缅北轮奸

The July 2026 edition of LUCC's newsletter is out.

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Welcome to a busy summer update! A full house braved the heat on July 10 for a fascinating discussion (above) on Confucius Institutes, based on an insider perspective from Jinghan Zeng, former director of Lancaster’s CI, and Andrea Ghiselli of Exeter, who has eight years of experience working in the PRC higher education sector. Not surprisingly, the discussion didn’t resolve the controversies and ambiguities around the PRC’s flagship soft power initiative, but it did take the discussion into uniquely concrete and specific territory.

Earlier in the term, we welcomed Professor Mark Beeson of the University of Technology, Sydney, and Dr Qin FAN, recent alumna of the LUCC Doctoral Fellowship, now a lecturer at Zhejiang University of Water Resources and Electric Power. New LUCC Fellow Dr Gabriel Wallin, of the Mathematics Department, also joined LUCC director Andrew Chubb to present their collaborative project analysing long-term trends in worldwide survey data on views of China.

The summer research events will continue on August 7, with Visiting Scholar Prof. Shimin Li presenting his project on China’s national image in global south media, based on a study of China coverage in South Africa’s The Star.

Next, on August 18, Prof. Jianfeng Wang of Fuzhou University will present his work on recently discovered articles by Mao Zedong and Xi Zhongxun and what they tell us about Chinese Communist Party history (note this event will be conducted in Chinese). On August 31, new LUCC fellow Dr. Zhongming Zhang will share his insights on the state of nuclear fusion research — including the famed “artificial suns” — in the UK, China and the US.

Read on to meet the five new additions to LUCC's community, along with a bumper crop of new interdisciplinary research from LUCC scholars, appointment of LUCC Fellow Dr Jocelin Zhou as chair of the British Chinese Language Teaching Society, and more.

Upcoming Events

Research Seminars

7 August 2026

Western Mirror or Southern Narrative? The Discursive Construction of China's National Image in Global South Media

?Shimin Li (Southwest Jiaotong University)

Time and place: 1:00pm to 2:00pm, 7 August, County South B59

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18 August 2026

文献学视角下的中共党史研究 —以新发现的毛泽东、习仲勋佚文为中心 (Studies on the History of CPC from the perspective of Philology: the lost articles of Mao Zedong and Xi Zhongxun)

Jianfeng Wang (Fuzhou University)

Time and place: 1:00pm to 2:00pm, 18 August, County South B59

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31 August 2026

Nuclear fusion research in the UK, China and the US

Zhongming Zhang (Department of Engineering)

Time and place: 12-1pm, venue TBC

For more details on our upcoming events, see: Events

People

LUCC is delighted to welcome Dr Sam Geall, an eminent specialist on China and environmental issues, as a Non-Resident Fellow. We also recently welcomed Dr Gabriel Wallin of the Mathematics Department, and Dr Zhongming Zhang from Engineering, as new Fellows. Jiayue Yin from Linguistics joins as a Doctoral Fellow, and Dr Yanbing Zhang from Zhejiang Gongshang University is a Visiting Scholar for 26-27.

Three LUCC Doctoral Fellows, Yuhong Lei, Yannan Li and Francesca Ceccato, have successfully defended their PhD dissertations recently. Their theses examine, respectively, Chinese undergraduate students’ engagement on campus, ethnic Mongolians’ strategies under Han-centric CCP ethnic policies, and UK-based Chinese feminists’ identity construction. Congratulations to Dr. Lei, Dr. Ceccato and Dr. Li, and see the Research News section below for all the details of their work.

Sam GEALL

Dr Sam Geall is an Honorary Research Fellow in 缅北轮奸's School of Global Affairs, working at the intersection of China, geopolitics, climate, and energy. Sam is also an Associate Fellow at the Chatham House Environment and Society Centre and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, and previously served as CEO of Dialogue Earth (formerly China Dialogue) — an independent non-profit reporting on China’s role in global sustainability.

