Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She obtained her PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and University of Michigan before moving to UCLA. She is a former member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2006-7) and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2003-4). Her publications have focused on labor, social activism, political sociology and development in China and the Global South.
Lee is author of Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007), winner of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Labor Book Award in 2008 and Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), co-winner of the Best Book Award given by the Asia and Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association in 1999. Her edited and co-edited books include From the Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers and the State in a Changing China (2011); Reclaiming Chinese Society: New Social Activism (2009), Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China (2007) and Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation (2007).
She is currently writing a book on forty years of state and society relation in China, and working on two research projects: one on the micro-foundations of China’s durable authoritarianism and the other examines Chinese investment and labor practices in Africa.