I am currently associate professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Before coming to Northwestern in January 2013, I served as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto (from 2011 through December 2012) and the University of Texas at Austin (from 2007-2011). Prior to starting on the tenure track, I was a visiting instructor in Government and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College (2004-2005) and a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford University (2005-2007).
My research has encompassed several strands and topics in both Chinese politics and Indonesian politics, often drawing on and endeavoring to speak to diverse disciplines, such as law, history, sociology, as well as to multiple sub-fields and literatures of political science. But all of my work is motivated by a concern for careful subnational comparative analysis, tracing of historical patterns and processes, and a desire to look beyond the pronouncements of national governments to understand politics at the grassroots from more of a bottom-up perspective.
My first book, The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge 2009), is the most comprehensive study to date of the political economy, social policy responses, coping strategies, and contentious mobilization surrounding reform of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and the more than 60 million jobs lost in that sector between 1993 and 2008. Based on over 300 interviews, conducted over two years of field research across 9 Chinese cities, it is also the first book to propose a systematic subnational comparative framework for analysis of important outcomes in contemporary Chinese politics and society.
My second major monograph, Ruling Before the Law: the Politics of Legal Regimes in China and Indonesia (Cambridge 2018), is the first book to attempt a full side-by-side comparison of China with another major country, as well as the first work comparing Indonesia and China from any angle. Based on over 12 years of research, including more than two years of on-the-ground fieldwork across both urban and rural areas of multiple Chinese and Indonesian provinces, it is also the most detailed study of either country’s legal system at the grassroots in several decades. Examining law and politics from 1949-2017 in both countries, the book lays out a new theory of legal regimes that can help categorize and explain the institutional politics of courts and legal institutions in diverse political contexts.
Beyond these two books, I've also published more than 25 articles and book chapters on a variety of themes, but many with a particular emphasis on local governance and state-society relations in both urban and rural China. Looking at issues from urbanization to rural protest and petitioning, these pieces articulate a perspective that looks beyond China’s superficial development success story to probe instances of political decay, institutional dysfunction, and social dislocation, alongside examples of innovation and inclusive economic growth.
I've also edited three volumes on the politics of urbanization in China and co-edited two others, one on the politics of laid-off SOE workers and the other on local governance innovation in China.
Currently, I'm working on two new book projects. The first book focuses on the politics and of land and land reform in Mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Indonesia between 1945 and 1965 to trace the long-term implications of distribution, tenure, and property rights arrangements reached during that critical juncture for each country's institutional development and political economy. The second book is a co-authored study of US-China relations from c.1900 to the present, focusing on the interaction of domestic political and international structural factors in shaping the world’s most important bilateral relationship over a range of different historical periods. Both books should be completed and ready for submission by the end of 2022.