Frank Pieke, University Lecturer in the Modern Politics and Society of China and Fellow of St Cross College

Frank Pieke (Amsterdam 1957) is University Lecturer in the Modern Politics and Society of China at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross College. He is the Director of the University’s Institute for Chinese Studies and China Centre. In 2006, he was awarded a £5 million grant from HEFCE, ESRC and AHRC for the new British Inter-university China Centre, of which he is the director. In 2002, he was co-grantholder of the £3.5 million ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), where between 2003 and 2006 he was adjunct director and head of the research programme on sending contexts of migration.

Before moving to Oxford in 1995, Pieke was University Lecturer at the Sinological Institute of the University of Leiden. He took his first degrees in cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam (B.A. 1979 and M.A. 1982), then spent a year in Beijing studying Chinese language and history (1983), before taking his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (1992). His current research interests are the administrative and political reform in China and migration to, from and within China. His general anthropological interests revolve around the issues of social action, agency and personhood.

Current Projects:

• A monograph on cadre training and party schools in China. The book has the provisional title Market Leninism: Cadre Training, Party Schools and the Chinese Communist Party.

• The nature and implication of illegal immigration to the UK. Pieke's research shows how Chinese migrant strategies do much more than simply evade the government’s immigration policies.