Yunhan Wen

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. My research is driven by a  fundamental curiosity about the urban: how cities come into being, what they produce, and how late urbanization—especially after 1950 in the Global South—differs from earlier patterns observed in industrializing Europe and North America. This broad interest anchors both my empirical work and my theoretical orientation.

My dissertation is an initial step in a broader research agenda on the interaction between late urbanization and state-building in developing countries. Using China as a strategic case, I examine how municipal governments in China build governing capacity amidst the world’s most rapid and large-scale urbanization. Drawing on ethnography, interviews, and archival research, I compare Shenzhen—a Special Economic Zone that entered reform with weak bureaucratic institutions—and Shanghai, a socialist industrial hub with a robust administrative legacy. I focus on the role of indigenous villages and their collective economies, which first enabled industrial growth through rural land and later became central to land-based revenue strategies under fiscal decentralization. By tracing how Shenzhen informally tolerated and gradually absorbed villages to compensate for weak infrastructural power, and how Shanghai subordinated villages from the outset to reinforce state-led growth, I show that local capacity is not given but forged through path-dependent alliances. Extending to Xi Jinping’s collective ownership reforms after 2014, I demonstrate how these alliances continue to shape divergent outcomes, underscoring the tension between growth, legitimacy, and control. Conceptually, I advance “party-state urbanism” to highlight how ostensibly neoliberal alliances are mobilized through coercive means under authoritarian rule, distinguishing China’s trajectory from neoliberal urban governance.

While China has been an empirical focus for both personal and intellectual reasons, I believe the most powerful insights emerge through comparison and interdisciplinary conversations, and I strive to stay intellectually omnivorous. To better understand outcomes of development policies outside China, I’ve collaborated on research exploring sexual practices among older adults in rural South Africa during the rollout of antiretroviral treatment. To engage with methodological frontiers, I lead a collaborative project examining how large language models (LLMs) and computer-assisted text classification can benefit from the insight of traditional qualitative methods. You can find more about my work in my CV.