Gabriel WALLIN

Gabriel Wallin is a Lecturer in Statistics, whose research focuses on developing flexible statistical methods to accurately identify latent (unobserved) structures in social, behavioural and health data. He is working on LUCC projects related on public opinion towards China.

Zhongming Zhang

Zhongming Zhang is an International Lecturer in the Department of Engineering at 缅北轮奸. Dr Zhang's research focuses on developing neutron detectors for extreme detection environments. Look out for details of Dr Zhang’s upcoming LUCC talk comparing nuclear fusion research in the UK, China and the US.

Yanbing Zhang

Yanbing Zhang is a lecturer in the School of Marxism at Zhejiang Gongshang University. As a LUCC Visiting Scholar in 2026-2027, Dr Zhang will be conducting research on the Chinese Communist Party's understanding and management of capital, focusing on historical materialism and institutional philosophy.

Jiayue Yin

Jiayue Yin is a PhD student in Linguistics, studying metaphors related to high-stakes examinations, such as the Gaokao in China. Jiayue joins LUCC as a Doctoral Fellow.

Profiles of all LUCC’s fellows can be found on our People page.

Research News

- Andrew Sweetman

The toxicity and persistence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) have made their widespread environmental contamination a significant global issue. Forests can uptake and trap PFASs from the atmosphere, but their environmental behavior and fate in forest humus layer and mineral soil remain unclear. This study in Environmental Research by LUCC Fellow Andrew Sweetman, in collaboration with colleagues at China University of Geosciences and Hubei Polytechnic University investigated PFAS distribution, drivers, and leaching rates in Mt. Shennongjia, China. Spatial distribution and correlation analysis indicates that, altitude and forest vegetation types influence the accumulation of PFASs in forest humus and soil. The concentration of PFASs generally increased with increasing altitude, and the sub-alpine conifer forest exhibited higher PFASs level than other vegetation types. Short-chain and carboxylate-headed PFASs showed greater downward leaching potential, more attention should be paid to their transport to groundwater in ecologically sensitive areas.

- Kevin Jones

Kevin Jones’ latest study on insecticides in collaboration with colleagues at eight PRC institutions develops and validates a robust and sensitive analytical method for simultaneous determination of 38 systemic insecticides and their transformation products (TPs) in surface water, groundwater, wastewater, soil, sediment and sludge. The method integrated optimized extraction procedures for solid samples and solid-phase extraction (SPE) cleanup/enrichment with liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS), aiming to support the investigation of the occurrence and environmental behaviour of these systemic insecticides and their TPs in multimedia environment. Optimised methods were applied to analyse relevant compounds in surface water, sediment and soil from the Dawen River Basin, groundwater in karst springs from Zigui, and wastewater and sludge from wastewater treatment plants in Wuhan, China. The results revealed that TPs had comparable or even higher concentrations and detection frequencies than their parents, with some concentrations among the highest reported in surface water worldwide. The developed method provides a tool for comprehensive investigation, and the preliminary findings emphasise the importance of incorporating TPs into investigations in future environmental studies.

- Oliver Wild

Prof Oliver Wild’s latest preprint, with colleagues from the School of Atmospheric Physics, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, investigates the hydroxyl radical (OH) in the troposphere. OH is a critical determinant of global oxidative capacity and trace gas lifetimes whose variation remains poorly constrained. This study investigates the sensitivity of modelled tropospheric OH concentration changes to physical and chemical processes using the FRSGC/UCI chemistry transport model. The article shows that simulated tropospheric Ozone (O3) and Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) agree well with satellite observations, but that annual variations in Carbon Monoxide (CO) do not, likely due to uncertainties in biomass burning emissions in the southern hemisphere and overestimated CO trends over Asia. This discrepancy, along with the background increase in CO, may lead to an underestimation of OH increase or overestimation of OH decrease from 2000 to 2017. These results provide a quantitative basis for understanding the drivers of tropospheric OH variability and their implications for global methane chemistry.

