Rate My Professor Beibei Tang

Beibei Tang is Professor of China Studies in the Department of China Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She joined the university in 2015 and held several leadership positions, including Head of the Department of China Studies from 2017 to 2020, Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences from 2020 to 2025, and Acting Director of the Research Centre for Culture, Communication, and Society from 2022 to 2025. Her academic career includes studies at Wuhan University, the University of Oxford, and the Australian National University. Tang teaches modules such as China: Society and Development on the BA China Studies programme, focusing on social changes in post-1978 Chinese society.

Tang's research specializations encompass social class, social stratification and mobility in contemporary China, neighbourhood governance and state-society relations, urbanisation, and deliberative democracy. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research on urban transformation, including responses of landless villagers and village collectives to urban development, and the role of village shareholding companies in community governance. Key publications include Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China: Changing State-Society Relations (Cornell University Press, 2023), China's Housing Middle Class: Changing Urban Life in Gated Communities (Routledge, 2018), Grid Governance in China's Urban Middle-class Neighbourhoods (The China Quarterly, 2020), and “Not Rural but Not Urban”: Community Governance in China's Urban Villages (The China Quarterly, 2015), for which she received the 2015 Gordon White Prize, awarded by The China Quarterly for the most innovative article. She also edited Suzhou in Transition (Routledge, 2021). Tang has delivered public lectures, such as at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and contributed to international conferences on urban heritage and governance. Her work has influenced understandings of state-society dynamics in China's urban middle-class neighbourhoods and grid management systems.