The Berkeley China Initiative brings together UC Berkeley's exceptional resources to strengthen research and teaching about China across all disciplines and professions, forge new international partnerships, and enrich public life by communicating those results.

To accomplish this, we have undertaken a new funding initiative to strengthen several key areas of China Studies at Berkeley. Learn more about this initiative and BCI here.

Student Groups

Berkeley China Scholars Society – Graduate Students

Kun Chen

Department:	Anthropology, 1st year
Email:	kunchen [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Interface between culture and transnational enterpreneurship of technological innovation in China and US.

Chih-hua Chiang

Department:	Anthropology, 5th year
Email:	chihhua [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am interested in studying the prehistory of Taiwan.

Jenny Chio

Department:	Anthropology, 4th year
Email:	jchio [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	My research is on the role of domestic tourism practices and management in shaping social lives and opportunities in Guangxi and Guizhou provinces.

Cindy Huang

Department:	Anthropology, 3rd year
Email:	cindyh [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I study traditional Uyghur medicine and changing conceptions of health and healing.

Daniel Husman

Department:	Anthropology, 2nd year
Email:	danielh [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Memories of the Mao era in the context of contemporary capitalism, nostalgia and nationalism, the experience of social change.

Shannon May

Department:	Anthropology, 4th year
Email:	shannon.k.may [at] gmail.com
Research Interests:	Research interests include discourses and practices of development, processes of inclusion and exclusion, nation-making and self-making. She is currently working in Huangbaiyu, China, with a focus on the effects of a transnational project to create a "sustainable development model village" that will modernize the countryside without environmental degradation. The working title of the dissertation is Making China Modern: Transformational Technologies of Society and Self.

Emily Wilcox

Department:	Anthropology, 2nd year
Email:	eewilcox [at] socrates.berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am studying contemporary dance in urban China, particularly the role of traditional medical cosmologies in dancers' views of their bodies and health as well as ways that avant-garde performance art, through unique forms of expression, serves as a venu for political action and debate.

Lisia Zheng

Department:	Anthropology, 1st year
Email:	lisiazheng [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Development, economic anthropology, visual anthropology, and urban studies.

Chung Man Carmen Tsui

Department:	Architecture, 1st year
Email:	tsui_chungman [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am interested in the urban history and development of modern China, with focuses on the urban transformations of the Yangtze regions during the 20th century.

John Givens

Department:	Asian Studies, 2nd year
Email:	john_givens [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am looking at retrospective changes in travel patterns and costs (i.e. - changes from 'before' to 'after' moving to the urban fringe) for urban fringe dwellers in several Chinese cities, as well as cross-sectional differences in costs associated with travel (i.e. - differences between people living in the urban fringe versus inner-city dwellers).

Annie Gu

Department:	Boalt School of Law, LLM '06
Email:	gujing [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I get excited about the up-to-date legal development in China, which is also my research topic right now.

Wendy Tao

Department:	City and Regional Planning, 1st year
Email:	wendytao [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am interested in transport planning processes in China's rapidly motorizing cities, as well as health and air quality impacts of motorization to pedestrians.

Allie Thomas

Department:	City and Regional Planning, 1st year
Email:	alliet [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	China and Energy, Sustainable Transportation in China/East Asia, Sino-US relations, Sino-African Relations, and Sino-Saudi/Arab relations.

Chris Cherry

Department:	Civil Engineering, 3rd year
Email:	cherry [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am interested in studying the effect of electric vehicles on mobility and the environment in China.

Frederich Kahrl

Department:	Energy Resources Group, 1st year
Email:	fkahrl [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Energy demand, efficiency, and renewable energy markets in China; rural development; Chinese forestry policy; China-Persia-Central Asia-Mongolia historical trade interactions.

Graham Bullock

Department:	Environmental Science Policy Management, 1st year
Email:	gbullock [at] calmail.berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am researching the emergence of voluntary environmental governance regimes, such as organic food eco-labels, ecotourism, and sustainable forestry certification, in China, the US and several other countries.

