Skip to content

Prof. PUN Ngai 潘毅

Chair Professor, Head of Department
Director, Centre for Cultural Research and Development
Director, Lingnan University Creative and Cultural Innovation Center
Co-Director, Institute of Policy Studies
Yueng Family Visiting Professor, East Asian Studies Program, John Hopkins University
Honorary Professor, Department of Sociology, Global China Research Hub, University of Hong Kong

Prof. PUN Ngai 潘毅

Location: Room 131, Ho Sin Hang Building 何善衡樓131室

Phone: (852) 2616 7429

Fax: (852) 2572 5170

Email: npun@ln.edu.hk

Areas of Interest

  • Infrastructural Capitalism
  • Labour and Gender
  • Commons
  • Global China
  • Asia
  • Biography

    Before joining Lingnan University as Chair Professor in 2021, Prof. PUN Ngai was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.
    Pun Ngai received her Ph.D. from the University of London, SOAS, in 1998. She won the 2006 C. Wright Mills Award for her first book, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005). Made in China is widely used as required reading in major universities in America, Europe, and Asia. Together with Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers (co-authored with Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, 2016), these two texts have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Chinese. She is the sole author of Migrant Labor in Post-Socialist China (Polity Press, 2016). She is also the editor of seven volumes of books in both English and Chinese. Two of her Chinese books were also awarded the Hong Kong Book Prize in 2007 and 2011 as the top ten popular books widely read in Hong Kong and Mainland China. She was a Top 2 Scientist in the World ranked by Stanford University.

    She has published extensively and cross-disciplinary in top-tier journals in Cultural Studies, China Studies, Labor Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology. Her articles appeared in Cultural Studies, Positions, Public Culture, Information, Communication and Society, New Media and Society, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Global Labor Studies, Work, Employment and Society, The China Quarterly, Modern China, and The China Journal, Cultural Anthropology, Dialectical Anthropology, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Sociological Review, Sociology, etc.

  • Distinguished Awards
    1. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace is the book winner of the C. Wright Mills Award of 2006. (The first Asian scholar to receive the award in the forty-year history of the Award).
    2. 《中國女工》獲取2007年度香港十大書獎
    3. 《大工地上:中國農民工之歌》獲取2011年度香港十大書獎
    4. 「開創一種抗爭的次文體:工廠裡一位女工的尖叫、夢魘和叛離」《社會學研究》1999, Vol. 83,九月,頁11-22。於 2003年4月被中國社會科學院 評選為《社會學研究》百期優秀論文。
  • Education

    Ph.D., University of London, SOAS

    M.Phil.,The University of Hong Kong

    B.A. The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  • Selected Publication

    Most representative publications within the recent five-year period:

