Andrew G. Walder's Profile | Stanford Profiles (original) (raw)

Bio

Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has previously served as Chair of the Department of Sociology, Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and Director and of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

A political sociologist, Walder has long specialized in the sources of conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His research on China has focused on the grass-roots organization of party authority, the political economy of reform, social stratification and mobility, and political conflict from the 1960s to 1980s. His current research focuses on political upheavals during China's Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1971. He is the author of Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Harvard University Press, 2009), and of the forthcoming China Under Mao (Harvard University Press).

Walder joined the Stanford faculty the fall of 1997. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan in 1981 and taught at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 1987. As a professor of sociology, he served as chair of Harvard's MA Program on Regional Studies-East Asia for several years. From 1995 to 1997, he headed the Division of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. From 1996 to 2006, as a member of the Hong Kong Government's Research Grants Council, he chaired its Panel on the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Business Studies.

Other recent publications include “Transitions from State Socialism: A Property Rights Perspective” in the Sociology of Economic Life, edited by Mark Granovetter and Richard Swedberg (Westview Press, 2011); The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, edited with Joseph Esherick and Paul Pickowicz (Stanford University Press, 2006); "Ownership, Organization, and Income Inequality: Market Transition in Rural Vietnam" in the American Sociological Review (2008); "Ambiguity and Choice in Political Movements: The Origins of Beijing Red Guard Factionalism," in the American Journal of Sociology (2006); "From Control to Ownership: China's Managerial Revolution," in Management and Organizations Review (2009); and "Political Sociology and Social Movements," in Annual Review of Sociology (2009).

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Current Research and Scholarly Interests

Market reforms in China; and political movements in China during the Cultural Revolution.

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Abstract

State socialist economies provided public housing to urban citizens at nominal cost, while allocating larger and better quality apartments to individuals in elite occupations. In transitions to a market economy, ownership is typically transferred to existing occupants at deeply discounted prices, making home equity the largest component of household wealth. Housing privatization is therefore a potentially important avenue for the conversion of bureaucratic privilege into private wealth. We estimate the resulting inequalities with data from successive waves of a Chinese national income survey that details household assets and participation in housing programs. Access to privatization programs was relatively equal across urban residents in state sector occupations. Elite occupations had substantially greater wealth in the form of home equity shortly after privatization, due primarily to their prior allocations of newer and higher quality apartments. The resulting gaps in private wealth were nonetheless small by the standards of established market economies, and despite the inherent biases in the process, housing privatization distributed home equity widely across those who were resident in public housing immediately prior to privatization.
View details for DOI 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2014.02.008
View details for Web of Science ID 000335291000008
View details for PubMedID 24767592

Abstract

Do regime change and market reform disrupt patterns of intergenerational mobility? China's political trajectory is distinctive from that of other communist regimes in two ways. During its first three decades, the regime enforced unusually restrictive barriers to elite status inheritance. And during the subsequent market transition, unlike most of its counterparts, the Communist Party survived intact. Data from a multigeneration survey suggest that despite their obvious exclusion from the party and related administrative careers in the Mao era, certain prerevolution elites transmitted one type of elite status to their offspring to a surprising degree. Party elites, in contrast, were hit hard by radical Maoism but recovered quickly afterward, and their offspring inherited elite status at much higher rates.
View details for Web of Science ID 000265676200004
View details for PubMedID 19824312