Michel Hockx (born 1964) is a Dutch sinologist currently serving as professor of Chinese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and founding Director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies at the University of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs. Hockx previously was a professor of Chinese at SOAS University of London and founding director of the SOAS China Institute.
Hockx was born in the Netherlands. He holds a PhD in Chinese literature from Leiden University.
Hockx has published widely, both in English and in Chinese, on topics related to modern Chinese poetry and literary culture, especially early 20th-century Chinese magazine literature and print culture and contemporary Internet literature. He is the author of Questions of Style: Literary Societies and Literary Journals in Modern China, 1911-1937, which focuses on how the style of Republican-era Chinese literature was shaped by the context in which it was produced. His recent book, Internet Literature in China, was listed by Choice magazine as one of the âÂÂTop 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2015.â His latest book, Literature and Censorship in Modern China (Routledge, 2026), challenges the stereotypical simplistic characterization of Chinese censorship by delineating compellingly the "gray zone" between "institutional censorship" and "structural censorship" in the literary field of modern China, from 1900 to present.
In December 2016, Hockx's first book A Snowy Morning was made freely available to download under an Open Access licence.