
Dr Vivienne Xiangwei Guo
Lecturer in Modern Chinese History
Contact details
Biography
Dr Vivienne Xiangwei Guo is a historian specialising in modern China. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Peking University and her master’s degree from the LSE. Dr Guo completed her doctoral research in history at King’s College London.
From 2014 to 2016, she worked as a Research Associate in Modern Chinese History at the University of Cologne. She then served as a Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Exeter. In September 2021, Dr Guo returned to King’s College London, where she continues to contribute to the field.
Research interests and PhD supervision
Dr Guo’s research focuses on the intellectual, political, and cultural history of modern China, particularly the history of China’s intellectual elites—their ideas, networks, and identities—in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first monograph, Women and Politics in Wartime China (Routledge, 2018), studies Chinese elite women as a distinct socio-political group who dedicated themselves to ‘national resistance and reconstruction’ from the 1930s to the 1950s. It examines the interactions between their sophisticated networks and the shifting geopolitical, social, and cultural landscapes of wartime China. Her second monograph, Negotiating a Chinese Federation (Brill, 2022), investigates how Chinese warlords and intellectuals engaged and collaborated with one another in the making of a Chinese federation between 1919 and 1923.
Dr Guo is currently working on a BA/Leverhulme-funded project titled ‘New Self, New World: The French Language in the Making of Modern Chinese Intellectuals’. This project examines how Chinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries learned French as the first step towards engaging with Western science, technology, thought, and culture. Moreover, it explores how French language acquisition and utilisation influenced their self-identification, self-representation, and self-expression. By integrating the concepts and methods intrinsic to sociolinguistics and cultural linguistics into historical studies, this project aims to shed new light on the relationship between foreign languages, ideas, and identity within a transnational context.
Dr Guo welcomes interest from prospective research students in the following fields:
- Intellectual and political history of modern China
- Gender and women’s history in modern China
- Chinese warlordism and the Chinese federalist movement
- The literary, cultural, and political societies of Chinese intellectuals
- Transnational history of Chinese intellectuals, particularly their acquisition and use of foreign languages
Teaching
Dr. Guo teaches a range of modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her teaching covers all critical periods of China’s transformation from an imperial state to the People’s Republic of today, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Selected Publications
Monographs:
Negotiating a Chinese Federation: The Exchange of Ideas and Political Collaborations between China’s Men of Guns and Men of Letters, 1919-1923 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022)
Women and Politics in Wartime China: Networking Across Geopolitical Borders (London and New York: Routledge, 2018)
Research articles:
‘Conceiving an Alternative: The Ideological Underpinnings and Political Blueprints of Chinese Federalism’, Journal of Chinese History Vol.9 Issue 1 (2025) Published online on 07 March 2024 https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2023.37
‘Making the “Good Government” with the “Good People”: Collaboration between General Wu Peifu and Endeavor Intellectuals, 1920–1922’, Twentieth-Century China Vol.47 no. 2 (2022): 112-132.
‘Not Just a Man of Guns: Chen Jiongming, Warlord, and the May Fourth Intellectual (1919-1922)’, Journal of Chinese History Vol. 4 Issue 1 (2020): 161-185.
‘Forging a Women’s United Front: Chinese Elite Women’s Networks for National Salvation and Resistance 1932-1938’, Modern Asian Studies Vol.53 Issue 2 (2019): 483–511.
‘Leaning to the Left: The Political Reorganisation of Chinese Women Activists within the CCP United-Front Framework (1945-1949)’, British Journal of Chinese Studies Vol. 7 (2017): 29-62.
Expertise and public engagement
Dr Guo is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the Second World War Research Group. She also serves as a co-editor of the Cambridge Elements series in collaboration with the Royal Historical Society: History and Contemporary Society.
Dr Guo endeavours to fulfil her responsibility as an intellectual in advancing and disseminating knowledge to a wider audience. In 2021, she participated in a two-day interview for the production of the three-episode Arte series Reinventing China, where she provided comprehensive commentary on the history of modern and contemporary China. This series has aired in France and Germany and has also been translated into Chinese for broadcast in Taiwan. In 2017, she was interviewed for producing the WildBear Entertainment series, The Impossible Peace. She provided commentary on the history of interwar China. This series has been completed and delivered for international distribution.
Events

'I Wish I Knew' by Jia Zhangke - film screening and panel
Join us for a special screening of Jia Zhangke's poignant film I Wish I Knew co-curated with the Chinese Cinema Project.
Please note: this event has passed.
Events

'I Wish I Knew' by Jia Zhangke - film screening and panel
Join us for a special screening of Jia Zhangke's poignant film I Wish I Knew co-curated with the Chinese Cinema Project.
Please note: this event has passed.