Research

I am a cultural and political sociologist who investigates the transnational dynamics of identity construction, along with the local, national, and global forces that drive changes in political views and practices. I am versatile in methods and often combine both qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, focus groups, content analysis, text analysis, statistical analysis, and vignette experiments, in my own research.

Culture and Identity

An overall question guiding my scholarship is how international migration, especially migration from an authoritarian context to a democratic one, impacts the ways in which individuals make sense of the self, nation, and world. My dissertation and book project, titled “Home Is Where I Stand”: A Comparative Study of Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism Among Chinese Students in the United States and China, exemplifies my overall agenda. It draws on comparative ethnographic work at three universities in the U.S. and China, over 100 in-depth interviews, and systematic text analysis of more than 4,500 news articles in major newspapers in the two countries. I address how Chinese students negotiate their racial, national, and global identities amid the rise of anti-Asian racism and the difficult China-U.S. geopolitics. I explore why and how some Chinese students can develop supranational or cosmopolitan identification, whereas others remain apolitical or become more nationalistic. My work theorizes the conditions under which transnational experiences can lead to cosmopolitan identification. I argue that being abroad is not enough. To become more cosmopolitan, individuals must problematize their national belonging, unpack national assumptions, and unlearn the default political habits cultivated in an authoritarian context. They must learn to be cosmopolitan.

Bridging work in cultural sociology, political sociology, international migration, and social psychology, this project proposes a typology of identifications—active nationalism, passive nationalism, Kantian (community-oriented) cosmopolitanism, and Stoic (individual-oriented) cosmopolitanism—to capture how individuals growing up under authoritarianism navigate the local, the national, the universal, and the political. I find that male, upper-middle-class students are more likely to be active nationalists and Kantian cosmopolitans, whereas female or working-class students are more likely to be passive nationalists, Stoic cosmopolitans, or “identity-less” individuals because of the discrimination, microaggressions, hypermobility, and mental health issues that they have endured in both contexts. Meanwhile, students from the Chinese university and the American private university, which are more controlled and depoliticized, tend to enact passive nationalism and Stoic cosmopolitanism. Those from the American public university tend to enact either active nationalism or Kantian cosmopolitanism as a response to the progressive campus culture.

Culture and Health/Economy

In another line of research, I examine how culture shapes people’s economic action and leads to inequality. I use China’s informal medical payment (also known as hongbao)—extra payment offered by patients to doctors, in the forms of money, gifts, or favors, to secure better medical services or priority—as a case. I (and my co-author) view informal medical payment as a form of disreputable exchange, which is morally disapproved and often legally prohibited but somehow remain ubiquitous. Although previous literature explains this social problem by material interests and structural relations, we propose a cultural approach based on three major conceptions of culture: culture in relations, culture in interactions, and culture in inequality. Drawing on interviews with doctors and patients, we find that participants of the exchange mobilize items from their cultural repertoires, such as professional ethics, face, power, fairness, and affection, to redefine different situations of interactions and project positive self–images to render their problematic exchanges morally acceptable to each other. Moreover, as the participants’ responses to our vignettes show, they negatively evaluate the exchanges in general moral terms, such as equality and fairness, but culturally justify their own involvement. This discrepancy between saying and doing tends to legitimize the disreputable exchange amid enduring public outrage and institutional prohibition. These cultural processes contribute to the reproduction of unequal access to scarce health care resources. This study is published in Social Psychology Quarterly, a top journal in social psychology. An earlier version in Chinese was included in several books and won the Best Master’s Thesis award in Southern China.

Culture and Politics

In a project titled “Whom to Trust, State or Society? The Differentiated Trust in Contemporary China,“ I look at the patterns of trust among Chinese people in social and state institutions. I find that different groups of people have differentiated trust in the central vs. local government and in the official vs. non-official institutions. Fitting latent class models (LCA) to the data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), I first identify a typology of groups of differentiated trust: optimist, institutionalist, centralist, and neutralist. Institutionalists, the largest among the four groups, are those who trust only the institutions that are supported or recognized by the nation. Optimists, the second-largest group, trust every institution, regardless of whether it is at the central or local level and whether it is officially recognized or not. In contrast, centralists trust only the central-level and officially recognized institutions, whereas they strongly distrust, for example, the local government, the local police, the local media, and non-governmental organizations. Finally, neutralists, the smallest group, hold consistent neutral attitudes toward all institutions, being neither trustful nor distrustful. Then, I run logit regressions to predict the probability of being in each group. Results show that negative and self-organized political experience increases the probability of being a centralist or neutralist, whereas positive and collectively organized political experience increases the probability of being an optimist or institutionalist. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how trust sustains an authoritarian regime.

In another project, I explore why middle-class professionals in China have drastically different political attitudes, which, I argue, is due to their relationships with the “System” (“Ti-Zhi”, which mainly refers to the state-ownership system and the redistribution system controlled by the state). Drawing on in-depth interviews and content analysis of social media data, I compare three types of middle-class professionals: doctors, investment bankers, and information technology practitioners (software engineers and product manages). I find that (1) the degree to which the industry is commercialized and (2) how the professionals define their identity in relation to the “System” jointly shape how they view the state-market relationship and imagine the future of China. Accordingly, their views lead to different actions (e.g., whether to protest or simply immigrate to another country). This study was published in Chinese in the Journal of Gansu Administration Institute, a leading Chinese journal in politics and public administration.

Cultural Sociology in General

I am also interested in how cultural sociology as a field evolves and spreads to non-English societies. In a review article, my collaborators and I delineate the trajectory and features of the development of the cultural sociology of China. We argue that the evolution of this scholarship has involved three intertwined social, political, and intellectual processes across national boundaries: (1) the production, diffusion, reception, and reproduction of modern social scientific paradigms from the West, especially the USA, to China; (2) the tensions between China studies as “area studies” in western academia and sociology as a discipline; (3) the entangled relations between politics and knowledge in both China and the West. Then we review existing cultural sociological studies of various topics in three broad categories: economy, politics, and civil society. We end with a discussion of promising topics and agenda for future research and potential challenges.

Additionally, I also translate recent works in cultural sociology into Chinese. One piece of translation was published in the Sociological Journal (社会学刊). I am also a co-editor of Cultural Sociology: Classics & Frontiers, the first Chinese-language anthology that introduces the Chinese audience to the field of cultural sociology in North America. The anthology is published by Peking University Press, one of the most prestigious university presses in China, and hopes to reach a larger Chinese audience interested in cultural sociology.