Yidan Li

Yidan’s doctoral research explores the formation and function of what she terms “aesthetic infrastructure” of global China in Paris, specifically through the lens of fashion. 

This research is under Dr Carwyn Morris’s ERC-Horizon Grant (2025-2030) that investigates the impact of Chinese capital and actors on European urban development. Through the mapping of Sino-French fashion networks, digital ethnography, and fieldwork in Paris (2026-2027), her research interrogates how the “aesthetic infrastructure” of global China—a bundle of “wanghong” logic, digital platforms like Xiaohongshu (RED), Wechat, and Alipay, and mediatized sensorial practices—encounter and configure the French fashion field and a fashion-mediatized Parisian urbanism. 

This research seeks to understand global China beyond a geopolitical BRI framework, and as a generic neoliberal power that redefines the production and perception of urban space through the deployment and performance of this pervasive aesthetic infrastructure. Yidan started as a student in Geology before developing an interest in the human configuration of space. 

She received her Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design from University of Colorado Boulder, specializing in architecture and urbanism, and Master’s in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (GSAPP). Her master’s thesis investigated the “politics of promises” in two “smart city” projects in Kenya, exploring the geopolitics and epistemology of “smartness” in a postcolonial and neoliberal African context. Consequently, she is also interested in a comparative lens of global China in Africa versus global China in Europe.

• China between and beyond Global North and Global South
• Built Environment
• French Theory
• Algorithms as Culture
• (Video) Game Studies

Global China In Urban Europe