Professor Bettina Gransow 柯兰君教授 FGCA is senior Professor of Chinese Studies at Freie Universität (FU) Berlin. Her current research foci are on migrants in Chinese megacities, on infrastructure as a Chinese development strategy and on Chinese sociology in a global perspective.

Positions held: 2003–2016 Professor for Chinese Politics at the Institute of Chinese Studies and the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science, FU Berlin; 2009–2012 Guest Professor at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU), School of Sociology and Anthropology; 2000–2002 Asian Development Bank/ GFA Hamburg (Team Leader ‘Capacity Building for Social Assessment in Chinese Investment Projects’).

Recent publications: ‘Migrant actions and government responses: African traders in the Pearl River delta’ (2021), in Gunter Schubert, Franziska Plümmer and Anastasiya Bayok (eds.), Immigration Governance in East Asia: Norm Diffusion, Politics of Identity, Citizenship, pp. 43–66 (London: Routledge, 2021; ‘Contestation over moral economy: Distant resettlement from the Three Gorges area to the Pearl River delta’ (2021), in Jean-François Rousseau and Sabrina Habich-Sobiegalla (eds.), The Political Economy of Hydropower in Southwest China and Beyond, pp. 69–88 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Her current project is ‘Worlding the Pearl River delta. Conceptualizing the socio-spatial reconfiguration of a mega-urban region from the perspective of migration dynamics and city-making (Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong)’ (working title). The overall aim of the project is to identify the intrinsic logic of the three cities based on their specific characteristics, migration dynamics and city-making processes as building blocks to conceptualize the socio-spatial reconfiguration of the delta region as the production process of a space of world-making.

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