Dr Ning Zhang

Ning Zhang is a Research Associate at the SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies and holds a PhD in Modern Chinese History from Fudan University (Shanghai, China), awarded in 2022. 

From 2022 to 2024, Ning held a Newton International Fellowship funded by the British Academy at the University of Oxford. Since 2024, she has also held a few visiting fellowships at the University of Göttingen, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and East China Normal University. 

During Ning's time at Oxford, she worked on the project “Chinese Sent-Down Youth and the Communist Movement in Burma (1968–1989)”, which involved extensive fieldwork and oral history research. This project also led to the development of a related subproject on the children of exiled Southeast Asian communists who were raised in China during the Mao era. In addition, she is developing a manuscript based on my doctoral dissertation, “The Sent-Down Movement in a Village: A Microhistory of Maoism, 1968–1989”. 

More broadly, her research examines how individuals sought to navigate and make sense of their lives amid the shifting dynamics of revolutionary China. She pays particular attention to the interplay between everyday life, emotion, and ideology, drawing on personal archives and oral histories to explore how ordinary people lived, felt, and believed during periods of profound political transformation. 

Mao-era China; the sent-down youth movement; the Cultural Revolution; global Maoism; and transnational revolutionary movements in Cold War Southeast Asia.