The Contemporary China Centre was set up in 1970 at the Australian National University as a research facility concerned with scholarly social science analysis of post-1949 China. 

Its main emphases have expanded to include economic issues, the modern political and legal arenas and the social/anthropological ramifications of political and economic change in the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. 

Activities

The Centre's academic staff supervise, either independently or in collaboration with other university departments, students enrolled for PhD degrees. The Centre currently supervises five doctoral students. 

Each year the Centre is host to a range of long-term visiting fellows and attracts a steady stream of departmental visitors for shorter terms.

The Centre also houses the Transformation of Communist Systems Project, with two academics who specialise in Eastern Europe. 

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Publications

The Centre has a thriving publication series. It is home to one of the leading international journals on contemporary China, The China Journal.

The Centre produces a commemorative series of lecture papers, the George Ernest Morrison Lectures in Ethnology. Download past lectures by Beverley Hooper, Philip A. Kuhn, Donald Leslie, T.H. Barrett, and the most recent lectures by Frederick Teiwes, Ezra Vogel, Anita Chan, Wen-hsin Yeh and David Goodman.

The Centre also publishes a number of monographs jointly with M. E. Sharpe, New York, as part of its Contemporary China Books series. 

Staff

The head of the Centre is Jonathan Unger, a sociologist whose work to date has focused on Chinese education, rural social change, and industrial policy.

The Centre’s academic staff include Andrew Kipnis, an anthropologist who has published on rural social connections, on education and on kinship, Luigi Tomba, a political scientist whose research has focused on labour market reforms and on the rise of a salaried urban middle class, Anita Chan, a sociologist who conducts research on Chinese labour relations, and Sally Sargeson, who is studying the local politics of property reforms in rural China and women’s property rights in expanding urban areas.

Other academics with offices at the Centre are Godfrey Linge, a geographer who is examining the future spatial development of the Chinese economy; Robert Miller, a political scientist who specialises in eastern Europe and Russian foreign policy; T. H. Rigby, a specialist on Russian politics; Peter Van Ness, who specialises in international relations; and Ian Wilson, a political scientist.

Hong Yu is the Centre Administrator and concurrently the Administrator of The China Journal, and Janelle Caiger is the Journal’s Assistant Editor.

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Doctoral Students

Evelyn Chia's research focuses on the relationship between village committees and other layers of government and the effect on forest governance and villagers' access to forest resources, touching on power relations, the autonomy of village institutions, tenure rights, the decision-making structure and the villagers' livelihood.

Tom Cliff researches how the idealised new urban spaces of Xinjiang reflect and form the perspectives of their citizenry. Visual imagery features centrally in both the methodology of the research and its presentation.

Meiling Southwell-Lee commenced her PhD in August 2003, researching the topic of the marriage prospects of highly educated women in urban China.

Beibei Tang is doing research focusing on the Chinese middle class status attainment and their community-level political participation. Through quantitative analysis and in-depth interviews she is exploring the mechanism of social stratification and mobility in a transitional economy.

Location

For further information, contact:

Contemporary China Centre
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia
Ph. (61-2) 6125 4150
Fax: (61-2) 6125 9047
Email: ccc@anu.edu.au