Yiqing Zhu

Yiqing received her BA in Chinese Language and Literature from East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, and her MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Chinese Studies) from the University of Cambridge. Her MPhil dissertation examined the phenomenon of “internet-viral poets” in contemporary China, with a focus on Yu Xiuhua. This work developed her interest in how literary and cultural meanings emerge and circulate across different media and public settings.

After completing her MPhil, Yiqing worked as a Risk Evaluation Specialist at ByteDance, contributing to the development and refinement of TikTok’s content safety models. Her work focused on assessing and improving the effectiveness of content safety systems in a global digital environment. Through this experience, she gained practical insight into how media technologies shape the circulation and governance of online content across different cultural contexts.

At SOAS, Yiqing‘s doctoral project, Shanghai Romance: Romantic Narrative and the Promises of Urban Life since the 1990s, explores how representations of romantic relationships in literature, film, and television contribute to Shanghai’s urban imaginary. Examining cultural works produced since the 1990s, she considers how romantic narratives give shape to hopes for recognition, belonging, security, and other possibilities of a good life in the city. Her research traces how such expectations have been informed by Shanghai’s changing social landscape and its layered histories, as well as how they are negotiated through encounters with intimacy, memory, consumption, and the everyday pressures of urban living. By working across literary and screen cultures, the project explores how promises associated with urban modernity are imagined, sustained, revised, and sometimes questioned.

Yiqing’s wider research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese cinema and television, urban culture, cultural memory, intimacy and affect, and popular media. She warmly welcomes opportunities to connect with researchers from diverse academic backgrounds, exchange ideas and perspectives, and explore possibilities for interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. She would be delighted to hear from fellow scholars whose work intersects with these interests or opens up new avenues for intellectual exchange.

Chinese cinema and television; modern and contemporary Chinese literature; intimacy and affect; urban culture and imaginaries; popular culture and media studies