- Andrew Chubb

Recent experimental research has found citizens to be “intuitive deterrence theorists” who judge the resolve of foreign states based on their capabilities, material stakes, past behavior and costly signals. In Conflict Management and Peace Science,LUCC Director Andrew Chubb and co-authors Barbara Yoxon, Thomas Loughran and Kristina Kironska argue there are good reasons to expect that subjective feelings toward the specific country in question—variables that are difficult to capture in genericized experimental designs—could also condition such judgements. They test this proposition using original 2022 data from an 11 country survey on China (N?=?13,051), and a three-pronged measure of resolve that disaggregates its military, economic and general aspects. On the one hand, citizens’ estimations of China's resolve in a crisis scenario do correlate with their perceptions of its military and economic capabilities, consistent with the expectations of deterrence theory. On the other hand, negative subjective feelings toward China were a similarly powerful predictor of higher estimations of its resolve. The results suggest that where states seek to convey a resolved image to foreign audiences, negatively disposed individuals will be more likely to perceive it, potentially entrenching opposition to compromise.

- Derek Hird

Historical Confucian parenting, framed through the lens of an authoritarian father and a caring mother, gave rise to the popular trope of the ‘strict father and kind mother’ (yanfu-cimu 严父慈母) (Li, 2020). Yet, numerous Confucian texts held that the father should manifest kindness to his children (Li & Lamb, 2012, 42–44). While there has been a growth in contemporary scholarship on caring Chinese fathers (e.g. Huang, 2025; Li, 2020; Wang & Keizer, 2024; Xu et al., 2025; Xu & O’Brien, 2014), less attention has been paid to the caring expectations placed on fathers in the Confucian tradition. Derek Hird’s examination of Confucian texts in premodern China, including ‘family instructions’ (jiaxun 家训), family education guides written by fathers themselves, shows a more nuanced picture than popular discourses allow. Kindness (ci) and strictness (yan) were expected to be in dynamic equilibrium, as per the principle of zhongyong 中庸 and its operating mechanism of yinyang 阴阳 dialectics, a relational process through which kindness and strictness work together to produce a harmony. Employing ci-yan as a heuristic through which to better understand Confucian fathers and Confucian masculinities rebalances the representation of historical Chinese fathers in public debate, grounds zhongyong as a key principle for understanding Confucian fathers and masculinities, and provides a starting point for reevaluation of historical Chinese fatherhood and family education.

- Sharon Zheng

LUCC Fellow Sharon Zheng’s new co-authored article delves into the strategies of different types of media (e.g., leading state-owned media, local state-owned media, private media), visualization production of data journalism in China, based on their different dual legitimacy (identity legitimacy and regulative legitimacy) in the pictorial turn and digital era. Inspired by new institutional organizational theory and resource dependence theory, qualitative interviews were conducted with 24 Chinese data news practitioners. The findings reveal that different types of media have adopted strategies of proactive innovation, passive catering, and commercial barter in data visualization production, showing a characteristic of technology arbitrage. The data visualization has been used as an innovative technology tool aimed at acquiring governmental and/or economic resources in the unique “asymmetric-controlled” institutional environment of China’s journalism. In the process of technology arbitrage, the visualization production of data journalism has demonstrated a practical orientation of selective depoliticization, and dual legitimacy has also been utilized and manipulated by these media. The findings shed light on the intricate interest relationship between the government and media, and enhance our understanding of the dynamics of visualization and provide empirical evidence for the intricate ecology of China’s data journalism.

