Visiting Instructor, History
B.A. Southwest University; M.A. Renmin University of China; M.A. University of Chicago; Ph.D. University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Appointed In
2026
Office
Swan Hall #302
Hours
Mondays 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Bing Xia is a historian of modern China whose research focuses on political and social history, the history of science and knowledge, labor, and everyday life under socialism.
Xia’s current book project, The Haphazardness of Totalitarianism: Grassroots Governance in Mao-Era China, examines how political authority was produced, negotiated, and experienced in the everyday workings of socialist institutions. Drawing on an extensive collection of factory archives and personnel records, the project reconstructs the daily practices through which officials and ordinary people interpreted policies, produced bureaucratic knowledge, made decisions, and navigated the uncertainties of political life. It argues that the power of the Maoist state emerged not simply from the implementation of commands from above, but through contingent and often improvised interactions among institutions, cadres, workers, and documentary practices at the grassroots.
Xia’s broader research explores the relationship between knowledge, political authority, and everyday experience in twentieth-century China. His work on science, medicine, and the body examines how scientific and medical forms of knowledge entered socialist institutions and everyday life and how people interpreted, negotiated, and reshaped them in practice. His research on fatigue during the Great Leap Forward traces the circulation of psysiological knowledge about the working body and its intersection with mass politics and socialist production. Another project examines postpartum confinement and illness narratives, exploring the relationship between medical knowledge, embodied experience, labor, and memory in socialist China.
Selected Publications:
“Conquering Fatigue: Calisthenics, Science, and Mass Politics during the Great Leap Forward.” In A Revolution Across Art and Science: Participatory Knowledge Production in China’s Great Leap Forward, edited by Christine Ho and Sigrid Schmalzer, 74–91. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2026.
“The Vulgar-Minded: Cadres’ ‘Improper Man-Woman Relations’ in the Mao Era.” The PRC History Review 9, no. 1 (May 2024): 1–16.
“Dandelions and Their Memories: Archives, Ordinary Lives, and Socialist China.” Past, Present & Future (2022): 12. “Shared Embodiment: Conversations with Older Women about Postpartum Confinement” (身处共境：我与大妈聊 月子). In On the Scene: Sociologists of Sexuality in the Field (我在现场：性社会学田野调查笔记), edited by Pan Suiming and Huang Yingying, 266–283. Taiyuan: Shanxi People’s Publishing House, 2017.
Translated Work: Sigrid Schmalzer, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China. Chinese translation by Bing Xia. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, forthcoming 2027.