Assistant Professor
PhD University of Toronto
Zixian Liu is a historian of science, technology, and environment whose research focuses on energy infrastructure, community development, epistemic and environmental justice, ethnicity and gender. His current book project, Radical Extractivism: Alternative Technology, Knowledge Production, and Social Leveling in Socialist China, 1964–1976, examines Maoist China’s sociotechnical experiments with small-scale and decentralized technologies in southwestern China’s multi-ethnic extractive communities. Drawing upon a decade of archival and fieldwork research, it shows how the Maoist regime promoted equity-seeking and “masses-led” practices of knowledge production, technological application, and environmental protection. This monography explains why these experiments eventually declined, constrained by Cold War development and scientific norms, and failed Maoist attempts to democratize knowledge production and development decision-making.
Zixian is also interested in how indigenous, feminist, environmentalist techno-scientific movements in the West and the non-Western contexts contributed to a global history of alternative visions challenging unsustainable and unequal development. In addition to scholarly writing, he is committed to action research and community engagement in a time of planetary crisis. In 2021, he contributed to an investigative report on health inequalities in a polluted industrial town in southwestern China, which later prompted local government actions to expand access to senior care facilities. He also advocates for digital humanities strategies to build archival infrastructure that supports community-engaged knowledge production and circulation, and epistemic justice.
At MSVU, Zixian teaches environmental history, history of science and technology, world history, and Chinese history.
Book:
Radical Extractivism: Alternative Technology, Knowledge Production, and Social Leveling in Socialist China, 1964-1976 (manuscript in preparation)
Peer-Reviewed Articles:
2023 “Revolutionary Bedsheets: Industrial Design and the Material Properties of Maoist China.” Twentieth-Century China 48, no. 2: 159-177.
2017 “Making a New World and a New People: Cold War, the ‘Rammed-Earth Campaign’ and Architectural Design in Mao’s China, 1964-1976,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 4, no. 2-3: 269-285.