- Aiqing Wang

This paper by LUCC Non-Resident Fellow Aiqing Wang examines clause-internal preposing of pronominal non-wh-determiner phrases (non-wh-DP) in Late Archaic Chinese (LAC). Demonstrative pronouns may front to preverbal positions above negation, either in the left periphery or within the sentence-internal domain. Movement to the left periphery targets a topic position above tense phrase (TP), while movement to a position between TP and little v phrase (vP) targets a focus position. Both positions are structurally higher than negation, with the topic position being more prominent. In negated contexts, demonstrative and personal pronouns may also move to a post-negation position restricted to pronouns, termed the pronoun position. I argue that pronoun fronting to negation in LAC involves overt phrasal movement, with the pronoun position hosting elements bearing a [+Foc] feature.

- Yang Hu

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated responses, such as border closure, lockdown measures, and flight curtailment, have severely disrupted transnational infrastructures that sustain, channel, organize, and condition international migration. This infrastructural disruption has led to the double exclusion of temporary migrants from both sending and host societies. In this context, LUCC Non-Resident Fellow Yang Hu and colleagues explore how Chinese international students in the United Kingdom and their parents in China navigate transnational (im)mobilities during the pandemic. In doing so, they develop the conceptualization of “family-mediated migration infrastructure” to elucidate the role played by transnational family relationships in brokering information, mobilizing resources, and coordinating the disjointed acts of institutional players to sustain transnational (im)mobility. They also reveal a distinctive emotional double-bind in the process of family-mediated infrastructuring, which requires members of transnational families to strategically perform emotional engagement and detachment in complex ways. The findings highlight the functional resilience and emotional vulnerability of family-mediated transnational migration infrastructure, and render visible the intimate fabrics that contribute to sustaining transnationalism during the pandemic.

- Yuhong Lei

Student engagement is widely used in higher education policy and research, yet its meaning remains conceptually fragmented and research often privileges visible and measurable forms of participation. In China, student engagement has increasingly been adopted as a borrowed concept in policy and research, but its local interpretation, negotiation, and governance remain underexplored. LUCC Doctoral Fellow Yuhong Lei’s PhD thesis addresses these gaps through a qualitative study of day-to-day undergraduate engagement at a Chinese public university. It asks: (1) in what ways do Chinese undergraduates describe their engagement, including whom they engage with, where engagement takes place, and what forms it takes; and (2) what enablers and barriers shape that engagement? Taking a non-normative stance, the study examines what undergraduates do rather than what they ought to do. It adopts a dual lens: a sociomaterial lens to trace everyday engagement practices, and a Foucauldian lens to analyse how governance, power, visibility, evaluation, and self-discipline shape those practices. The study draws on forty semi-structured interviews with undergraduates in Years 1–4, conducted in Chinese and analysed through reflexive thematic analysis.

The findings show that engagement was selective, uneven, and object-related rather than a single stable condition. Participants engaged with a wide range of human and non-human actors, including teachers, peers, online materials, and Artificial Intelligence, across hybrid campus spaces. Conditions such as assessment demands, power relations, and surveillance did not operate as fixed enablers or barriers; their effects depended on how they were configured in particular situations. The thesis develops “made-in-China student engagement” as an analytic to capture a hybrid formation shaped by both international and local forces, and argues for understanding engagement as a lived practice organised through context, relations, and conditions.

- Francesca Ceccato

This study examines the processes underpinning the construction of feminist identities among Chinese feminist students in transnational social spaces in the UK and advances the concept of transnational Chinese feminist liminality to understand such processes. This concept refers to an “in-between” condition shaped by navigating conflicting social, cultural, and political positions across Chinese and transnational feminist contexts, capturing the dynamic, tension-filled space through which identities are continually negotiated and re-articulated amid cross-border mobility and shifting geopolitical forces. It is situated within the contexts of China’s recent socio-political changes—including intensified state control over feminist grassroots mobilisation and rising nationalist anti-feminism and misogyny—and transnational mobility. This research positions transnational mobility as a transformative space for identity construction and seeks to offer a nuanced understanding of an underexamined aspect of Chinese feminism by exploring the interplay between transnational mobility, China’s socio-political changes, and feminist identity formation. Drawing from the principles of constructivist grounded theory methodology, this study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation with 30 Chinese feminist students in the UK, identifying three pathways to feminist identity construction: individualised, collective and cosmopolitan. This study offers an original understanding of Chinese feminism through the lens of transnational mobility, while also highlighting how diverse feminist identity formations shape feminist mobilisation in the UK. The findings demonstrate how transnational mobility and the influence of ongoing geopolitical shifts foster critical reflection, negotiation, and the re-articulation of feminist identities.

