urban-centric development. China’s cutting-edge modern communication infrastructures and deep-rooted agrarian traditions serve as revealing sites for analyzing the possibilities and limits of the Chinese state’s rural revitalization strategy, while Zhejiang as the party-state’s chosen demonstration zone for achieving modernization and common prosperity offers a unique vantage point for a critical examination of the place of the rural in China’s overall developmental trajectory.
Speaker: Professor Yuezhi Zhao (Simon Fraser University, Canada and Tsinghua University, China).
Chair: Professor Bingchun Meng (Co-Director of LSE-Fudan Public Policy Centre, Director of LSE PhD Academy).
PODCAST available here.
Autocratic China: Ideology, Bureaucracy and Repression
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 6 March 2023
Dr Xue will consider the nature of autocratic rule in China with a particular focus on the Qing dynasty and the use of persecution to suppress potential dissent. The talk will discuss the imperial examination system and the constrains autocrats faced in using this system to select bureaucrats. Finally, the speaker will touch on the role of ideas and how these can be used to legitimate autocratic rule.
Speaker: Professor Dr Melanie Xue (LSE Economic History).
Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (LSE-Fudan Hub Council Member).
Social Policy Development in the Post-COVID Age in China and BRICS Countries: Challenges and Opportunities
Co-hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub with the Global Health Initiative
on 8 February 2023
Based on the speakers’ research on social policy developments in China and BRICS countries before and during the pandemic, especially in the fields of education and health policies, this seminar will be devoted to discussing the challenges and opportunities as these countries move to "build back better" in the post-COVID age.
Speaker: Dr Yifei Yan (Southampton University).
Chair: Dr Yuxi Zhang (School of Public Policy).
PODCAST available here.
Civic Engagement, Volunteerism and Philanthropy in Contemporary China and Beyond
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 8 December 2022
In this conversation, Profs Hasmath and Hildebrandt will explore the relationship between volunteerism, philanthropy, and civic engagement in contemporary China. They will discuss the new forms of citizen-led initiatives that are complementary to, or supplanting, state-led ones.
Speaker: Dr Reza Hasmath (University of Alberta).
Chair: Dr Timothy Hildebrandt (Department of Social Policy).
PODCAST available here.
Researching Public Opinion in China
Hosted by the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Hub on 10 November 2022
In this research dialogue session, Dr Blake Miller and Professor Bingchun Meng will discuss their research on mediated political communication in the Chinese context and exchange opinions about some of the common methodological and conceptual issues that cut across their respective fields.
PODCAST available here.