Siyu Tang DPhil in Anthropology

Supervisor: Dr. Dace Dzenovska & Prof. Michael Keith

College affiliation: St Hugh’s College

My doctoral research looks into the spatial-temporal transformation of urban Northeast China, the Maoist “industrial base”, in its post-Maoist present. More specifically, I plan to follow irregularly employed or unemployed youths who migrate to the northeastern cities and move into cheap apartments to live an “indolent life” (e.g. embodying such discourses as tangping or xianyu), in response to the impossibility of upward economic mobility, four decades into the economic reform. I thus ask how post-socialist time of decline encounters capitalist time of stagnation, and how the failed dreamworld of socialism becomes a “utopia of indolence” for precarious youths at the economic bottom in contemporary China.

I received a BS in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford.

Publications

Rhetoric of governance in China under COVID-19
Blog | 20/12/2021