Tianhe Chen was born in Suzhou, China. He has long been interested in how market-oriented social transformations and differentiations are deeply intertwined with people's everyday struggles and self-identities, especially in how people understand their lives and make expression in an unstable society. During his undergraduate school, he co-founded and co-led the student club “Colorsworld”, which aims to promote the gender minority community at Peking University. Before his graduate school, he went to Xinjiang as a volunteer teacher. His master's thesis focuses on how workers and managers in a state-owned enterprise in southern Jiangsu were involved in and affected by the ownership reform in the late 1990s. His current project is about underdog culture on the Chinese Internet, a loosely connected community using "抽象文化", which may be understood as the Chinese version of incel culture (but not the same), as the resource of their discourses. He is interested in topics like body, memory, gender, shame, and resistance.