Jimmy Tran

Department:	Environmental Science Policy Management, 1st year
Email:	jimtran [at] nature.berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Environmental governance of industry, particular interest in clean and renewable energy, technology transfer, influence of non-state actors.

Ching-chih Lin

Department:	History, 3rd year
Email:	cclin [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Chinese popular religion; gender construction; anti-superstition movement during the Republican period. Region: Shandong.

Shakhar Rahav

Department:	History
Email:	ishrahav [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am writing my dissertation on May Fourth era intellectuals in Wuhan, emphasizing their associations, social networks, and links with the press.

Edna Tow

Department:	History
Email:	tow [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	My research examines the ways that war has impacted twentieth-century China, in terms of state-society relations, conceptions of citizenship and national identity, as well as local politics and culture in the city of Chongqing.

Margaret Boittin

Department:	Political Science, 2nd year
Email:	boittin [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I study sex workers in China and Russia.

Crystal Chang

Department:	Political Science, 2nd year
Email:	crystalchang [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am interested in the sources of variation in the local enforcement of intellectual property laws in China and India.

T.C. Chau

Department:	Political Science, 3rd year
Email:	tchau [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Researching the development of the information and communications technology (ICT) industries in China, with an emphaisis on the role of government-led development strategies.

Mark Dallas

Department:	Political Science, 5th year
Email:	sharkmail6 [at] yahoo.com
Research Interests:	The creation and maintenance of markets along the textile and steel production chains, and contributions to the geographical redistribution of these industries over the reform era.

Jonathan Hassid

Department:	Political Science, 3rd year
Email:	jhhassid [at] uclink.berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am interested in the Chinese media – how the central government attempts to control media workers, and they attempts these workers make to escape this control.

Rosie Hsueh

Department:	Political Science, 6th year
Email:	rhsueh [at] socrates.berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I study Chinese government control (regulation and firm-level intervention) of foreign direct investment across industrial sectors to understand marketization and the relationship between industrial and FDI policies.

Rachel Stern

Department:	Political Science, 3rd year
Email:	rstern [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Environmental lawsuits in China.

Chung-min Tsai

Department:	Political Science, 4th year
Email:	cmt421 [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Comparative politics, Chinese political economy (State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) reform, especially in electricity industry; regulatory regime; and the central-local relationship).

Carsten Vala

Department:	Political Science, 7th year
Email:	carsten_v [at] yahoo.com
Research Interests:	I am writing my dissertation on the relationship between Chinese Protestants and the reform era state, paying particular attention to how religious believers inside and outside registered churches organize, recruit, and negotiate spaces under the Chinese Communist Party.

Jme McLean

Department:	Public Health, 1st year
Email:	jmclean [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Research interests include HIV/AIDS in China, women's and adolescent health, the health of migrant workers and "healthy city" initatives.

Julia Chuang

Department:	Sociology, 1st year
Email:	jchuang [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	I am interested in the effects of rural-urban labor migration on rural households in China.

Zongshi Chen

Department:	Sociology
Email:	zongshi [at] uclink.berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Law, labor, and development.

Jennifer Choo

Department:	Sociology, 4th year
Email:	jchoo [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Examination of the relationship between legal categories and social protest in China.

Seio Nakajima

Department:	Sociology, 9th year
Email:	nakajima [at] socrates.berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	My current research focuses on Chinese film industry, combining perspectives of economic sociology, sociology of culture, and organizational theory.

Eli Friedman

Department:	Sociology, 2nd year
Email:	elidf [at] berkeley.edu
Research Interests:	Current research is focused on the nascent labor movement in South China's export processing zones, and the relationship between grassroots participants and transnational activists.

Leslie Wang

Department:	Sociology, 4th year
Email:	lkwang77 [at] yahoo.com
Research Interests:	My dissertation deals with the topic of a high number of children who have been abandoned due to the combination of economic reform, family planning regulations, changing conceptions of gender, and the Chinese government's project to develop a 'high quality' population.