Xiaomian Wu

Xiaomian Wu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Fuzhou University, Fujian, China. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Tsinghua University in 2023.

Her work explores coastal and maritime frontier worlds in modern China. Drawing on oral history and ethnographically informed historical research, she studies fishing communities—especially boat-dwelling populations—whose lives have long unfolded at the margins of territorial governance and historical narration. Through these frontier experiences, her research reconsiders China’s modernization not as a single rupture in 1978, but as a longer, uneven, and contested historical process.

During her visiting period at Harvard University, she is revising her doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript. The project traces the historical formation and transformation of the collective social boundaries and identity of a boat-dwelling community in eastern Fujian, showing how such boundaries were produced through everyday practices, encounters with the state, and shifting coastal regimes.