Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

Rao, Yichen. 2023. Discourse as Infrastructure: How ‘new infrastructure’ policies reinfrastructure China. Global Media and China. 8(3) https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364231198605

Rao, Yichen and Jieyi Xie. 2023. Digital Distinction: Class as Mediated Dispositions in China’s Animal Crossing Fever. Chinese Journal of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2023.2248524

Rao, Yichen and Tom McDonald. 2023. Debt at a Distance: Counter-collection strategies and financial subjectivities of China’s working-class defaulters during COVID-19. Economy and Society 52(2): 250-273

Rao, Yichen. 2022. E-sports vs. Exams: Youth Competition Ideologies in Neo-socialist China. Social Analysis 66(4): 69-90. 

Rao, Yichen. 2021 Dreaming Like a Market: The hidden script of financial inclusion in China’s P2P lending platforms. Economic Anthropology 8(1): 102-115. (2020 Schneider Prize Honorable Mention, American Anthropological Association)

Rao, Yichen. 2019. From Confucianism to Psychology: Rebooting Internet Addicts in China. History of Psychology 22(4) 328-350

Rao, Yichen. 2015. Internet Addicts and the Transformation of Social Control in China. Beijing Cultural Review 2015(5): 64-71 [In Chinese]

Book Chapters

Rao, Yichen. 2025. Rebooting a Family: Helping Children in Internet Addiction Treatment Camps. In Hsu, Becky Yang, ed. The Extraordinary in the Mundane: Family and Forms of Community in China. Columbia University Press. [Peer-reviewed]

Rao, Yichen. 2024. Deep Play in a Total Institution: How China’s Young Game Addicts Gamify the Disciplinary Treatment Camp in Douglas Eyman, Li Guo and Hongmei Sun eds. Game and Play in the Chinese and Sinophone World: From the Early Modern to Contemporary. University of Washington Press [Peer-reviewed]

Santos, Goncalo, Yichen Rao, Jack L. Xing, Jun Zhang. 2021. Capitalism, Overwork and Polanyi’s Dialectics of Freedom: Emerging Visions of Work-Life Balance in Contemporary China. In Chris Hann ed. Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era. Oxford and NY: Berghahn. [Peer-reviewed]

Rao, Yichen. 2020. “Bread, Coke and Psychology: Internet Addiction Treatment Beyond Military Training and Electric Shock”. In Huang Xiuwei ed. Anthropology: Learn everything about human Hong Kong: Humming Publishing [In Chinese, non-peer-reviewed]