I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I also serve as Associate Director of the Centre for Civil Society Studies at the CUHK Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies.

My research on China encompasses political sociology, civil society, and globalization. My latest article, co-authored with Lin Tao and Kin-man Chan, will appear in The China Journal in January 2014 and is entitled “Societal Support for China’s Grassroots NGOs: Evidence from Yunnan, Guangdong, and Beijing.”  Click here for an abstract.

An earlier study of grassroots NGOs and their relations with the Chinese government was published in the July 2011 issue of the American Journal of Sociology as, “Contingent Symbiosis and Civil Society in an Authoritarian State:  Understanding the Survival of China’s Grassroots NGOs.” My research on foreign philanthropy to China includes “Organizational Homophily in International Grantmaking: US-Based Foundations and their Grantees in China,” in the Journal of Civil Society (2011), and “Lessons from Abroad: Foreign Influences on China’s Emerging Civil Society,” in The China Journal (2012).

I received my undergraduate degree in Asian Studies at Occidental College, during which time I spent a year at Nanjing University and Beijing University as an exchange student. After working for five years in Taiwan in the 1990s, I returned to the US to study at Yale University, where I obtained an MA degree in East Asian Studies in 1998, an MA and MPhil in Sociology (2001 and 2005), and my PhD in Sociology in 2007.  During the early ‘00s, I spent three years with the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, where I co-founded and worked as Assistant Editor of YaleGlobal Online.