Jacqueline Zhenru LIN
Research Assistant Professor
PhD, Chinese Studies, University of Cambridge
I was born in a Cantonese river town in South China. First, I began my undergraduate studies in 2008 in business administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shaw College). However, I gradually realised I was not cut out for it during my two-year internship in a local consultancy firm in Wan Chai. Fortunately, the General Education at CUHK allowed me to explore other exciting subjects outside of my major, ranging from archaeology to film studies. In a class on cultural heritage, I discovered the pleasure of socio-cultural anthropology and became passionate about doing ethnographic research. My graduate training started in Gender Studies (anthropology as the home discipline) at CUHK (M.Phil. 2016), then continued in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge (PhD 2021). After having lived in the UK for five years, I am blessed to join the Centre of China Studies, returning to the academic community by which I have been nurtured.
Through long-term intensive fieldwork, my current book project delves into how digital technology is reshaping grassroots volunteering and local charities in contemporary China. It offers a historical and ethnographic exploration of a redress movement that seeks to honor and support Kuomintang veterans who fought in the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-45) but faced difficulties in post-1949 China. This project is an extension of my first monograph, ‘Making National Heroes’ (HKU Press 2024), which analyzes the intertwining of gender and nationalism in local volunteering for KMT veterans in Hunan province.
I am currently collaborating on a book with Professor Adam Yuet Chau at Cambridge University, focusing on the formation of modern Chinese polity. Additionally, I am engaged in a new research endeavor, exploring the transnational commemorative network of the Second World War involving NGOs in the People’s Republic of China and overseas Chinese communities in Myanmar, Thailand, and India. I have also been invited to contribute as a reviewer by editors from ‘New Media & Society’ and ‘Memory Studies’.
Research Interests
- the use of digital technology in Chinese NGOs
- charity and volunteering in contemporary China
- war memories and local histories
- gender and Nationalism
- Second World War commemoration in Asia
Representative Publications
Books and Edited Volumes
| 2024 | Lin, Jacqueline Zhenru. Making National Heroes: The Exemplarist Production of Masculinities in Contemporary China. The Hong Kong University Press. (2024) |
Journal Articles & Book Chapters
| 2024 | Lin, Jacqueline Zhenru. “Performative filiality and Chinese Voluntary Associations in Transnational Commemoration of the Second World War.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. |
| 2022 | Lin, Jacqueline Zhenru. “Souls of Contention and Incommensurate Mourning: Commemorative Rituals in Contemporary China.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 37, no. 3 (2022): 401-418. |
| 2021 | Lin, Zhenru. “Remembering forgotten heroes and the idealisation of true love: Veteran memorial activism in contemporary China.” Memory Studies 14, no. 5 (2021): 1081-1105. |
Others
| 2023 | Lin, Jacqueline Zhenru. Book Review Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death. The China Journal 90(3):433-5. |
| 2022 | A University news story, based on Dr Jacqueline Zhenru Lin’s PhD thesis and her article published in the Journal of Memory Studies, has picked up a CASE award, one of the only significant international awards for Research Communications. (Link) |
| 2021 | Lin, Zhenru. “The Architecture of the Digital Space.” Feeling Digital and Reimagining Fieldwork during COVID Time Workshop, May 12th-13th, organized by The Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS), HKU Anthropology Research Network and HKU Department of Sociology. |
| 2020 | Lin, Zhenru. “Book Review: Management and Morality: an Ethnographic Exploration of Management Consultancy Seminars.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 28, no. 4 (2020): 1007-08. DOI: 10.1111/1469- 8676.12947. |
| 2019 | Lin, Zhenru. “Gendered Moral Codes in China.” Anthropology News website 60, no. 6 (December, 2019): e182-e186. |
Current Research Projects
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2022–24. PI. “Martyrs to Ghosts, Ghosts to Martyrs: Transnational Commemoration of the Second World War in Asia.” General Research Fund, Hong Kong Research Grants Council. |
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2022. PI. “the Social Lives of Dead Bodies: Technologies of Identifications and the Politics of Memorialization in China.” Direct Grant for Research, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. |
Courses Offered
| CHES1000 | Introduction to Chinese Studies |
| CHES3004/ CHES5110 | Media China |
| CHES4003 | Research Team Lab |
| CHES4500 | Thesis Research |
| CHES5110 | Selected Themes on Chinese Media |
| CHES5136 | Hong Kong and Mainland China: Interaction and Integration |
| CHES6010 | China Seminar I |
| CHES6020 | China Seminar II |