Zhangluyuan Charlie Yang is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Coimbra. She holds an MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a BA in International Communications from the University of Nottingham. Her research explores the transformation of contemporary Chinese familialism, gender antagonism, marriage, urban demolition projects, and the legacies of welfare systems established during the socialist era of industrial construction, examining how these intersect with broader historical, political, and economic processes.
Her master’s thesis traced the evolution of uxorilocal marriagein China’s urban peripheries over the past fifty years, highlighting its entanglements with the One-Child Policy, the household registration system, and rapid urbanization reforms. In another ethnographic project, she investigated the shifting symbolic value of bride price and dowryin contemporary Chinese society, analyzing how these practices have become contested terrains shaped simultaneously by misogyny, feminism, constructions of masculinity, and intergenerational pressures.