Dr Yunyun Zhou, MSc (Oxford), DPhil (Oxford)

Profile

Dr Yunyun Zhou is a political sociologist with expertise in gender and authoritarianism, representation, political institution, nationalism, and the politics of affects. She holds a master’s degree in Political Sociology and a PhD in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford. After holding academic positions at Sciences Po and the University of Oslo, she joined the Department of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London in 2024. 

Her past research has gained international recognition in the academic fields of politics and gender and offered critical insights into topics such as gender lobbying and legislation, substantive political representation, institutional change, state feminism, and authoritarianism, particularly in East Asia. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including Politics & Gender, Women’s Studies International Forum, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Journal of Contemporary China. One of her most recent articles critically examines the global rise ‘illiberal state feminism,’ where state institutions adopt pro-feminist rhetoric through non-democratic and monopolistic structures. Her other research article in the top-ranked journal Politics & Gender examined the underlying mechanisms behind China’s opaque gender lobbying and legislative processes, shedding light on the complexities of gender policy in an authoritarian context.

Teaching

• POL361 Gender and Politics
• POL3003 Gender, Sexuality, and Capitalism

Research

Research Interests:

Yunyun positions herself as a fieldwork-based researcher working at the intersection of political sociology, gender studies and cultural studies. Her research takes a critical and interdisciplinary approach to the study of gender and politics within a global context. Her general research interests lie in how individuals negotiate with authoritarian states, when social movements rise, and how gender matters in these political processes. Using a political ethnographic approach, her on-going book project examines three generations of women cadres’ political subjectivities in China’s local party-states. Her book illustrates the process of how the ‘ruled’ are transformed into the ‘rulers’ in everyday practices of China’s post-socialist governance, offering a nuanced understanding of power, gender, and political agency in an authoritarian context.

Yunyun’s research expertise covers a range of topics concerning gender and politics, such as state feminism and gender lobbying, affective governance, youth politicisation, and political representation. Her latest article dissects the institutional dilemmas that are inherent to 'illiberal state feminism' in China and beyond. Another recent publication of hers compares China's anti-domestic violence and anti-sexual harassment activism and reasons the type of political dynamics and mechanisms that can lead to successful gender lobbying and legislation. Her previous research also examines the Chinese Communist Party’s latest mass organisation reforms and its representative crisis, in particular the increasing bureaucratisation and detachment of the Party's ‘women’s work’ in the Xi-Era. Her other recent publications include two articles on Chinese state’s affective governance through gendered discourses in two TV series that aimed to mobilise its citizens' self-sacrifice, gratitude and heroism during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Her current research projects include:

• A forthcoming monograph titled The Gender of Authoritarianism: Women Cadres and Political Institutions in Contemporary China, which is currently under contract with Amsterdam University Press.
• A journal article exploring the sociological explanations of tokophobia and reproductive politics in East Asia
• A book chapter examining the political divergence of China’s liberal and ‘pink’ feminists 

Examples of research funding:

Examples of research funding and grant applications:

• Pariticipating researcher of grant application ‘Chinese Youth in a Divided World: Life Choices, Social Imaginaries and China's Possible Futures’ to Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council), with Marina Svensson.
• Collaborating partner of grant application ‘CRISIS: Citizen Response to Environmental Crises and State Legitimacy in China’, Forskningsrådet (Norwegian Research Council) with Hedda Flatø.
• Particiating researcher of grant application ‘New Political Imaginaries and Models in the 21st Century: A Comparative and Transnational Analysis’ to Agence Nationale de la Recherche (The National Agence of Research of France) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) with Yves Sintomer.
• Doctoral fellowship and Lecture Series Grant from Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation, 2019-2021
• The Annual Award on Gender and Authoritarianism from The Annette Lawson Charitable Trust, 2018

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles

Jiang, Xinhui, and Yunyun Zhou. 2024. “When Socialist Legacy Meets International Norms: Gender Quota Adoption and Institutional Change in China.” Journal of Contemporary China 0 (0): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2023.2299964.

Zhou, Yunyun. 2023. “Theorizing Illiberal State Feminism: Institutional Dilemmas and Political Parallelism in China’s Gender Governance.” Women’s Studies International Forum 98 (May): 102734. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102734.

Jiang, Xinhui, and Yunyun Zhou. 2022. “Coalition-Based Gender Lobbying: Revisiting Women’s Substantive Representation in China’s Authoritarian Governance” 18 (4): 978–1010. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X21000210.

Zhou, Yunyun, and Kailing Xie. 2022. “Gendering National Sacrifices: The Making of New Heroines in China’s Counter-COVID-19 TV Series.” Communication, Culture and Critique 15 (3): 372–92. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcac014.

Xie, Kailing and Yunyun Zhou. 2021. “The Cultural Politics of National Tragedies and Personal Sacrifice.” Made in China Journal (blog). May 30, 2021. https://madeinchinajournal.com/2021/05/30.

Sintomer, Yves, and Yunyun Zhou. 2019. “‘Representation’ and ‘Dàibiǎo’: A Comparative Study of the Notions of Political Representation in France and China.” Journal of Chinese Governance 4 (4): 362–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/23812346.2019.1672371.

Zhou, Yunyun. 2019. “« La petite fille modèle du Parti » ? Analyse néo-institutionnelle des réformes organisationnelles de la Fédération des femmes à l’ère de Xi Jinping”. Perspectives chinoises 2019 (2): 19–32. http://journals.openedition.org/perspectiveschinoises/9605.

