Profile

My research and teaching has been focused on the political economy of development in East Asia, especially China.  I am interested in the question of power and space.  My first book, Making Captialism in China: The Taiwan Connection, focuses on the role of culture in inter-regional capital flows.  In my second book, The Great Urban Tansformation: Politics of Land and Property in China, I examine the issue of territorality.  I look at how the transformation of the state and the society shapes and is shaped by land battles in Chinese cities and villages.  My co-edited book, Reclaiming Chinese Society, looks at China’s emerging social activism in the struggles over distribution, recognition, and representation.  My current project concerns the cultural and environmental politics in Northwestern China.  For my research I draw inspiration from ethnographical work: in-depth interviews and participatory observation with a reflexive perspective.  I believe that theorizing starts from muddy realities.  It is a process of open dialogues and self-reflections, of which the historical and the geographical, the institutional and the emotional are all indispensable parts.
(https://geography.berkeley.edu/professor-you-tien-hsing)

Research Interests

Political economy of development in East Asia (especially China), power and space, cultural and environmental politics, urbanization; regional focus: China

Awards and Honours

Selected Publication

• 2010. The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land & Property in China. New York: Oxford University Press.
• 2009. Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism, edited with Ching Kwan Lee. New York: Routledge Press.
• 2006. “Brokering Power and Property in China’s Townships”, Journal of Pacific Review, Vol.19, No. 1. pp.103-124.
• 2006. “Land and Territorial Politics in Urban China”, The China Quarterly, No. 187, September 2006.

Teaching

• Culture, Nature, City, and Country: Territorial Politics in Asia

Semester: Fall | TSE604700 | 2 credits 
Module: 
Abstract
This course focuses on the political economy of environmental and cultural conservation as well as urban and rural development. We will read monographs by political scientists, geographers, sociologists, historians and anthropologists on the policies and politics of culture, nature, city, and the countryside in contemporary East, Southeast, South, and Central Asia. We will use the concept of territoriality to bring these seemingly disparate domains together. A territory is a politicized place. Territoriality refers to the workings of power in a given territory. Territoriality, in other words, concerns geopolitics at multiple spatial scales from an empire to an urban neighborhood, in both real and virtual space. Such multi-scalar geopolitics go far beyond the narrowly defined political power framed by the nation state. Geopolitics are found in the struggle over access to natural resources (nature) and in the production of competing meanings (culture).