Focusing on the domestic impact of Chinese economic reform, she has written the books Strangers in the City (2001), In Search of Paradise (2010), and Anxious China (2021).
[5][6] After leaving UC Irvine, Zhang spent several years in Zhejiangcun, where she lived with migrants who had settled there from rural regions and interviewed them.
[8][7] She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies from 1998 to 1999, before moving to UC Davis and becoming a professor.
[2] She was also director of their East Asian Studies Program from 2003 until 2006, chair of their Department of Anthropology from 2011 until 2015, and interim dean of their Division of Social Sciences from 2015 until 2017.
[2] She received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's Victor Turner Prize for her 2021 book Anxious China.