Jean-Philippe Béja, a senior researcher at CNRS/CERI-Sciences-Po in Paris, is a political scientist working on civil society, opposition and the state–society relations in China. He is the co-founder of China Perspectives. His latest edited books include The Impact of China's Tiananmen Massacre (Routledge, 2011) and Liu Xiaobo, La philosophie du porc et autres essais (Gallimard/Bleu de Chine, 2011).

Gregor Benton has written studies on the Chinese Communist Party, its revolution, and its oppositions, and on migrant and ethnic Chinese communities outside China. He has affiliations with Cardiff University, the University of Malaya, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Selina Ching Chan has a DPhil in social anthropology from Oxford University. Her research interests are: kinship and lineage, colonialism and identities, religion and tourism, cultural heritage and collective memories.

Ya-chen Chen is currently assistant professor of foreign languages and literature and co-ordinator of the Chinese Programme at Clark University. Her academic books include Higher Education in East Asia: Neoliberalism and the Professoriate (2009), Women in Taiwan: Sociocultural Perspectives (2009), and Farewell My Concubine: Same-Sex Reading and Cross-Cultural Dialogues (2004). Her scholarly articles have appeared in American Journal of Chinese Studies, Borrowers and Lenders: Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Mediascape: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminism/o, etc. Most of them are also included in Ohio State University's MCLC (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture) resource center.

Yen-lin Chung, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica (Taipei), received his PhD in 2009 from the National Chengchi University, Taiwan. He specializes in Chinese Communist Party History. He has published several significant articles in Chinese journals on Deng Xiaoping, the Great Leap Forward, and other major political events in the CCP history. Currently he is revising his PhD dissertation for publication, entitled “Mao's ‘Vice Marshal’ Before the Cultural Revolution: The Party General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, 1956–1966.”

Lucy Corkin is a research associate at the Africa–Asia Centre, SOAS, University of London. She is currently pursuing her PhD on China–Angola relations.

Thomas DavidDuBois is associate professor of history at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Hawai‘i University Press, 2005) and Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Richard Louis Edmonds is visiting professor at the Universität Duisburg-Essen and associate member at the Center for East Asian Studies, University of Chicago. His interests focus around environmental studies and historical geography.

Hualing Fu is currently a professor of law in the faculty of law of the University of Hong Kong. His research interest includes public law, human rights and legal institutions in China. He has published widely in media law, criminal justice and dispute resolution with a focus on China.

John W. Garver is a professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Xin He is associate professor at the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong and has been visiting professor at NYU School of Law and University of Illinois College of Law. His research interests focus on empirical studies on Chinese legal systems. His recent articles include "Street as Courtroom: State Accommodation of Labor Protest in South China," in Law & Society Review, 2010 (with Yang Su) and "Enforcing Commercial Judgments in the Pearl River Delta of China," in American Journal of Comparative Law, 2009.

Yuka Kobayashi is lecturer in China and International Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and research fellow at the Institute of International Economics, Nankai University, Tianjin, China. Prior to joining SOAS, she was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

Wen-Hua Kuo is an associate professor at National Yang-Ming University, where he teaches social studies of medicine and public health. His research interests in East Asia are both contemporary and historical, including clinical trial regulations and their social impacts, and public health and disease control in the 1950s and 1960s.

Linda Chelan Li is professor at the department of public and social administration, City University of Hong Kong. She is author of Centre and Provinces, China, 1978–1993: Power as Non-Zero-Sum (Clarendon Press, 1998, 2002) and Rural Tax Reform in China: Policy Process and Institutional Change (Routledge, forthcoming), and editor of The Chinese State in Transition: Processes and Contests in Local China, and Towards Responsible Government in East Asia: Trajectories, Intentions and Meanings, both by Routledge, 2009.

