Political Cross Currents in China’s Corporate Restructuring

Stanford University's Jean Oi will examine China's corporate cross currents.

Jean Oi is the William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics, a professor of political science and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. She is the director the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center's newly established Stanford China Program. Her work focuses on comparative politics, Chinese political economy, and corporate restructuring and governance in Asia. She is currently working on a project that examines restructuring and corporate governance in China's state-owned enterprises. She is also continuing her research on rural China, including work on village and township finances, rural development and debt, as well as, work on village elections. She has done extensive fieldwork in China since the mid-1980s and has conducted fieldwork interviews in Hong Kong.

Professor Oi's book, Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform (University of California Press) was named by the library journal Choice as one of the "outstanding academic titles" of 1999. She is also the author of State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of Village Government (University of California, 1989,) and is co-editor of Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford University Press, 1999). Oi has edited, with Nara Dillon of Bard College, a conference volume titled At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks and State-building in Republican Shanghai (forthcoming Stanford University Press 2007.)

Oi was the director of Stanford's Center for East Asian studies from 1998 to 2005 and a Crocker Faculty Scholar at Stanford from 1998 to 2001. She has taught courses in Chinese politics and the Era of Reform in China. In 1999, her students selected her as an Outstanding Faculty Adviser and in 2003 she became a Stanford Cap and Gown Honorary. She received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2004-05 and was named Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education for 2005-2010. She received a BA with a double major in political science and Asian languages and literature from Indiana University, and a Ph.D in political science from the University of Michigan. She speaks Mandarin, and some Cantonese.

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