Yiching Wu
Associate Professor, Asian Institute
Associate Professor, Department of East Asian Studies
Biography
Main Bio
Yiching Wu teaches East Asian Studies, modern Chinese history, and anthropology at the University of Toronto. An anthropologist trained at the University of Chicago, his research focuses on the history, society, and politics of Mao’s China, in particular during the Cultural Revolution. His main scholarly interests include historical anthropology, critical social theory, populism and social protest, modern Chinese history, Chinese socialism and post-socialism, and politics of historical knowledge. He is currently working on two book-length projects about China’s late 1960s, on the demobilization of Cultural Revolution mass politics and the contradictory role of Mao during the Cultural Revolution, respectively.
Select publications
- "The Strange Case of China: History, Class, and Postsocialism," Duke University Press (2019).
- "The Cultural Revolution at 50: A Q&A with Four Specialists," Blog of the Los Angeles Review of Books (2016).
- "Popular Politics and Ideological Struggles in China’s Cultural Revolution: A Response to Critics," American Sociological Association (ASA) (2015).
- "Oxford Bibliography of the Cultural Revolution," Oxford University Press (2015).
- The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2014). Winner of the 2013 President’s Book Award, the Social Science History Association.
- “Coping with Crisis in the Wake of the Cultural Revolution: Toward a Historical Critique of Chinese Postsocialism,” Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, 21 (4), 2013. Forthcoming.
- “The Great Retreat and Its Discontents: Reexamining the Shengwulian Episode in the Cultural Revolution,” The China Journal, no. 71, 2014. Forthcoming.
- “How State Enumeration Spoiled Mao’s ‘Last Revolution,’” Journal of Modern Chinese History 7, no. 2 (2013), 1-18.
- “‘Revolution’ and ‘Restoration’ in Contemporary China: A Genealogical Inquiry,” in Xueping Zhong, et al., ed., Culture and Social Transformations: Theoretical Framework and Chinese Context (Brill, 2013), 293-314.
- “Chinese Socialism and Market Transition: A Critique,” in China and Socialism: Criticisms and Commentaries, Du Jiping, ed. (Taipei: Renjian chubanshe, 2006), 178-201 (in Chinese).
- “Rethinking ‘Capitalist Restoration’ in China,” Monthly Review, 57 (6): 44-63, 2005 (translated into Danish, Bengali, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese).
- “Prelude to Culture: Interrogating Colonial Rule in Early British Hong Kong,” Dialectical Anthropology, 24 (1999):141-170.