Work on the Margins in China

Scott Rozelle

Dr. Rozelle holds the Helen Farnsworth Endowed Professorship at Stanford University and is Senior Fellow in the Food Security and Environment Program and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies. Dr. Rozelle is also an Invited Distinguished Professor of Economics in the Tsingshan Institute for Advanced Business Studies in Zhejiang University. His research focuses on agricultural economics, development economics and the economics of poverty, with an emphasis on the economics of education, health, agriculture and the environment. He is co-director of the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions (SCCEI) and director of the Rural Education Action Project (REAP), an organization at Stanford University that seeks to evaluate China’s new education and health programs and have an impact on policy.

The hallmark of Dr. Rozelle’s work is that it is all collaborative with academics inside China. He is the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy at Peking University. He is also an adjunct professor in more than 10 universities in China. Through these collaborations, Dr. Rozelle and his coauthors have published more than 500 papers over the years. He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Cornell University.

Yige Dong

Yige Dong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology and the Department of Global Gender & Sexuality Studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Dr. Dong is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on care work, labor politics, and feminist movements in the context of modern and contemporary China. She is currently working on her first monograph, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which has been supported by the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies. Based on a case study of textile and iPhone workers in a major industrial city, Zhengzhou, Fabric of Care is the first monograph that examines the century-long transformation of care politics in China. In addition, her articles on China’s care workers, Foxconn labor’s ‘gig manufacturing’, and feminist movements have appeared in International Review of Social History, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Critical Sociology, and Critical Asian Studies, among others. She holds a B.A. in social sciences from University of Hong Kong, an M.A. in social sciences from University of Chicago, and an M.A. and Ph.D, in sociology from Johns Hopkins University.

Kristen Looney

Kristen Looney is an associate professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on Chinese and Comparative Politics. Her research is on rural development and governance. Her first book, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia, was published with Cornell University Press in 2020. Dr. Looney has previously published her research in World Politics, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Current History, among other outlets. She was a fellow in the NCUSCR Public Intellectuals Program (2023-2025) and is a former Wilson China Fellow (2022-2023). Her research has been supported by the Wilson Center, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Blakemore Foundation, and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program. She holds a B.A. from Wellesley College in Chinese studies and Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.