Phoebe Li
Auckland
Phoebe H. Li (李海蓉）holds a PhD from the University of Auckland and was a research fellow at Tsinghua University (清华大学) in Beijing. She is currently an independent historian. Her research interests include late Qing politics, the Chinese Diaspora in Australasia, and mass media.
She was the principal curator of the photographic exhibition “Recollections of A Distant Shore: a Photographic Introduction to the History of the Chinese in New Zealand (1842-2016)” held at the Overseas Chinese Museum of China in Beijing, and later under the title “Being Chinese in Aotearoa” at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Waitangi Treaty Ground Museum and the New Zealand Portrait Gallery between 2016 and 2020. Her publications include A Virtual Chinatown: The Diasporic Mediasphere of Chinese Migrants in New Zealand (Brill, 2013), Recollections of a Distant Shore: New Zealand Chinese in Historical Images (co-authored with John B. Turner, Social Sciences Academic Press, 2017), Golden Enterprise: New Zealand Chinese Merchants 1860s-1970s (Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust, 2024), which was longlisted for the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (Illustrated Non-Fiction), as well as academic journal articles and book chapters in both Chinese and English.
Specialties:
Modern China
Chinese Diaspora
New Zealand Chinese