Zhou, Yunyun. 2019. “‘Being a Good Daughter of the Party’? A Neo-Institutional Analysis of the All-China Women’s Federation Organisational Reforms in China’s Xi Era” China Perspectives 2019 (2): 17–28. https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.9042.

Book chapter

Nykvist, Henrik, and Yunyun Zhou. (under review) “Cultivating the ‘Successors of Socialism’: The Communist Youth League’s Ideological and Political Education Program in China’s Middle Schools”. In Youth Politics in Post-Mao China. Stanford University Press. Edited by Jérôme Doyon, Konstantinos Tsimonis, Sofia Fraziani. 

Book review

Yunyun, Zhou. 2017. “Writing Prostitution into Modern’s China’s State-building”. Book review in Women and Gender in Chinese Studies Review. November 2017. https://booksandideas.net/Prostitution-and-Statebuilding.html.

Supervision

Potential PhD supervision topics include:

• Gender, democracy and authoritarianism
• Radical feminist theories and movements in global contexts
• Global left-wing movements
• Political sociology in East Asia

Public Engagement

Yunyun is a member of the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network (FIIN), a global collective of feminist scholars from over 50 countries who analyze social and political institutions through a gendered lens. Since 2022, Yunyun has been a research associate of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, Germany since 2022. Previously, she was a research associate in the international research group 'New Political Representative Claims: A Global View' during her stay at the Centre de Recherches Sociologiques et Politiques de Paris and Paris Université 8 in France from 2018 to 2020.

Filmmaking and curation

Yunyun adopts a creative and multi-media approach to qualitative research, exploring in the use of visual ethnography in her teaching and research on immigration, gender, and politics. She has received advanced training through the Filmmaking for Fieldwork program at the University of Manchester and the Documentary Storytelling course at University College London (UCL). Yunyun’s expertise also extends beyond academia into film curation, where she focuses on independent documentaries and protest cinema that directly engage with socio-political issues. Her curatorial work emphasises the films of female, queer and dissident directors, as well as politically censored films, reflecting her broader commitment to highlighting underrepresented voices.

Using film as a socially and political mobilising medium, Yunyun is also actively engaging with civil organizations to foster feminist, queer, and critical cultural experiences for the public. In 2022, she co-founded FRA ØST TIL NORD, an Oslo-based NGO dedicated to increasing the visibility of Asian culture in the Nordic region through independent cinema. As part of this initiative, she launched the Kina Kino documentary screening series, collaborating with independent cultural spaces, grassroots artists, and student communities in Oslo.

Yunyun has co-curated, convened, and spoken at numerous film festivals in Norway, France, and Germany. In her role as co-curator of the Berlin-based Chinese cinema screening project C/LENS, she convened and contributed to two significant events: the open webinar ‘Independent Documentary in China’s Feminist and LGBTQ+ Movements’ in June 2022, and a roundtable discussion titled ‘Female Gaze and Subaltern Speak in Contemporary China’ in November 2022, in collaboration with the community-driven Sinema Transtopia in Berlin.

She is also involved in the upcoming sixth edition of the Made-in-China Film Festival, co-organized by Comptoir du Doc and Institut de Confucius de Bretagne, set for October 2024. This edition will focus on female directors and their political and cultural perspectives on China's past, present, and future.

Selected media

Co-curator and panellist of roundtable in «Femmes cinéastes et féminisme dans la sinosphère» at Made-in-China Film Festival, Rennes, October 11, 2024

Discussant in panel ‘La Cina fra repressione interna e nuovo (dis)ordine mondiale’ with Simone Pieranni and Eleonora Zocca at International Journalism Festival. April 23, 2023.

Discussant in podcast ‘Why Are Young Women Today Tokophobic? The Structural Dilemma Behind Marriage and Reproduction in China’ on Weirdo. February 28, 2023.

Curator of Kina-Kino and Alter-Kina Documentary Screening Projects at Fra Øst til Nord, Oslo. 

Panellist in Roundtable ‘Beyond Authoritarianism: Counterstrategies, Solidarities and Utopia’ at Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. 15 September 2022. 

Interviewed by Valentin Cebron, in «Xi Jinping s'échine à étouffer MeToo» on Politis. November 24, 2022.

Interviewed by Stella Chen, in ‘Will China’s updated Women’s Rights Law actually help women?’. South China Morning Post. November 5, 2022.

Interviewed by Lu Shen, in ‘Under Xi Jinping, women in China have given up gains. The Wall Street Journal. November 9, 2022.

Curator, Chair and Panellist of ‘Female Gaze and Subaltern Speak in Contemporary China’ in C/LENS Indie Chinese Cinema in Berlin. June 26, 2022.

Curator, Chair and Panellist of ‘Independent Documentary in China’s Feminist and LGBTQ+Movements’ at Sinema Transtopia & C/LENS Indie Chinese Cinema in Berlin. November 19, 2022.

Interviewed by Valentin Cebron, in «Pourquoi le #MeToo chinois inquiète les maîtres de Pékin», Le Temps. January 5, 2022.

Interviewed by Shen Lu, in ‘Pretty lady cadres: new data shows the limits of women’s advancement in China’s leadership’, ChinaFile. December 21, 2020.

Co-author of editorial article with Emilie Frenkiel and Yves Sintomer. «La gestion chinoise de la pandémie est ambivalente», Le Monde. June 2, 2020.