Ling Zhu received an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University. Before joining CUHK she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Center for Poverty and Inequality. Her overarching research interests consist of two substantive topics and one methodological theme: (1) state governance in authoritarian regimes – how the bureaucratic organizations are structured and the bureaucrats are incentivized to maintain a delicate balance between political control (which requires power centralization) and regional development (which requires power de-centralization), (2) mechanisms of reproducing economic inequality, gender segregation, and family advantages/disadvantages in China and in the United States, and (3) understanding misuses of causal inference methodology. The substantive studies are unified by a sociological interest in understanding how political and social institutions work together to shape social structures and often built on newly available big data and state-of-the-art data analytics for causal inference, network analysis, and machine learning techniques. Specifically. her current research investigates mobility patterns in Chinese bureaucracy througn an institutional perspective. She finds that bureaucrats of different positions have distinct mobility patterns, based on which she further explores who, local political leaders or non-leader officials, are more influential in promoting economic growth in Chinese local governments. Her earlier studies analyze income returns to Party membership in China and its variation between 1988 and 2015. She is also working on a project about intergenerational occupation reproduction in the United States and how it relates to occupational gender segregation in the US between 1972 and 2018.
Chinese Society
Computational Social Science
Economic Sociology
Organizations and Work
Political Sociology
Quantitative Methods
Social Inequality and Stratification
Social Networks
2023 Zhu, Ling *. “Spatial Mobility as a Governance Tool: Mechanisms, Patterns, and Distributions in the Chinese Bureaucracy.” Chinese Sociological Review. DOI: 10.1080/21620555.2023.2243377. (SSCI)
* Full text: Here Supplementary File: Here
2022 Zhu, Ling *, Di Xin, and Silu Chen. “Power persistence through an intergenerational perspective: Inequality in private housing assets in post-reform China.” Housing Studies. DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2022.2119210. (SSCI)
* Full text: Here
2022 Zhu, Ling, and David B. Grusky. “The intergenerational sources of the U-turn in gender segregation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119(32): e2121439119.
* Media Coverage: PNSA Podcast
2022 Zhu, Ling * and Xueguang Zhou. “Bureaucrats, Local Elites, and Economic Developments: Evidence from Chinese Counties.” In Economies, Institutions, and Territories: Dissecting Nexuses in a Changing World. Edited by Luca Storti, Giulia Urso, and Neil Reid. Routledge.
* Full text: Here
2021 Zhu, Ling *. “How Does the Chinese Bureaucracy Sustain Economic Growth without Stable Local Political Leaders? Stratified Spatial Mobility and the Role of Stable Political Elites in Local Governments.” Journal of Asian Public Policy. (SSCI)
* Full text: Here
* Media Coverage: in Chinese: 公共管理共同号; in English: Faculti
2021 Zhou, Xueguang, Yu Ai, Jianhua Ge, Huijun Gu, Lan Li, Qinglian Lu, Wei Zhao, and Ling Zhu. “The Party-Government Relationship in the Chinese Bureaucracy: Evidence from Patterns of Personnel Flow”. Chinese Journal of Sociology. 7(3): 315-46.
* An earlier Chinese version was published in Society/Shehui (in Chinese). 40(2):137-67. (CSSCI)
* Full text: Here
2021 Liu, J., Y Sui, L Zhu, X Zhou. “Modelling and Evaluating Hierarchical Network: An Application to Personnel Flow Network.” Studies in Computational Intelligence. 944: 474-484.
* Full text: Here
2020 Zhu, Ling *. “Tradition-modern Duality: Cultural Characteristics of Urban Villages through the Lens of a Rural Protest”. Tsinghua Sociological Review (in Chinese). Vol. 13. (CSSCI)
* Full text: Here
2020 Zhu, Ling * and Tony Tam. “Negative Ability Bias from Conditioning on a Confounded Mediator: A Directed Interaction Test and Case Study”. Social Science Research. 87: 102401. (SSCI)
* Full text: Here
2019 Zhu, Ling * and Tony Tam. “Have Party Premiums Disappeared in Post-2000 China? The Influence of Negative Ability Bias from Position Conditioning.” Chinese Journal of Sociology. 5(1): 57-79.
* Full text: Here
2018 Zhu, Ling *. “Intergenerational Housing Asset Transfer and the Reproduction of Housing Inequality in Urban China.” Chinese Journal of Sociology. 4(4):453-480.
* Full text: Here
* Media Coverage: in Chinese: Here
2018 Zhou, Xueguang, Yu Ai, Jianhua Ge, Huijun Gu, Lan Li, Qinglian Lu, Wei Zhao, and Ling Zhu. “Stratified Spatial Mobility in the Chinese Bureaucracy: A Model and Empirical Evidence.” Society (in Chinese). 38(3):1-45. (CSSCI)
* Full text: Here
- SOCI 2106 Economic Reform and Social Impacts in China
- SOCI 5631 Contemporary Chinese Society
- SOCI 6002 Advanced Methodology
- SOCI 6010 Guided Studies I
- SOCI 6020 Guided Studies II
- UGEA 2190 Chinese Society