Valeria Zanier

Associate professor at Bologna since 2022, she combines her interest for entrepreneurs and business culture in contemporary China with social, economic and business history in early PRC (1950s – early 1960s). In particular, she focuses on China’s global interactions in the years of the country’s maximum isolation, answering the following research question: Is it possible to incorporate the Maoist experience into China’s longer-term search for modernization in the XXth century? In her works, Zanier has showed that, regardless of the deep influence of the bipolar setting, at enterprise and sub-national administrative level, China cultivated transnational networks with Socialist and capitalist actors which were conducive to economic and technological modernization. Her ongoing research projects include: a book on the practice of NATO economic sanctions against China during the Cold War with a major international publisher and the compilation of a Corpus of Texts related to CCP Cultural Policy in English and Chinese.