A Reevaluation of the Chinese Revolution: Linking the Past to the Present Over the Long Term

James Lee, director of the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, speaks at USC on the durability of social structures in China.

Reception to follow
Please RSVP to uschina@usc.edu

James Z. Lee is Frederick Huetwell Professor of History and Sociology, research professor at the Population Studies Center, Faculty Associate at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, and Changjiang Visiting Scholar at Peking University. A practitioner of social scientific history, the application of quantitative social science methods on historical data, he and his students and colleagues in the Lee-Campbell Research Group link historical and contemporary archival sources, social surveys, genealogies, inscriptions, and oral histories to create large individual level panel data sets extending from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Their analyses of these populations show how economic conditions and historical institutions, social organization and cultural values, domestic and individual agency combine to produce distinctive variations in demographic behavior, stratification, and social mobility.

Professor Lee is currently writing two books with Cameron Campbell on social stratification in China in general and among the royal peasants of Liaoning in particular from 1700 to 2000.  His published work includes six authored or co-authored books, five co-edited books, and over forty articles focused largely on the demography, ethnicity, fiscal and frontier history of late imperial China, as well as on the social organization, and social mobility of late imperial and contemporary China.  He has recently extended his area of research from historical China to the comparative demography and sociology of other East Asian and West European populations in the past and China and Zambia in the present.  A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2004), he is also a recipient of the Social Science History Association's Allan Sharlin Award for Best Book in Social Science History (2000), and two American Sociological Association section best book awards including the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Social Demography from the Population Section (2000) and the Outstanding Book on Asia published in 2003 and 2004 from the Asia and Asian America Section (2005).  A founding editor of Late Imperial China (1985-2000), and co-editor of Historical Methods (2001-6), Professor Lee is the lead editor of the MIT Series in Eurasian Population and Family History.  His most recent book, Liaodong yiminzhong de qiren shehui (Immigration and Eight Banner Society in Liaodong), published by the Shanghai Academy of Social Science Press was named one of the top five history books published in China in 2004 by the Zhongguo xueshu nianjian (Chinese Academic Annals).