GCA People
Professor Xiangqun Chang FRSA FGCA
Founding Fellow of Global China Academy
Professor Xiangqun Chang 常向群教授 FRSA, FGCA and President of the Global China Academy (GCA), a UK-based independent worldwide fellowship that encourages comprehensive studies on China in the social sciences and humanities; she is Distinguished Professor at Nankai University and Honerary Professor at Jilin University. She was Honorary Professor at University College London (2015-20), Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University London, Visiting Professor at University of Westminster, Research Fellow of LSE, and holder of several Professorships and Senior Fellowships at Peking, Renmin, Fudan and Sun Yat-sen University in China. Her academic publications amount to over three million words (in English and Chinese), including Guanxi or Li shang wanglai?: Reciprocity, social support networks and social creativity in a Chinese village (Chinese 2009, English 2010).
As the only UK-based sociologist trained in both China and the UK, Xiangqun had been working at universities on social scientific studies of China interdisciplinarily since 1991, when she came to the UK as a Visiting Fellow. Based on the her thorough and detailed ethnography of a Chinese village with longitudinal comparisons, and borrowing and adapting Chinese classical and popular usage of li shang wanglai (礼尚往来), she developed a general analytical concept – ‘recipropriety’ (lishang-wanglai 互适), the mechanism by which Chinese society and Chinese social relations operate, thereby contributing to existing theories of reciprocity, relatedness, social exchange, social creativity, social interaction, social networks, social capital and transculturality with characteristics of ‘ritual capital’(礼仪资本), for understanding and governance of global society. She was selected by the Academic Presidents of the International Sociological Association (ISA) as one of 15 sociologists in the world who ’called upon to adapt the discipline to the upheavals of the twenty-first century’ (see Practicing Social Science: Sociologists and their Craft, by Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, Routledge, 2017).
Xiangqun is also Editor-in-Chief of Global Century Press (GCP). Currectly, she is in charging of publications of four academic journals and eight book series (in English and Chinese dual languages). She is Editor of the Journal of China in Global and Comparative Perspectives, ‘Chinese Concepts’, ‘Globalization of Chinese Social Sciences’, ‘China and Chinese in Comparative Perspectives’, ‘Transcultural Experiences with “Three Eyes”’ book series and ‘Global Chinese Dialogue Proceedings’.
常向群教授,英国皇家艺术院院士,全球中国学术院院士及院长,该院是基于英国的在社会科学和人文领域独立地对中国进行综合研究的全球性院士制机构。现为南开大学特聘教授、吉林大学名誉教授,曾为伦敦大学学院的名誉教授 (2015-20),伦敦大学亚非学院的教授级研究员,威斯敏斯特大学的客座教授,伦敦经济学院研究员,伦敦城市大学研究员,以及北大、人大、复旦和中山等多所大学的客座兼职教授或高级研究员。她发表的中英文著述约300余万字,代表作为《马克思主义社会学论稿》(中文版58万字2018, 46万字1992),《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,英文和中文繁体字版两个版本, 2010) 。主编《社会建设:中国社会的一种发展模式》(英文版2014;英文和中文两个版本的增补版,2015–18);合作主编《费孝通研究》(三卷本,2015–18)。
作为在英国工作的唯一的在中国和英国受过社会学训练的社会学家,自1991年来到英国作为访问学者以来,一直在大学从事跨学科的中国社会科学研究。基于对一个中国村庄长期比较的深入详细的民族志研究,在研究中她发现了一个有中国特色的互惠、互动、社会关系和社会网络的模型,借用并改造中国古典的和民间常用的“礼尚往来”用法,锤炼出了一个基于“礼仪资本”的具有普适价值的分析概念:“互适”(recipropriety),影响了社会学和人类学的互惠、社会交换、社会互动、社会创造、社会网络、社会资本等理论,被国际社会学协会 (ISA) 学术委员会选为全球的影响“适应动荡的二十一世纪的社会学”的15位社会学家之一(见《实践社会科学:社会学家及其工艺》(Practicing Social Science: Sociologists and their Craft,作者德沃拉·卡莱金-费什曼,劳特里奇出版社,2017年)。
近年来,常向群兼任环球世纪出版总编,负责四种学术期刊和八套书籍系列的英汉双语的出版工作,主编《全球中国比较研究》期刊,“中华概念”“中国社会科学全球化”“中国与中华比较研究”丛书”和“‘三眼’的跨文化”等系列丛书,以及“全球中国对话文集”。
Click here to return to the Fellowship page