Hanchao Lu

Hanchao Lu researches modern China through urban life, social change, and the experiences of people often missing from official narratives. A professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he earned a UCLA doctorate in history and joined Georgia Tech in 1994. Beyond the Neon Lights is his University of California Press study subtitled Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Lu turns attention away from Shanghai's famous commercial skyline to densely populated residential neighborhoods and the routines of lower- and middle-income residents. Drawing on documentary and ethnographic material, he examines housing, work, consumption, neighborhood relationships, and the practical adjustments that accompanied rapid modernization. The book received recognition from the Urban History Association and helped establish Lu's broader interest in everyday history. His later studies of beggars, family photographs, and modern Chinese society continue that attention to ordinary lives as evidence of large historical transformations. Across these subjects, ordinary experience becomes a precise measure of wider historical change.