Zhehang Zhang graduated from Yuanpei College at Peking University with a concentration in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (minor in history), receiving highest graduation honors. He later received graduate training in sociology at Peking University and the University of Chicago before entering the Ph.D. program in Sociology at UC Berkeley.

His research examines how states, capital, and labor regimes are made and remade under conditions of social and economic transformation. Bringing together state theory, political geography, and political economy, he studies how public authority is organized, justified, and contested across institutional and spatial boundaries.

One strand of his work investigates state capacity not as a fixed institutional attribute, but as a practical and relational achievement. It asks how capacity is assembled through bureaucratic routines, policy expertise, administrative coordination, and the everyday practices that connect state authority to professional and institutional actors.

A second strand examines the moral and affective politics of market transition. Focusing on laid-off workers in Northeast China, his home region, he uses historical archives and oral history methods to study how socialist industrial restructuring reshaped workers’ expectations of the state, their interpretations of market ideology, and their understandings of social responsibility and legitimate authority.

His current research turns to transnational development in the border regions between China and Southeast Asia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this project analyzes industrial relocation, labor migration, and capital flows as political and spatial processes that reorganize labor regimes, local state practices, and regional political economy.

Alongside these empirical projects, Zhang is developing theoretical work in state theory, political geography, historical international relations, and the philosophy of social science.