Ping Zhu

Ping Zhu is Professor in Transnational Chinese Studies at UC San Diego and she serves as the Editor in Chief of Chinese Literature and Thought Today. She is the author of Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Literature and Culture (2015), the co-editor (with Zhuoyi Wang and Jason McGrath) of Maoist Laughter (2019), which won Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title in 2020, and the co-editor (with Hui Faye Xiao) of Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics (2021). Her new monograph, The Cult of Labor in Modern China, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

Pronouns: she / her / hers

Languages: Chinese, English

Affiliated Faculty: 21Century China Center, School of Global Policy and Strategy 

Books

• Ping Zhu, The Cult of Labor in Modern China. Forthcoming, Cornell University Press.
• Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao, eds., Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics. Syracuse, NY.: Syracuse University Press, 2021.
• Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
  • Winner of the 2020 Choice's Outstanding Academic Title
• Ping Zhu, Gender and Subjectivities in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Articles & Book Chapters

• Ping Zhu, “Foreword to 1966,” in Wang Xiaoni, 1966, translated by Eleanor Goodman, pp. viii-xxiii. Yale University Press, 2026.
• Ping Zhu, “Tales of Chinese Coolies in Late Qing Labor Reportage,” in Charles A. Laughlin and Li Guo, eds., Reportage in the Chinese-Speaking World, 193-214, University of Michigan Press, 2026.
• Ping Zhu, “Transactional Translation: Subjectivity, Voice, and Justice in Two Transpacific Exchanges,” forthcoming in Chinese Literature and Thought Today v56, n.1-2, 2025.
• Ping Zhu, “Reenchanting History,” in Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, eds., New Vocabularies of May Fourth Studies, 172-190. Brill, 2024.
• Ping Zhu,“Metabolic Cinema: From Hollywood to Socialist China,” Humanities 13, no.5 (2024): 1-19.
• Ping Zhu, “Teaching Chinese History through the Cinematic Trio,” in Zhuoyi Wang, Emily Wilcox, and Hongmei Yu, eds., Teaching Films from the People’s Republic of China, 100-111. The Modern Language Association of America, 2024.
• Ping Zhu, “Women’s Affective Labor in the Red Army’s War Propaganda in the Early 1930s," Feminist Media Studies 24, 1( 2024): 1-18.
• Ping Zhu, “Reading Xi Xi’s I City through Heidegger,” in Jennifer Feeley and Tammy Lai-ming Ho, eds, “Xi Xi: Can We Say?”, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, July 2023.
• Ping Zhu, “Chinese Literature at Large: Wong Chin Foo’s Border-Crossing Writing,” in Yingjin Zhang, ed., A World History of Chinese Literature (Routledge Handbook Series), 87-97. New York: Routledge, 2023.
• Ping Zhu, “The Penumbra and the Shadow: Editing Translations of Modern Chinese Literature,” in Chris Song, Cosima Bruno, and Lucas Klein, eds. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Chinese Literature in Translation, 219-228. London, UK.: Bloomsbury, 2023.
• Ping Zhu, "Becoming Laborers: The Identification with Labor During the Chinese New Culture Movement," The Journal of Asian Studies vol. 82, no.1 (2023): 25-43.
• Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao, “Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics: An Introduction,” in Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao eds., Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, 1–36. Syracuse, NY.: Syracuse University Press, 2021.
• Ping Zhu, “Wang Anyi’s New Shanghai: Gender and Labor in Fu Ping,” in Ping Zhu and Hui Faye Xiao eds. Feminisms with Chinese Characteristics, 216–242. Syracuse, NY.: Syracuse University Press, 2021.
• Ping Zhu, “Chinese Exclusion Act and the Late Qing Chinese Cosmopolitanism,” Comparative Literature Studies 58, 4 (2021): 863-890.
• Ping Zhu, “Wang Anyi’s New Shanghai: Gender and Labor in Fu Ping,” Xiaoshuo pinglun, no.5 (2021): 37-43. [In Chinese]. Republished on China Writers’ Association website on September 16, 2021.
• Ping Zhu, “Finding Universality in the Two-Dimensional History: On Ban Wang’s Scholarly Paradigm of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literary Studies,” in Liu Hongtao, ed., Contemporary Chinese Literary Studies from the Perspectives of Sinologists, 286–305. Nanchang: Jiangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 2020. [In Chinese]
• Ping Zhu, “Reading Xi Xi’s I City (Wocheng) through Heidegger,” O-Square, no. 6 (2020): 147–168. [In Chinese]
• Ping Zhu, “From Patricide to Patrilineality: Adapting The Wandering Earth for the Big Screen,” Arts 9, no. 3 (2020): 1–12.
• Ping Zhu, “Women’s Same-Sex Love in Two Fictional Memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” Asian Women 35, no.1 (2019): 71–94.
• Ping Zhu, "The Study of Laughter in the Mao Era," in Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter, 1–18. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
• Ping Zhu, "Huajixi, Heteroglossia, and the Maoist Language," in Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath, eds., Maoist Laughter, 162–178. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
• Ping Zhu, "The Phantasm of the Feminine: Gender, Race and Nationalist Agency in Early-Twentieth-Century China," Gender & History 26, no.1 (2014): 147–166.
• Ping Zhu, “The Masquerade of Male Masochists: Two Tales of Translation of the Zhou Brothers (Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren) in the 1910s,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 8, no.1 (2014): 31–51.
• Ping Zhu, "Virtuality, Nationalism, and Globalization in Zhang Yimou's Hero," CLCweb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, no.2 (June 2013):1-9.
• Ping Zhu, “The Sincere Gaze: Art and Realism in Jia Zhangke’s Films,” Chinese Literature Today 3, no.1&2 (2013): 88–94.
• Ping Zhu, "Destruction, Moral Nihilism, and the Poetics of Debris in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life,” Visual Anthropology 24 (2011): 318–328.
• Ping Zhu, "Sublime and Nothing: The Metamorphosis of the Female Body in Lu Xun’s ‘Regrets for the Past,’” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 12, 1 (June 2010): 9–22.

• Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, 2010