Professor Xiangqun Chang, PhD, FRSA, FGCA, is the President of the Global China Academy (GCA), a UK-based independent global fellowship promoting comprehensive studies of China in the social sciences and humanities.

Over the years, she has held honorary, part-time, visiting and senior research positions at a number of leading universities in both the UK and China. In the UK, these have included City, University of London, where she began her academic career in Britain as a Visiting Fellow in 1991 and subsequently worked as a Research Assistant, Research Officer and Research Associate while completing her PhD; the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she served as Visiting Fellow and Senior Research Associate and co-founded the China in Comparative Perspective Network (CCPN at LSE), serving as its Coordinator; SOAS University of London, where she was Research Associate at the China Centre and later Professorial Research Associate at the Centre for Translation Studies; the University of Westminster, where she was Visiting Professor at the China Media Centre; and University College London (UCL), where she served as an Honorary Professor (2015–2020), appointed by the President and Provost of UCL. In China, she has held positions at Nankai University, Jilin University, Peking University, Renmin University of China, Fudan University, Sun Yat-sen University and Northeastern University, among others.

Her academic publications amount to over three million words in both English and Chinese, including Guanxi or Li Shang Wanglai?: Reciprocity, Social Support Networks and Social Creativity in a Chinese Village (Chinese, 2009; English, 2010). ​ She also edited Society Building: A China Model of Social Development (English edition, 2014; expanded bilingual edition, 2015–2018), co-edited the three-volume Fei Xiaotong Studies (2015–2018), and edited and structurally organised China and the Shared Human Future: Exploring Common Values and Goals, authored by Martin Albrow (2021). She has also served as the Editor-in-Chief of Global Century Press. She is the editor of the Journal of China in Global and Comparative Perspectives, Global China Dialogue Proceedings and several book series, including  ‘Concepts of China,’ ‘Globalization of Chinese Social Sciences,’ ‘China and Chinese Comparative Studies,’ ‘Transcultural Experiences with “Three Eyes”’ ‘Cutting Edge and Frontiers’. Additionally, she is responsible for the bilingual (Chinese-English) publication of four academic journals and eight book series.

To the best of her knowledge, she remains one of very few Chinese sociologists who have received formal sociological training in both China and the United Kingdom, and who, having arrived in Britain as a Visiting Fellow in 1991, have continuously pursued an academic career within the UK ever since., and who has continuously pursued an academic career in the UK ever since. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic research in a Chinese village, conducted with longitudinal comparisons, she developed the analytical concept of ‘recipropriety’ (lishang-wanglai 互适)—an adaptation of the classical and popular Chinese concept of li shang wanglai (礼尚往来). This concept explains the mechanisms by which Chinese society and social relations operate, contributing to existing theories on reciprocity, relatedness, social exchange, social creativity, social interaction, social networks, social capital, and transculturality, incorporating the notion of ‘ritual capital’ (礼仪资本) for a deeper understanding of and governance in global society. In recognition of her contributions, she was selected by the Academic Presidents of the International Sociological Association (ISA) as one of 15 sociologists worldwide who were ‘called upon to adapt the discipline to the upheavals of the twenty-first century’ (Practicing Social Science: Sociologists and Their Craft, by Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, Routledge, 2017).

Over the past decade or so, building on her sustained fieldwork and comparative research, she is further developing the theory of ‘relational generativity’, which takes renxin (the human heart-mind) as its ontological foundation and examines the mechanisms through which relationships are generated and transformed across different types. At the same time, she has advanced a research approach that integrates corpus analysis and artificial intelligence, exploring how studies of Chinese society can move from empirical description to conceptual articulation, theoretical construction, and methodological innovation. Methodologically, she promotes a framework combining corpus analysis, artificial intelligence, and theoretical reasoning, and has developed a five-dimensional model of knowledge production encompassing experience, concepts (language), theory, methods, and institutions. Her work further examines how scholarly research on Chinese society—produced by both Chinese and international scholars—can be structurally transformed into knowledge that enters the global knowledge system. She advances the global circulation and intellectual integration of Chinese social sciences through the institutional platform she has created, which is globally unique.

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