- Yannan Li

Based on first-hand data from fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2023, LUCC Doctoral Fellow Yannan Li’s thesis examines China's ethnic issues concerning Mongolians in Inner Mongolia and argues that local urban Mongolians have adopted a strategy of "pragmatic compromise" to negotiate their ethnic identity within contemporary Chinese state nationalism. Since the 1990s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) central government, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has increasingly relied on nationalism as a key source of political legitimacy. However, the Han-centric orientation embedded in state-led nationalism and national identity building has generated structural tensions within China’s ethnic governance. Against this backdrop, pragmatic compromise has emerged from the interaction between state ethnic policies and local social realities in Inner Mongolia. This strategy enables urban Mongolians to navigate the opportunities and constraints produced by nationalist ethnic strategies, leading to the region's relative stability. However, the 2020 ethnic policy reforms somewhat disturbed this delicate balance in the short term, and their long-term impact remains uncertain.

Outreach & Engagement

LUCC Fellow Dr. Jocelin Lingxia Zhou, a Lecturer in Chinese and Programme Lead for Chinese Studies and Confucius Institute Teaching Lead, has been elected as the new chair of the British Chinese Language Teaching Society (BCLTS).

BCLTS is the leading professional organisation supporting Chinese language teaching, learning and research across the UK.

The Society brings together educators, researchers and practitioners from schools, colleges and universities to promote excellence in Chinese language education and foster professional collaboration.

LUCC’s Director Andrew Chubb joined the "International Forum on Countering Transnational Repression” at the Institute of Diplomacy and International Affairs in Taipei City on May 8. Chubb’s intervention argued transnational repression (TNR) is a growing global challenge, as evidenced by Freedom House’s latest database which counts more than 1200 incidents of cross-border attacks on exiles by 48 perpetrator countries. He discussed the relationship between TNR and national security, the emerging digital and financial dimensions, national-level responses in the UK and Australia, and the emerging multilateral responses at the G7, EU and UN. Chubb’s broader research on TNR can be found in the and series.

Culture & Community

缅北轮奸’s School of Global Affairs will host the British Association for Chinese Studies annual conference from September 2 to 4. China scholars from around Britain will gather in Lancaster to present and discuss several hundred new pieces of research on all aspects of China, under the theme “Encountering the Everyday in Chinese Contexts.” Many LUCC fellows will present papers. Although the call for papers has closed, registration for participation in the conference is .

For more information, see:

Two highly anticipated careers fairs are happening at 缅北轮奸. The Asia Careers Fair (Virtual) will take place on the 8th of September 2026, 9am - 12:30pm and again on the 9th September 2026, 9am - 12pm. The 2nd event the Asia International careers fair is happening on the 20th of October, 11am-3pm on campus. The events are FREE and open to employers internationally. Events are run in collaboration with the Confucius Institute and will have 20 Universities attending with their students from the QS Top 100 Ranked Institutions in the UK. For further information email: lumscareers@lancaster.ac.uk

Chinese Language and Culture Summer School 2026 (6-11 years old)

The 缅北轮奸 Confucius Institute offers a summer school for children aged 6-11 years old. Sessions include some Chinese Mandarin language learning as well as Chinese arts and crafts.

The Summer School will take place from 9.30am to 3.30pm each day. These sessions are designed for children whose first language is not Chinese, and it is not required for children to attend for the full week.

Book at: /confucius-institute/events/chinese-language-and-culture-summer-school-2026-6-11-years-old/