Additional information
by Zai Liang (Editor), Steven Messner (Editor), Cheng Chen (Editor)
This book provides first-hand, insiders' perspectives on urban issues in China, aiming to provide a theoretically informed and empirically rich discussion of the new social landscape of urban China in the 21st century. The research reported encompasses both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, with the latter based on extensive and in-depth fieldwork. The authors, most of them being native Chinese, had distinctive advantages in gaining access to study subjects, and had intimate knowledge of the locations and people they studied. The book's primary geographical focus is on southern China, especially Guangdong province. This region is in the forefront of China's transition to a market economy, and therefore constitutes an ideal social laboratory to study the key urban issues that have emerged in the last two decades. Combining ethnographic research along with survey-based quantitative analysis, this volume will appeal to students of urban issues in contemporary China, and it will generate important and fresh empirical and theoretical insights for the broader scholarly communities of area studies, urban studies, and urban sociology. It will also serve as a useful text for graduate courses and advanced undergraduate courses on China and urban sociology.
Author Biography
About the Editors:
Zai Liang is professor of sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY, and director of Urban China Research Network. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago and conducted post-doctoral research at Brown University. He has served as chair of Asia and Asian American section of the American Sociological Association. His main research interests are in internal and international migration and urban sociology. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health as well as other private foundations.
Steven F. Messner is Distinguished Teaching Professor of sociology at the University at Albany, SUNY. He received his Ph. D. in Sociology from Princeton University. His research focuses on social institutions and crime, understanding spatial and temporal patterns of crime, and crime and social control in China. In addition to his articles in professional journals and chapters in edited volumes, he is co-author of Crime and the American Dream;Perspectives on Crime and Deviance;Criminology: An Introduction Using ExplorIt; and co-editor of Theoretical Integration in the Study of Deviance and Crime and Crime and Social Control in a Changing China. He served as the 2010-11 President of the American Society of Criminology.
Cheng Chen is associate professor of political science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Her research and teaching interests include post-communist politics, nationalism and nation-building, democratization, Chinese politics, and comparative-historical methodology. She is the author of The Prospects for Liberal Nationalism in Post-Leninist States (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007) as well as many journal articles. Currently, she is working on a new book project examining the search for regime ideology in post-communist China and Russia.
Youqin Huang is associate professor of geography and planning, and a research associate of the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University at Albany, SUNY. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001. She is interested primarily in the interaction between population behavior and geography. Her research has focused on housing, migration/mobility, urbanization and China. She has published in many of the leading journals in her fields of expertise.
Fuping Chen, Xiaojuan Chen, Eric Fong, Guangxu Ji, Cuiling Li, Jing Li, Zhen Li, Alan Smart, Josephine Smart, Jiashun Wang, Tao Xu, XiongduanYang