    1. Pun, Ngai (2024) China’s Infrastructural Capitalism: The Making of the Chinese Working Classes. positions: asia critique, Volume 32, Issue 2. Forthcoming.
    2. Koo, Anita and Pun, Ngai (2024), Clashing Gender in the Age of Transnational Infrastructural Capitalism: Vocational Education and Subject Making of Future Workers in China, positions: asia critique, Volume 32, Issue 4. Forthcoming.
    3. Pun, Ngai., & Chen, Peier. (2023). Confronting global infrastructural capitalism: the triple logic of the “vanguard” and its inevitable spatial and class contradictions in China’s high-speed rail program. Cultural Studies, 37:6, 872-893.
    4. Zhou, Yang, and Ngai Pun (2022). “Affording worker solidarity in motion: Theorising the intersection between social media and agential practices in the platform economy.” New Media & Society (2022): 14614448221130474.
    5. Pun, Ngai. (2022). Marx’s Theories and Beyond: Understanding Working-Class Solidarity in China. Critical Sociology, 08969205221105445.  
    6. Julia Shu-Huah Wang, Jing Lin and Ngai Pun (2022) Enjoying the fruit of development? Working conditions and the earnings of low-skilled internal migrants in China across two decades (1993–2015), Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2074380
    7. Pun, N., Chen, P., & Jin, S. (2022). Reconceptualising youth poverty through the lens of precarious employment during the pandemic: the case of creative industry. Social Policy and Society, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746421000932
    8. Xu, D., Jin, S., Pun, N., Guo, J., & Wu, X. (2022). The scarring effect of first job precarity: New Evidence from a panel study in Hong Kong. Work, Employment and Society, 09500170221112221.
    9. Jack Qiu, Minglun Chung, Ngai Pun (2022) “The Effects of Digital Media Upon Labor Knowledge and Attitudes: A Study of Chinese Labor Subjectivity in a Vocational Training School”, Information, Communication & Society, 25(15), 2224-2245
    10. Pun Ngai (2021) “Turning left: student-worker alliance in labour struggles in China.” Globalizations (2021): 1-14. Online.
    11. Pun, Ngai and Jack Qiu (2020), “‘Emotional authoritarianism’: state, education and the mobile working-class subjects”, Mobilities, Volume 15(4): 620-634.
    12. Pun, N., Tse, T., Shin, V., & Fan, L. (2020). “Conceptualising Socio-Economic Formations of Labour and Workers’ Power in Global Production Networks”. Sociology, 54.4 (2020): 745-762.

    Most representative publications beyond the recent five-year period:

    Smith, Chris and Pun, Ngai (2018) “Precarity and Class in China: An Unhappy Coupling”, Work, Employment and Society. 32 (3): 599–615.

    Pun, Ngai (2016) Migrant Labor in Post-Socialist China. New York and London: Polity Press.

    Pun, Ngai, SHEN Yuan, GUO Yuhua, LU Huilin, Jenny Chan & Mark Selden. 2016. “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese workers’ struggles from a global labor perspective.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 17(2): 166-185.

    Pun, Ngai, and Anita Koo (2015) “A ‘World-Class’ (Labor) Camp/us: Foxconn and China’s new generation of labour migrants.” positions 23(3): 411–436.

    Pun Ngai and Jenny Chan (2013), “The Spatial Politics of Labor in China: Life, Labor, and a New Generation of Migrant Workers”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:1, 179–190.

    Pun Ngai (2012), “Gender and Class: Women’s Working Lives in a Dormitory Labor Regime in China”, International Labor and Working-Class History , 81, Spring 2012, 178–181.

    Pun, Ngai and Jenny Chan (2012) “Global Capital, the State and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience”, Modern China. 38(4) 383–410.

    Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin (2010), “Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger and Class Action among the Second Generation of Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China”, Modern China , 36 (5):493–519.

    Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin (2010), “A Culture of Violence: The Labor Subcontracting System and Collective Actions by Construction Workers in Post-Socialist China”, The China Journal .No. 64, pp. 143–158.

    Pun Ngai and Chris King-chi Chan (2008), “The Subsumption of Class Discourse in China”, Boundary 2, Vol 35, No 2,pp. 75–91.

    Pun, Ngai and Smith Chris (2007), “Putting Transnational Labour Process in its Place: Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-Socialist China”, Work, Employment and Society, Vol 21, No 1, pp. 27–46.

    Pun Ngai (2007), “The Dormitory Labor Regime: Sites of Control and Resistance for Women Migrant Workers in South China”, Feminist Economics , Volume 13, Issue 3, 2007,pp. 239–258.

    Pun, Ngai (2005) Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Pun, Ngai (2003), “Subsumption or Consumption?: The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in Globalizing China”, Cultural Anthropology, 18(4), November,pp. 469–492.

    Pun, Ngai (2002), “Global Capital, Local Gaze and Social Trauma in China”, Public Culture 14(2): 341-347.

    Pun, Ngai (2000), “Opening a Minor Genre of Resistance in Reform China: Scream, Dream and Transgression in a Workplace”, Positions , 8:2,pp. 1–24.

View Lingnan Scholars Profile