Associate Professor Zachary M Howlett is a sociocultural anthropologist of China and Chinese diasporas. After completing his BA in German Studies at Brown University, he spent several years in China working as a teacher and translator. In 2008, he entered the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University, which awarded him an MA in 2011 and a PhD in 2016. Assoc Prof Howlett has received a variety of academic honours, including a Jacob K Javits Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, and was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He served as Head of Studies for Yale-NUS Anthropology for the 2020/21 academic year. He has testified before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), a Congressionally chartered agency that advises the US Congress on relations with China. He is an elected member of the board of the Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA), where he serves as a councilor (2022-23-24).
Assoc Prof Howlett’s research investigates meritocracy and mobility in China and Chinese diasporas, speaking to a broad interdisciplinary audience of anthropologists, historians, political scientists, sociologists, and education scholars. His first book, Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (Cornell 2021), analyses China’s College Entrance Exam, the Gaokao, as a fateful rite of passage, exploring its role in political legitimacy, social inequality, migration and urbanisation, continuity and change, and state-society relations. Subsequent publications examine the charismatic and religious foundations of meritocracy in China and the demographic and sociopolitical consequences of women’s academic outperformance of men in China since the 2000s. Incorporating these themes and expanding his focus to transnational mobility, his second book project, Navigating the Bipolarverse: Chinese Student Migration in an Era of Superpower Competition, investigates the gendered dilemmas facing multinational Chinese student migrants as they confront eroding meritocracy and tightening ideological control in China and racism and marginalisation in Western countries.
Research Specialisations- Sociocultural anthropology
- China and overseas Chinese
- Meritocracy and mobility
- Education and social inequality
- Demographic change
Book:
Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, April 2021.
Peer-reviewed Articles:
“Diligent Daughters: Women’s Educational Outperformance in Contemporary China.” Modern China, online first, August 2023.
“Gaokao Warriors: Disciplined Struggle in China’s College Entrance Exam.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 2023): 22–39.
“Performative Secularism: School-Sponsored Prayer in China’s National College Entrance Exam.” Critical Asian Studies 54, no. 3 (July 2022): 441–69.
“Fateful Rite of Passage: Charismatic Ratification of Elite Merit in China’s National College Entrance Exam.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12, no. 1 (March 2022): 154–69.
Peer-reviewed Book Chapters:
“The National College Entrance Exam and the Myth of Meritocracy in Post-Mao China.” In Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi, 206–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.
“Tactics of Marriage Delay in China: Education, Rural-to-Urban Migration, and ‘Leftover Women.’” In Waithood: Gender, Education, and Global Delays in Marriage, edited by Marcia C. Inhorn and Nancy S. Hefner, 177–99. New York: Berghahn, 2021.
“China’s Examination Fever and the Fabrication of Fairness: ‘My Generation Was Raised on Poison Milk.’” In Emptiness and Fullness: Ethnographies of Lack and Desire in Contemporary China, edited by Susanne Bregnbæk and Mikkel Bunkenborg, 15-34. New York: Berghahn, 2017.
Book Reviews:
Invited review of Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women in the West (Duke University Press, 2022) by Fran Martin. The Asian Journal of Social Sciences. Online first.
Invited review of Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition (Princeton University Press, 2022) by Yi-Lin Chiang. The China Quarterly 254 (June 2023): 527–28.
Government Testimony:
“Meritocracy, Political Legitimacy, and the National College Entrance Exam in China.” Written and oral testimony submitted to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) for the hearing “China’s Challenges and Capabilities in Educating and Training the Next Generation Workforce,” February 2023.
- Modern Social Thought
- Anthropology of China
- Technology and Culture
- Language, Culture, Power
- Marriage and Kinship
- Anthropology of Education
- Anthropological Imagination
