Time: 4:00PM- 5:30PM, Thursday March 19

Venue: IB 2071

Speaker: Dr. Mujun Zhou, Cultural Political Sociologist

Description

The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society provides an alternative historical documentation of China’s reform. It focuses on a particular group of actors in China’s public sphere — a group of intellectual elites who are often referred to in China as the liberals (ziyou pai). Since the 1990s, the liberals launched a political project that advocated to build a civil society to constrain the state power and provide citizens with an independent space for participation. Based on ethnographic and archival research, my book examines how the liberals had incorporated social movements that raised specific social and economic demands into their political project in the 2000s and how the project had later disintegrated in the 2010s. From my illustrations, readers will command a comprehensive knowledge of the history of several significant social movements happening in China in the past three decades, including the environmental movement, the labor movement, the feminist movement, the homeowners’ movement, and the new rural reconstruction movement, as well as the transformation of critical institutions in the public sphere, such as NGOs, commercialized newspapers, and digital space for public discussion.

Speaker’s Bio:

Mujun Zhou is a cultural political sociologist. She obtained her PhD degree from Brown University in 2015. Before coming to Hangzhou, she had worked at the University of California, Berkeley and Sun Yat-sen University.

Dr. Zhou’s major research interests lie in issues in political culture and social change. Between 2012 and 2024, she had studied civil society and the public sphere in China, with a particular focus on the role of social movement. She publishes her monograph, The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society, with the University of Michigan Press. The book documents and explains the historical transformation of the ideological and organizational structure of China’s public sphere since 1992.

Dr. Zhou is now starting a new project on the culture community of hiphop dance in China. Seeing China as a special case in the global spread of Africa diasporic aesthetics, she hopes to explore alternative theories in globalization and the diffussion of culture and art.