Wanxin Li received her bachelor in precision instruments and master in economics from Tsinghua University. From Virginia Tech, she received her second master in statistics and PhD in public administration and policy. She has worked with the World Bank, OECD, and Tsinghua University in the past. Her research has been focusing on the interplay between government, business, individuals, and non-governmental organizations in the context of environmental and social governance in China.

Sida Liu is research fellow at Shanghai Jiao Tong University KoGuan Law School and assistant professor of sociology and law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He specializes in the sociology of law, focusing on the legal reform and legal profession in contemporary China. Dr Liu received his LL.B. degree from Peking University Law School and his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. He has published five English articles in the Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Annual Review of Law & Social Science, as well as extensively in leading law and social science journals in China, including Social Sciences in China, Peking University Law Review, and Sociological Studies. His first book The Lost Polis: Transformation of the Legal Profession in Contemporary China (in Chinese) was published by Peking University Press in 2008.

Mary Mazzilli is a post-doctoral fellow in Chinese at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests are modern and contemporary Chinese drama (with particular expertise on Gao Xingjian) and literature, comparative literature, gender studies and literary theory.

Anke Niehof is a full professor of sociology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Her research interests include domestic production, household food security, care and HIV/AIDS impacts. She supervises PhD projects in Asia and Africa.

Vera Schwarcz is a China historian and poet. She is the author of eight books on Chinese and Jewish history including the prize-winning Bridge across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (1999) and most recently, Place and Memory in Singing Crane Garden (2008). She has also written four books of poetry including Brief Rest in the Garden of Flourishing Grace (2009) and Chisel of Remembrance (2009). Schwarcz holds the Freeman Chair in East Asian Studies at Wesleyan. Her work won a Guggenheim Fellowship and is featured on the web (between2walls.com).

Tsering Shakya is the author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows, A History of Tibet since 1947 (Penguin, 2000) and currently holds the Canadian research chair in religion and society in Asia at the Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia.

Lihong Shi is an An Wang postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on reproductive choice and family change under China's birth-planning policy.

Patricia Sieber is an associate professor of Chinese with a specialization in traditional Chinese song and drama in the department of East Asian languages and literatures at Ohio State University. She is the author of Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama, 1300–2000 (Palgrave, 2003) and the editor of Red Is Not the Only Color (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

Chloë Starr is assistant professor of Asian Christianity and theology at Yale Divinity School. Her most recent edited volume is Reading Christian Scriptures in China (T&T Clark, 2008). She is currently working on a monograph on Chinese intellectual Christianity.

Rachel E. Stern is a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows. She is currently working on a book manuscript about environmental litigation in China.

Julia C. Strauss is the editor of The China Quarterly and senior lecturer in Chinese politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies

Elspeth Thomson is senior fellow at the Energy Studies Institute, National University of Singapore

Ning Wang is assistant professor of history at Brock University. His current work focuses on the banishment of intellectuals to China's border regions.

Felix Wemheuer is assistant professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. He currently is carrying out research on the politicization of hunger in Maoist China and the Soviet Union as a visiting scholar at Harvard University. His most recent publication is a biography of Mao Zedong (Rowohlt, 2010).

Gerda Wielander is principal lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Westminster. She is currently working on a book on the social and political impact of Christianity in contemporary China.

Teresa Wright is chair and professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach. Her publications include The Perils of Protest: State Repression and Student Activism in China (University of Hawaii Press, 2001) and Accepting Authoritarianism: State-Society Relations in China's Reform Era (Stanford University Press, 2010).

Rod Wye is a freelance commentator on Asia and a former analyst in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

Yi Lin is currently associate professor of sociology at Xiamen University. His research primarily falls into two broad categories of culture, inequality and boundaries, and education, governance and citizenship. Yi is the author of Cultural Exclusion in China: State Education, Social Mobility and Cultural Difference (Routledge, 2008), as well as a number of refereed journal articles.

Yuan Juanwen is on the staff at Guizhou College of Finance and Economics, China. Her major interests are participatory natural resource management, gender and rural development.