Li Zhang

Li Zhang is a Chinese anthropologist based in the United States. Focusing on the social, cultural, spatial, and psychological implications of the reform and opening up, she has written three award-winning books Strangers in the City, In Search of Paradise (2010), and Anxious China (2021). She is a professor at the UC Davis College of Letters and Science Department of Anthropology.

Biography Li Zhang, who grew up in Kunming, studied at Peking University (where she got her BA in 1987 and MA in 1990), the University of California, Irvine (where she got her second MA in 1993), and Cornell University, where she got her PhD in anthropology in 1998;

For her doctoral dissertation research, Zhang conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Zhejiangcun, where she interviewed rural migrants who had settled there from Zhejiang province. to be used for research on the rise of a popular psychological counseling movement in urban China since the 2010s. She won the American Sociological Association Community and Urban Sociology Section's award twice for Outstanding Book in Community and Urban Sociology for her first book Strangers in the City, and her second book In Search of Paradise, which focuses on the privatization of Chinese urban home-ownership and the making of the middle classes. She received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's Victor Turner Prize for her 2021 book Anxious China. She was president of the Society for East Asian Anthropology from 2013 until 2015.