BICC Position

Director of BICC

Home Institution Details

Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford

Contact Information

Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford, Walton Street, Oxford, OX1 2HG. frank.pieke@chinese.ox.ac.uk

Courses Taught

Modern politics and society of China

Anthropology of China .

Current Projects

How to Be a Good Communist in Reform-era China: An Ethnographic Study of Cadre Training (2004-2008)

Recent Publications (for Dr Pieke's full publications, click here)

Transnational Chinese: Fujianese Migrants in Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press (2004; first author with Pál Nyíri, Mette Thunø and Antonella Ceccagno)

“Contours of an anthropology of the Chinese state: political structure, agency and economic development in rural China.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 10(3): 517-538 (2004)

"The Genealogical Mentality in Modern China." The Journal of Asian Studies 62(1): 101-128 (2003)

The ordinary and the extraordinary: an anthropological study of Chinese reform and the 1989 People's Movement in Beijing (1996)

Biog

Frank Pieke (Amsterdam 1957) is University Lecturer in the Modern Politics and Society of China at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross College. He is the Director of the University’s Institute for Chinese Studies (www.orinst.ox.ac.uk/ea/chinese/) and China Centre (www.sias.cc.ox.ac.uk). In 2006, he was awarded a £5 million grant from HEFCE, ESRC and AHRC for the new British Inter-university China Centre (www.bicc.ac.uk), of which he is the director. In 2002, he was co-grantholder of the £3.5 million ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), where between 2003 and 2006 he was adjunct director and head of the research programme on sending contexts of migration.

Before moving to Oxford in 1995, Pieke was University Lecturer at the Sinological Institute of the University of Leiden. He took his first degrees in cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (B.A. 1979 and M.A. 1982), then spent a year in Beijing studying Chinese language and history (1983), before taking his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (1992). Frank Pieke’s current research interests are administrative and political reform in China and migration to, from and within China. His general anthropological interests include the state and political anthropology, migration, and social action and agency.

Pieke is currently working on a monograph on cadre training and party schools in China. The book has the provisional title Market Leninism: Cadre Training, Party Schools and the Chinese Communist Party. This book draws on fieldwork carried out in Central and local party schools in Yunnan and Beijing between 2004 and 2007. Communist party schools serve both as training grounds for communist cadres and policy think tanks. Both teaching and research at these schools has opened up considerably in the last fifteen years. Party schools are key sites for the production, reproduction and renewal of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ideology and governmental practice, which is increasingly framed in the ostensible non-ideological terms of management, modernization and administration. The book explores the extent and limits of the liberalization one of the core institutions of Leninist rule, and the difficulty that CCP cadres experience in matching the lessons taught at party schools with their daily task of ruling an increasingly complex, unequal and volatile society. Parts of the book’s manuscript are available as a BICC working paper (http://www.bicc.ac.uk/WorkingPapers/FrankPieke/tabid/432/Default.aspx).

In 2008, Pieke will start a three-year project on China as an immigration country together with demographers and sociologists at Peking University and Tsinghua University. As the Chinese economy continues to grow and makes a transition to an urban, service-based economy, China will in the medium to long term need more and more labour than it can supply and will also become an increasingly attractive destination for international migrants. In twenty years from now, China will be a country defined by its cities rather than by its countryside. Apart from simply having many more and much larger cities, this will also mean that the countryside will no longer be able to act as a limitless reservoir of labour migrants for the lower end jobs in the urban manufacturing, constructing and service sectors. In addition, there is the certainty that the effect of population ageing will be much more extreme (and of a much larger scale) in China than in the West or even Japan and Korea. The cause for is this quite simply the demographic effect of the severe family planning policy that has been in place since 1979. Little, if any, attention has as been paid to the migration effects of economic development and demographic imbalances, let alone the challenges that they poses to the global migration order.

Pieke’s third project is on the nature and implication of illegal immigration to the UK. His research shows how Chinese migrant strategies do much more than simply evade the government’s immigration policies. The commercialization of migration shape the reality of immigration policy implementation by fitting immigrants into the categories of approved and desirable immigration government policy. Furthermore, immigrant employment strategies sustain and expand an informal, “neo-proletarian” sector of the British economy that changes the international division of labour between the developed and the developing world, generating yet further demand for immigrant labour. A working paper on this project will be available next month on the BICC website (http://www.bicc.ac.uk/WorkingPapers/FrankPieke/tabid/432/Default.aspx).

Pieke’s most recent monograph is Transnational Chinese: Fujianese Migrants in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2004, with Pál Nyíri, Mette Thunø and Antonella Ceccagno). Earlier books include The Social Position of the Dutch Chinese (published in Dutch in 1988 and in Chinese in 1992) and The Ordinary and the Extraordinary: An Anthropological Study of Chinese Reform and the 1989 People's Movement in Beijing (Kegan Paul, 1996). A personal witness of the protest movement that rocked Beijing and China in 1989, he subsequently built up one of the world’s largest collections of documents and audiovisual materials on the movement at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Recent articles include “The Genealogical Mentality in Modern China” (The Journal of Asian Studies, 2003); “Beyond Control? The Mechanics and Dynamics of ‘Informal’ Remittances between Europe and Africa” (Global Networks, with Nicholas Van Hear and Anna Lindley, 2007); “Community and Identity in the New Chinese Migration Order” (Population, Space and Place, 2007); “Contours of an Anthropology of the Chinese State: Political Structure, Agency and Economic Development in Rural China” (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2004); and “The Politics of Rural Land Use Planning in China” (In Peter Ho, ed. Developmental Dilemmas: Land Reform and Institutional Change in China, 2005).