Position:
Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese History
Contact:
mark.czeller@ames.ox.ac.uk
Educational Background:
DPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford
MA in Advanced Chinese Studies, SOAS
BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Oxford
Research Interests
I am an historian of twentieth-century China, with a focus on the Mao era. The book derived from my doctoral research looks at why people belonging to families labelled 'landlord' and 'rich peasant' during land reform (1946-52)—well over five percent of the population—continued to face stigma and mistreatment for three decades after they were dispossessed. My next project will look how and why some people tried to falsify or conceal their identities during the Mao era, and how the state built up its capacity to prevent them from doing so.
Publications:
Non-People in the People’s Republic: Class Enemies in Mao’s China (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
‘Between Civil Dispute and Political Crime: Property Rights and Practices of Denunciation in Maoist China’ (forthcoming in The Journal of Chinese History).
‘Filial Affection as Political Failing: The Children of Rural Class Enemies under the Maoist Emotional Regime.’ Modern China, Vol. 50, no. 1 (2024), 41-75.
‘Local Reassessment versus Central Prestige: Tao Zhu, Land Reform, and the Pine Hill Incident’. In Daniel Leese and Amanda Shuman (eds.), Justice after Mao: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
