Qiuyang Chen is a historian of modern and contemporary China. She joined Loughborough in 2025 as a Research Associate in History of Sino-African Relations. Previously, she was a Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Bristol, following the completion of her PhD in History at the University of Warwick in 2024. She has also taught at the University of Birmingham and held an Early Career fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of Warwick in 2023-2024. Qiuyang completed her MA in World History and Cultures at King’s College London and BA in English at Shanghai International Studies University, China.
Dr Chen is currently working on Dr Thoralf Klein’s AHRC-DFG-funded project: Competing Socialism: The Sino-Soviet Rivalry in Tanzania during the Cold War, 1950s-1990 (with Kirsten Bönker, North-East Institute/University of Hamburg, Germany, and Andrea Kifyasi, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania). Her research project focuses on development projects between the PRC and Tanzania from the 1960s to the 1980s, with particular attention to tobacco cultivation and manufacturing. This work will result in the publication of two journal articles.
Prior to moving into the field of Sino-African relations, she specialises in the gender and social history of twentieth-century China. Her doctoral research combined archival work, oral hisory, and historical anthropology to examine gender, informal finance and rural society in the reform era. Through this interdisciplinary approach, her work highlights the everyday economic practices of rural communities and the gendered dynamics of credit, trust, and survival in periods of rapid socio-economic transformation.
Journal Articles
Chen, Q. (2025). 'The Female Network of Private Microcredit: Its Boom and Bust in Southeast Coastal China, 1987-1992'. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Chen, Q. (2026). 'Language and "Dialect": Oral History as a Method in Chinese History'. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Book Review
‘Hao Gao, Creating the Opium War: British Imperial Attitudes Towards China, 1792–1840’, Britain and the World, 15.1 (March 2022), pp. 86-88.
Essay
Adam Matthews Digital Archives China on Film exhibitions (2025): ‘Rural Life in China’ and ‘Captured on Film: Women’s Lives and Experiences in Early-Twentieth China’
Adam Matthews Digital Archives Foreign Office, Consulate and Legation Files, China: 1830-1939 (2026): Reigns of Empress Dowager Cixi and Queen Victoria.