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,’ ‘Chinese Social Science in the Global Age’, ‘China and Chinese Comparative Studies,’ ‘Transcultural Experiences with “Three Eyes”’ and ‘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. 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, she has continued to develop this line of research through sustained fieldwork and comparative study, and is now working on two related books: Renqing 人情: The Practice of Recipropriety (Lishang-Wanglai) in Ten Chinese Villages (1990–2026) and Recipropriety: A Social Theory of Relationship Dynamics and Mechanisms of Change.

Over the past decade and more, she has created and developed a set of institutionally distinctive global platforms to promote the international circulation, trans-cultural exchange and integration of knowledge in the Chinese social sciences. Building on this institutional foundation, she has continued to develop new approaches to research and knowledge production. In recent years, she has brought corpus methods into closer integration with artificial intelligence, exploring how research on Chinese society can move beyond empirical description towards conceptual refinement, theoretical construction and methodological innovation. Methodologically, she has advanced a research paradigm combining corpus analysis, artificial intelligence and theoretical judgement, and developed a five-dimensional model of knowledge production comprising experience, concepts (language), theory, method and institutions. Through this framework, she examines how scholarship on Chinese society, produced both within and outside China, can be structurally transformed so as to enter the global knowledge system. These long-term efforts in research, methodological innovation and institution building are now converging in a group of interrelated yet independent books, including The Contribution of Fei Xiaotong to Human Knowledge: From Chinese Experience to World Social Science; Chinese Social Science in the Global Age: A Personal Witness, 1985–2027; The Intelligent Age: Social Theory from Modernity and Globality to Intelligence; Corpus–AI–Human Judgement: Paradigms and Methods of Knowledge Production in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Intelligent Age; Integrated Dual-Language Publishing in the Intelligent Age: Concepts, Theory and Practice; and China in Global and Comparitive Perspectives: A Corpus–AI–Human Judgement Study Based on The Complete Works of Fei Xiaotong.

常向群教授，英国皇家艺术院院士 FRSA、全球中国学术院院士 FGCA，博士；全球中国学术院院长，该院是一家总部设于英国的独立性、全球性院士制学术机构，致力于推动人文社会科学领域关于中国的综合研究。多年来，她曾在中英多所高校担任名誉教授、兼职教授、访问教授及高级研究员等职务，涵盖的院校包括伦敦大学学院、伦敦政治经济学院、伦敦大学亚非学院、威斯敏斯特大学、伦敦城市大学，以及南开大学、吉林大学、北京大学、中国人民大学、复旦大学、中山大学和东北大学等。

她的中英文著述累计约300余万字，代表作包括：《马克思主义社会学论稿》（中文版共58万字，2018年；初版46万字，1992年）、《关系抑或礼尚往来：江村的互惠社会支持网和社会创造的研究》（中文简体字版54万字，2009年；英文版与繁体中文版，2010年）。她还主编了《社会建设：中国社会的一种发展模式》（英文版2014年；中英文增补版，2015–2018年），并与他人合作主编了三卷本《费孝通研究》（2015–2018年），编辑《中国与人类命运共同体：探寻共同的价值与目标》（2021），马丁·阿尔布劳著。她还兼任环球世纪出版社总编，主编《全球中国比较研究》期刊、《全球中国对话文集》辑刊，“中华概念”“全球时代的中国社会科学”“中国与中华比较视野”“‘三只眼’转文化”“新锐与前沿”等系列丛书，并负责四种学术期刊和八套系列丛书的中英双语出版事务。

她至今仍是极少数自1991年以访问学者身份来到英国以来，接受过中国和英国社会学正规训练，并一直在英国持续从事学术工作的华人社会学家之一。基于对中国某村庄长期深入的比较民族志研究，她提出了一个具有中国特色的互惠、互动、社会关系与社会网络模型。她借用并改造了中国古典与民间常用的“礼尚往来”概念，创造出一个基于“礼仪资本”、具有普适价值的分析概念——“互适”（recipropriety）。这一理论对社会学与人类学中的互惠、社会交换、社会互动、社会创造、社会网络与社会资本研究产生了重要影响，并被国际社会学协会（ISA）学术委员会评选为“应对动荡的21世纪社会学”的全球十五位有影响力的社会学家之一（见《实践社会科学：社会学家及其工匠研究》，德沃拉·卡莱金-费什曼著，劳特里奇出版社，2017年）。过去十余年来，她在持续的田野与比较研究基础上继续推进这一研究脉络，进一步探讨关系的生成、运行与转化机制，目前正在撰写两部相互关联的著作：《人情：中国十个村的礼尚往来实践（1990–2026）》和《礼尚往来：关系动态与变动机制的社会理论》。

过去十余年来，她持续创建并发展具有全球独特性的制度性平台，推动中国社会科学的全球传播、跨文化交流与知识整合，并在这一制度基础上不断拓展新的研究与知识生产路径。近年来，她将语料库方法与人工智能相结合，探索中国社会研究如何从经验描述进一步走向概念提炼、理论建构与方法创新。在方法论上，她提出并推动“语料库—人工智能—理论判断”相结合的研究范式，构建由经验、概念（语言）、理论、方法与制度构成的五维知识生产模型，探索国内外学者关于中国社会的研究成果如何通过结构性转化进入全球知识体系。这些长期积累的研究、方法创新与制度建设，目前正在汇聚为一组彼此关联而又各自独立的著作，包括《费孝通对人类知识体系的贡献——从中国经验到世界社会科学》《全球时代的中国社会科学：个人见证（1985–2027）》《智能时代：从现代性、全球性到智能性的社会理论》《语料库—AI—人工判断：智能时代的人文社科知识生产范式与方法》《智能时代的双语融合出版：理念、理论与实践》以及《全球中国比较：基于〈费孝通全集〉的语料库—AI—人工判断研究》等。

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