Christian Sorace is an Associate Professor of Global China at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Corpus Christi College. From 2017 to late 2022, he served as an Assistant Professor at Colorado College. His research explores political concepts and practices in China and Mongolia, spanning ideology, discourse, urban planning, air pollution, and aesthetics. Sorace is also deeply interested in the histories and legacies of communism in Asia.

His first book, Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell University Press, 2017), examines how the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimation strategies hinge on its conceptualization of ideology, language, and aesthetics. The book reveals how the Party’s visions for the future and its political-economic models became templates for post-earthquake reconstruction, including the transfer of resources from coastal regions, the urbanization of the peasantry, and the construction of an “ecological civilization.”

Sorace approaches the Chinese Communist Party, and the dynamics at its margins, as sites for the generation of political concepts and practices that deserve to be studied on their own terms. In this spirit, he has organized and participated in numerous collaborative, transnational projects, including co-editing Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (ANU Press and Verso Books, 2019) and Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour (Verso Books, 2022), as well as the special issue Political Enchantments: Aesthetic Practices and the Chinese State, published by Critical Inquiry in Spring 2020. He also serves on the editorial board of the Made in China Journal.

In 2022, Sorace was a Fulbright Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the National University of Mongolia, where he conducted research on urban crises in Ulaanbaatar, from ger district redevelopment to chronic air pollution, and their contribution to a widespread sense of democratic deficit. His work highlights how such issues, though locally grounded, are deeply intertwined with the global crisis of political forms and democratic futures.