Ai Xiaoming: A Chinese Woman Intellectual examines the construction and transformation of intellectual identity in modern China through the life and work of Ai Xiaoming, foregrounding how women intellectuals negotiate public engagement under pervasive political, institutional, technological, and gendered constraints.

Tracing shifts and overlaps among public intellectuals, academics, citizen intelligentsia, activist-intellectuals, and forbidden intellectuals, it shows how intellectual identity evolves in response to changing political ideologies and degrees of state control. Particular attention is paid to digital technologies as sites of both empowerment and surveillance, and to women’s strategic use of bodies, emotions, and domestic spaces for social action. Ai Xiaoming’s filmic, historical, and activist practices illuminate truth-seeking identities grounded in legal rhetoric, historical writing, and ethical self-making amid repression.

This book is ideal for scholars and students of China studies, gender and feminist studies, intellectual history, media and cultural studies, and social activism.

Jinyan Zeng (曾金燕) is an affiliated researcher and a former Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Department of History, Lund University, Sweden. She was born and raised as an ethnic Hakka in China, and is also a creative writer and documentary filmmaker.