Chinese Local Governance:
Contemporary Innovation and Reform
Speakers
Speakers will include Tan Yeling (Harvard University), John Kennedy (University of Kansas), Pierre Landry (University of Pittsburgh), Deborah Davis (Yale University), Jeremy Wallace (Ohio State University), Wang Yuhua (Pennsylvania State University), Dali Yang (University of Chicago), Shi Yaojiang (Northwest University, Xi'an, China), Kevin O'Brien (University of California, Berkeley), James Cook (University of Pittsburgh), Ang Yuen Yuen (University of Michigan), Lü Xiaobo (Texas A&M), and Chen Dan (University of Kansas).
Yuen Yuen ANG studies states, bureaucracies, and development in developing countries, focusing on China. She is currently writing a book manuscript that explains why state-led development has been possible in China despite the absence of conventionally “good” public bureaucracies. She has done extensive field work in China since 2006, gathering over 300 interviews with public officials and bureaucrats across regions and sectors. Her other research projects examine regulatory behavior, design of bureaucratic targets, and local fiscal sustainability. She was a recipient of the Andrew Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Early Career Fellowships for two consecutive years from 2008-2010. Prior to joining the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in Political Science, she served on the faculty of Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs.
James Cook: Biography coming soon.
Deborah S. Davis (Ph.D. Boston University, 1979) is a Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her primary teaching interests are historical and comparative sociology, inequality and stratification, contemporary Chinese society, and methods of fieldwork. In addition to teaching at Yale, she runs a summer fieldwork seminar where Yale students work collaboratively with students from Hong Kong and China. In past summers the seminar has investigated such topics as transformations of childhood consumption, changing concepts of privacy and property rights, the uses of public space in new and old residential communities in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and interaction of household and village level resources for predicting school attendance in rural Yunnan.
Davis is currently a member of the National Committee on US China Relations and in 2004 helped launch theYale China Health Journal. At Yale she has served as Director of Academic Programs at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Chair of the Department of Sociology, Chair of the Council of East Asian Studies, Director of Graduate Studies in both East Asian Studies and Sociology, Member of the Publications Committee for Yale Press, co-chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum and Member of the Tenure Appointments Committee for the Social Sciences.
Past publications have analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, social welfare policy, consumer culture, property rights, social stratification and occupational mobility. In 2008 Stanford University Press will publish Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China, co-edited with Wang Feng. Currently she is completing a monograph entitled A Home of Their Own, a study of the social consequences of the privatization of real estate in urban China.
Neil Diamant's research focuses on law and society in Asia (with particular reference to China, Japan, and India), civil-military relations in China, patriotism in comparative perspective, and (most recently) public health. He also teaches courses on Israeli politics and Zionism. Recent publications: Professor Diamant is author of two books, Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families and the Politics of Patriotism in China, 1949-2007 (published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2009) and Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949-1968 (published by University of California Press in 2000). He also published the edited volume Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (with Stanley Lubman and Kevin J. O'Brien) with Stanford University Press in 2005. His most recently-published articles include "Conspicuous Silence: Veterans and the Depoliticization of War Memory in China" (published in Modern Asian Studies in 2011) and "Veterans, Organization, and the Politics of Martial Citizenship in China" (published in The Journal of East Asian Studies in 2007). He has contributed chapters to a number of edited volumes, including "The Limitations of Martial Citizenship in the People's Republic of China," in Peled, Lewin-Epstein, Mundlak and Cohen's Democratic Citizenship and War (2010); "Why Archives?" in Carlson, Gallagher, Lieberthal, and Manion's Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies (2010); and "Legal Syncretism and Family Change in Urban and Rural China" in Galvan and Sil's, Reconfiguring Institutions across Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation (2007).
John Kennedy: biography coming soon.
Pierre Landry Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Pittsburgh specializing comparative politics and (since 1997) a research fellow the Research Center for Contemporary China at Peking University. He researches the politics of authoritarian regimes, with some emphasis on East and South East Asia (China, Vietnam), as well as the impact of governance (good or bad) and the rule of law (or lack thereof) on the stability of such regimes. He is the author of Decentralized Authoritarianism in China (Cambridge University Press). Pierre Landry serves on the external advisory committee of the General Social Survey of China as well as the China Committee of the World Values Survey Project. He also advises the Universities Service Center for China Studies at CUHK on the construction of the Barometer on China's Development. He has also been consulting with the United Nations Development Program in Vietnam on survey-based projects related to governance, the judiciary and rule of law development. For copies of other recent publications and work in progress, go to http://www.pflandry.com. For access to the governance project in Vietnam, go to: http://www.papi.vn.
Xiaobo Lü (Ph.D. Yale University 2011) is an Assistant Professor at Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. He has broad research interest in comparative and international political economy and Chinese politics. Specifically, he studies redistributive politics concerning inequality, social policies, and public finance issues in developing countries, with a focus on China. Currently he is working on several projects that study the political causes and consequences of education policies in China. He also has several on-going projects that concern local politics of public finance and development in China and beyond. He has published in American Journal of Political Science, and his dissertation received Mancur Olson Award by the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in the field of political economy in 2012.
Kevin O'Brien is the Alann P. Bedford Professor of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science. A student of Chinese politics in the reform era, he has written articles on topics such as legislative politics, local elections, fieldwork strategies, popular protest, policy implementation, and village-level political reform. He is the author of Reform Without Liberalization: China's National People's Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change (Cambridge, 1990, paperback, 2008) and the co-author of Rightful Resistance in Rural China (Cambridge, 2006). He is the co-editor of Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (Stanford, 2005, paperback 2010) and Grassroots Elections in China (Routledge, 2011), and the editor of Popular Protest in China (Harvard, 2008). His most recent work centers on the Chinese state and theories of popular contention, particularly as concerns "soft repression" and the policing of protest. He has won various grants and awards and serves on the editorial or advisory board of nine journals.
Yaojiang SHI is Professor of Economics and Management at Northwest University in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China. He also is Director of the Northwest Socioeconomic Development Research Center there. His research interests include the emergence and development of economic enterprises in rural China, as well as the process of political nominations in rural areas of China and how political incentives are affecting government performance. Shi's work is increasingly focused on China's education reforms and identifying though empirical work important leverage points for education policy to address the needs of the rural poor.
Yeling TAN is a PhD student in Public Policy at Harvard University. Her research interests are in the political economy of China's transition. Yeling holds an MPA in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BA in International Relations and Economics (Honors, Distinction) from Stanford University. She is co-author (with Ann Florini and Lai Hairong) of China Experiments: From Local Innovations to National Reform (Brookings Institution Press 2012).
Jeremy Wallace specializes in Chinese politics, political economy of development, politics of urbanization and geography, redistributive politics, and authoritarian regimes. His dissertation, Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Migration, and Authoritarian Resilience in China, examined how the Chinese government shapes urbanization to maintain its rule.
Yuhua WANG is an Assistant Professor of political science at University of Pennsylvania. His research combines Comparative Politics with a specialty in China and American Politics. His research is motivated by one question: “Under what conditions are politicians with discretionary power willing to abide by rules of the game?” As an attempt to address this question, Wang Yuhua’s research examines the rise of rule of law in authoritarian regimes, especially China and the politics of judicial review in the United States. Professor Wang received a B.A. and M.A. from Peking University (Beijing, China) in 2003 and 2006 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Michigan in 2011.
This conference is made possible by the contributions of the University Center for International Studies, the Asian Studies Center, and the China Council of the University of Pittsburgh.
>> Return to Asian Studies Center site
