Prof. Jenny Chan is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Applied Social Sciences and Management Committee Member of China and Global Development Network. Her research and teaching focus on labor and state–society relations of China’s transformation. She began her academic career at the University of Oxford where she was a lecturer of sociology at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, a junior research fellow at Kellogg College and an associate of the University of Oxford China Centre. She received the Best Teaching Award in 2018 and was honored as Leader of Professional Association at International Level in 2021. Between 2018 and 2023, she served as an elected vice president of the Research Committee on Labour Movements of the International Sociological Association (ISA). Her academic publications, written in English and/or Chinese, have been translated into French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. 

Prof. Chan’s book, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers, is co-authored with Mark Selden and Pun Ngai, and published by Pluto Press (2020) and Haymarket Books (2020). The book explains the buyer-supplier power dynamic in transnational manufacturing and contributes to promoting global public sociology by fostering cooperation between academics and civil society. The decade-long interviews and multi-sited fieldwork brought readers to the worlds of a young generation of rural migrants, who are emblematic of the new Chinese working class. Dying for an iPhone is named the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2022 on China, and the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2022 in Work and Labor.

With funding support from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and the East and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, and the John Fell Oxford University Press Research Fund, among others, Prof. Chan has published in sociology, labor and China studies journals. She examines how economic liberalization, along with the transformation of party-state governance, has vastly changed the nature of work in the Chinese political economy. As conventional management methods have evolved to mixed modes of human resources organization and algorithmic data-driven operations, these changes in the labor process open new inquiries about employment relations, worker agency, and collective actions, as well as the opportunities of union representation. She is also concerned about the persistence of gendered division between work and family, and the possibilities of advancing social progress and equality.

Prof. Chan explores the building of an alternative development model underpinned by democratic governance and social innovation. She further devotes to editorial and advisory boards of scholarly journals, including The Asia-Pacific Journal, The Economic and Labour Relations Review, Global Labour Journal, Labor History and Rural China. In a wider context, her sociological analyses of labor, migration and inequalities in global capitalism have been featured in local and international media.

Curriculum Vitae

• PhD in Sociology and China Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London
• MPhil in Sociology (Distinction), The University of Hong Kong 
• BSSc in Sociology (Hons), The Chinese University of Hong Kong 
• Certificate in English, The Oxford English Centre, Oxford, the United Kingdom