Zhou Taomo 周陶沫

I am a historian of modern China and Southeast Asia who’s curious about borders, frontiers and liminal spaces, such as communities of ethnic minorities, free ports and special economic zones. Currently, I am an associate professor at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where I teach histories of modern Asia, global capitalism and the international Cold War.

I write about Chinese diasporic identities and Sino-Southeast Asian geopolitics in my first book entitled Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2019). The book is a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” and has received an Honorable Mention for the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. My other writings have appeared in publications such as Journal of Asian Studies, Diplomatic History, The China Quarterly, Critical Asian Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the journal Indonesia, and The Made in China Journal.

Having grown up in a migrant family in Shenzhen, a city immediately north of Hong Kong, I am working on a second book tentatively entitled “Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China’s First Special Economic Zone” (under advance contract with Stanford University Press). This new project traces the transformation of the city in the broader context of China’s reforms and the global proliferation of the Export Processing Zones (EPZ). My research is funded by two Tier 1 grants from the Ministry of Education, Singapore. 

I was born in Harbin, raised in Shenzhen and spent my student years in Beijing, Tokyo, London, and Ithaca, upstate New York before settling in Singapore for work. My own life experiences inform my research interests on the movement and mobility of people, ideas, commodities and capital in the inter-Asian context. Outside of work, I enjoy swimming and hiking.

Link to my Google Scholar page

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Book Projects

Made in Shenzhen: A Global History of China's First Special Economic Zone

Publications

Dairy and diaspora: postponed reform on the guangming overseas Chinese farm of Shenzhen

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Published onlline 19 July 2023

[PDF of the accepted version]

This essay explains how the delay in reform ultimately served the state’s interests. The People’s Republic of China mobilized Southeast Asian refugee labor to grow international trade and expand state capital. In this process, the diasporic Chinese became, simultaneously, the agents and targets of Deng Xiaoping’s reform.

Passports to the Post-colonial World: Space and Mobility in Francisca Fanggidaej’s Afro-Asian Journeys

The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden University Press, 2022), 309-326.

[PDF of the accepted version]

By tracing her journeys in the Bandung era and her later immobility and isolation, this chapter reveals Fanggidaej’s understanding of the international realm as simultaneously personal and political, shaped by reason and diplomacy as well as by sensibility and intimacy.

 

510 not Found: The territorialisation of Sino-Southeast Asian Relations in the Chinese Hinterland

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, published online March 23, 2022. 

[PDF of the accepted version]

Most existing studies use ‘reterritorialization’ to describe the outward expansion of Chinese power in Southeast Asia. This paper, however, flips this familiar narrative. It examines Sino-Southeast Asian diplomacy hidden in the Chinese hinterland and embedded in the everyday. I focus on the landlocked province of Jiangxi, where the Chinese government created two enclaves for communist exiles and displaced diaspora respectively—both hailing from Southeast Asia.

Media

Teaching