For over a decade I have explored the city of Shenzhen as a unique space that links the national and the global in an ongoing speculative project that has indelibly transformed China’s identity, economy, and urban landscape. Having begun with an examination of the vexed persistence of the rural in so-called “urban villages,” I went on to co-edit, with Mary Ann O’Donnell and Winnie Wong, a book that shows ethnographically how two legacies from the Maoist era—rural collectives and urban work units—played a pivotal role in producing the city through negotiations with state power and capital, refusing easy incorporation into narratives of economic development, urban planning, or neoliberalism. In related work on China I have examined the politics of infrastructure, of model making, and the emerging social credit system.

Books on Shenzhen

2017 Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City (co-edited with Mary Ann O’Donnell and Winnie Won Yin Wong). University of Chicago Press.

• 2020 马立安、黄韵然、乔纳森∙巴赫（主编）《向深圳学习---中国改革开放时期从经济特区到模范城市的试验目录》 Haitian Publishers (China). (Translated into Chinese by Wang Lidi)

Articles and Book Chapters on Shenzhen and China

2022     “Material Culture and the Socialist Uncanny in Mao’s China.” In Material Contradictions in Mao’s China, Jennifer Altehenger and Denise Y. Ho, eds., University of Washington Press.

2021     “Reclaiming the New, Remaking the Local: Shenzhen at 40.” With Mary Ann O’Donnell, China Perspectives, 2021/2, 71-75.

2020 “Transformations of Shen Kong Borderlands.” Forum co-editor with Mary Ann O’Donnell and Denise Y. Ho, Made in China Journal 5(3), 92-140.

2020     “Border as Sluice: Toward a Cultural Geography of the Shen Kong Borderlands” (with Mary Ann O’Donnell), Made in China Journal 5(3), 137-140.

2020 “The Red and the Black: China’s Social Credit System as a Total Test Environment.” The British Journal of Sociology, Volume 72 (3), pp. 489-502.

2020 “Merit, Morality, and Market: The Chinese Social Credit Experiment” in David Stark, ed., The Performance Complex: Competitions and Valuations in Social Life. Oxford University Press.

2020 “Spaces of Informal Production in China” (with Stefan Al). In Nina Rappaport and Robert Lane, eds., The Design of Urban Manufacturing. Routledge, pp. 151-160.

2019 “What Kind of Model? Thinking about the Special Economic Zone and the Socialist City.” Made in China Journal, Volume 4(2), 2019, pp. 72-78. 

2017 “Shenzhen: From Exception to Rule,” and “Peasants into Citizens.” In Jonathan Bach, MaryAnn O’Donnell and Winnie Wong, eds., Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City. University of Chicago Press, pp. 23-38; 138-170.

2017 “Introduction: Experiments, Exceptions, and Extensions” and “Conclusion: Learning from Shenzhen” (with MaryAnn O’Donnell and Winnie Wong). In Jonathan Bach, MaryAnn O’Donnell and Winnie Wong, eds., Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City. University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-22; 250-259.

2016 “China’s Infrastructural Fix.” Limn no. 7, Special Issue on Public Infrastructures/Infrastractural Publics, pp. 35-40.

2013 “Shenzhen: Constructing the City, Reconstructing Subjects.” Open Democracy, Special feature on Cities in Conflict, March.

2011 “Shenzhen: City of Suspended Possibility” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 35(2), pp. 414-420.

2010 “Peasants into Citizens: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen, China.” Cultural Anthropology, Volume 25(3), pp. 421-458.

Related Teaching: Spaces of Exception; The Ex-City: Exception, Exports, and Global Urban Formations; Inequality in India and China: The Social Lives of Emerging Economies