Dr Yunan Xu

  • Assistant Professor
  • University Teaching Officer
Dr Yunan Xu

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About

Yunan Xu is an assistant professor of China and Global Development at the Centre of Development Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS). She is a section editor (Key Concepts Section) of the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS).

Before joining the University of Cambridge, she was a postdoctoral researcher working on an ERC Advanced Grant project (RRUSHES-5) at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. She was also previously a postdoctoral researcher at Singapore Management University in Singapore.

She holds a PhD in development studies from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Research

Yunan’s research centres on China-global interconnections, particularly in agri-food transformation. Her research interests include food politics, land politics, the agrochemical complex, rural transformation, the land and labour nexus, livelihood changes, and state-society interaction.

Yunan’s doctoral research studied the dynamics of the rise of industrial tree plantations in southern China through a critical political economy and political ecology framework. Her study put the logic of global capital front and centre, demonstrating the complicated role of China in the global land rush.

During her post-doctoral work, Yunan contributed to an ERC Advanced Grant project (RRUSHES-5), studying the global land rush and how it shapes and is shaped by five spheres of social life (food, climate change, geopolitics, labour, and nation-state/citizenship) across seven countries, including Ethiopia, Mozambique, Colombia, Cambodia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and China. Currently, she is exploring the agrochemical complex through a China-global interconnection lens.

Yunan holds a transdisciplinary educational background, with expertise in both qualitative and quantitative research methods. She is proficient in survey and quantitative data analysis using tools like SPSS and R. During her PhD training, she developed strong foundations in critical political economy and political ecology.

Key publications: 

  • Xu, Yunan, 2020. Industrial Tree Plantations and the Land Rush in China: Implications for Global Land Grabbing. London: Routledge.
  • Xu, Yunan, and Saturnino M. Borras, Jr., 2024. China and Global Land Use Change, in Saturnino M. Borras, Jr., and Jennifer C. Franco (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Land Politics. (Oxford University Press. Doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197618646.013.49
  • Xu, Yunan, 2023. “Taken-left” dynamics? Rethink the livelihood changes of affected villagers in the era of the global land rush. Agriculture and Human Values, 40(3), pp.1171-1184. DOI: 10.1007/s10460-022-10404-4
  • Wang, C., & Xu, Yunan. 2022. Reflecting on the Plantationocene: the political economy of sugarcane plantations in Guangxi, China. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 51(3), pp.564–585. DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2022.2087180
  • Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Jennifer C. Franco, Tsegaye Moreda, Yunan Xu, Natacha Bruna and Binyam Afewerk Demena, 2022. The value of so-called ‘failed’ large-scale land acquisitions. Land Use Policy. 119, pp.1-17. DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106199
  • Xu, Yunan, 2019. Rethinking the politics of land use change: insights from the rise of the industrial tree plantation sector in Southern China. Land Use Policy 87. DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104025
  • Xu, Yunan, 2019.The politics of inclusion and exclusion in the emerging industrial tree plantation sector in China. Journal of Peasant Studies 46(4), pp.767-791. DOI:10.1080/03066150.2017.1405936
  • Xu, Yunan, 2018. Land grabbing by villagers? Insights from intimate land grabbing in the rise of industrial tree plantation sector in Guangxi, China. Geoforum 96, pp.141-149. DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.08.012
  • Xu, Yunan. 2018 Political economy of land grabbing inside China involving foreign investors. Third World Quarterly 39(11), pp. 2018: 2069-2084. DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2018.1447372.
  • McKay, B.M., Alonso-Fradejas, A., Brent, Z.W., Sauer, S. and Xu, Y., 2018. China and Latin America: towards a new consensus of resource control?. In Rural Transformations and Agro-Food Systems (pp. 12-31). Routledge.
  • Alonso-Fradejas, A., Liu, J., Salerno, T. and Xu, Y., 2016. Inquiring into the political economy of oil palm as a global flex crop. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43(1), pp.141-165.