Ph.D. University of Chicago
My research interests lie in the interface between law, polity, economy, and society, with a thematic focus on international development. I was educated at Beijing University and the University of Chicago, both characterized by their nurturing grounds for interdisciplinary trespassing. During my long and continent-crossing student years, I enjoyed touring all social sciences departments that opened their doors to me, earning degrees in psychology, international relations, and human development, and conducting research in sociology and economics. Before joining the School of Global Studies, I had the privilege to work and study with Ronald Coase at the University of Chicago Law School on law and economics and the new institutional economics.
The primary concern of my research is transition and developing economies. My approach to economic development prioritizes the institutional and organizational structure of the economic system, underscoring the legal framework and social structure within which the economy operates and evolves. Coming from Coasean economics, I view economic development as essentially an everlasting process of market-augmenting. To sustain and expand Hayekian market order, there is no easy way but repeated social experimentation and collective learning, which are more likely to be encouraged and flourish in an open society that honors several property, individual freedom, political tolerance, cultural pluralism, and social diversity. Comparative study of international development has led me to appreciate different routes to a market-based social economy conditioned by various local circumstances.
My current empirical research on transition economies has a geographic focus on China. I have done intensive fieldwork in rural China, particularly, the rise of commercial fishery. To continue my study of China’s ongoing economic transition, I am now launching a project to examine China’s emerging auto industry, which is a crowded battlefield for domestic producers as well as multinationals from Japan, South Korea, the United States, and Europe. The empirical question driving this project begins with the evolving organizational and institutional structure of auto production as manifested in this highly competitive and heterogeneous industry. It is particularly interesting to compare how auto manufacturers respond to outsourcing and globalization, fuelled by and reinforcing increasing technological and organizational innovation.
Another related and persisting interest of mine is more elusive and defies ready classification. It stems from my frustration with the malaise of contemporary social sciences. Modern social sciences were borne out of philosophy mainly in their attempt to understand and harness the emerging commercial society first appeared in the West in the 18th century. Today, our understanding of modern society, with its interconnected and dynamic economic, political, social, and cultural systems, remains fragmented and self-contradictory. Nothing drives this point home with more force and agony than our ill perceptions of and impulsive reactions to the current wave of globalization.
In the endeavor to understand social reality on self-critical ontological and methodological terms, I am working toward a new institutional economic sociology by planting the seed of the new institutional economics into the empirically fertile land of sociology, which, I hope opens us to a deeper understanding of the social organization of economic activity.
I have published Cultural Psychology: Culture and Mind (Zhongshan University Press, 1993, with Chen Weiqi and Dai Jianling, in Chinese), Making a Market Economy: the Institutional Transformation of a Freshwater Fishery in a Chinese Community (Routledge 2004), and articles in American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Politics and Society, and Cambridge Journal of Economics.
On personal side, I grew up in a rice-and-fish farming village in south-central Hubei of China. As a kid, I enjoyed fishing more than anything else, perhaps with the only exception of reading. While at Chicago, jogging along the shores of Lake Michigan and stopping by at Powell’s was my favorite pastime. I now open mind to seek, and arms to embrace, the beauty of the Sunny State of Arizona.