Cynthia J. Arnson is director of the Latin American Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Along with Mark Mohr and Riordan Roett, she is co-editor of Enter the Dragon? China's Presence in Latin America (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008).

Reut Barak is a PhD candidate in the department of economics of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her research focuses on governance in contemporary China, environment resources management, South China and game theory.

Thomas J. Bickford is currently a China analyst for the Center for Naval Analyses. Previously he was an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh where he taught international relations and Chinese politics. He is also a former associate director of the Wisconsin Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He is the author of several articles and book chapters on Chinese security issues including civil–military relations, defence reform, and defence economics. He currently is engaged in research on Chinese national defence policy and foreign policy.

Jérôme Bourgon is a tenured researcher at CNRS, posted at Institut d'Asie Orientale in Lyon, France. He obtained his PhD, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, on late-Qing and early-Republic legal reforms (1994). A historian of Chinese law, he has a special interest in the period from the late 19th Century when the Chinese legal tradition confronted Western legal principles and judicial practice. His latest book is Death by a Thousand Cuts (Harvard University Press, 2008), written in collaboration with T. Brook and G. Blue.

John P. Burns is chair professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include Chinese politics and public administration, including Hong Kong. His most recent book, Government Capacity and the Hong Kong Civil Service (Oxford, 2004) will soon be published by Oxford in an updated Chinese-language edition.

Feng Chen is professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University. His current research focuses on China's labour politics and his articles have appeared in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Modern China, The Journal of Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and many others.

Tai Ming Cheung is an associate research scientist at the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and is author of Fortifying China: The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy (Cornell University Press, 2009), which examines the efforts to reform the Chinese defence science, technology and industrial base between the 1950s to the present day.

Mun Young Cho is a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at Stanford University. She is currently writing her dissertation, The Specter of “The People”: Managing Urban Poverty in Northeast China, which is based on her fieldwork in Harbin. Her recent article is “Forced Flexibility: A Migrant Women's Struggle for Settlement” (The China Journal, No. 61, January 2009).

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.

Hualing Fu is professor of law in the University of Hong Kong. His research interest includes human rights and socio-legal studies, with a special focus on legal development in China. His recent work includes National Security and Fundamental Freedoms: Hong Kong's Article 23 Under Scrutiny (Hong Kong University Press, 2005), co-edited with Carole Petersen and Simon Young, and The Struggle for Coherence: Constitutional Interpretation in Hong Kong (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), co-edited with Lison Harris and Simon Young. He teaches corruption, human rights in China, and legal relations between Hong Kong and mainland China.

Qin Gao is an assistant professor at Fordham University in New York City. Her current research focuses on the Chinese social benefit system in transition and its impact on poverty, income inequality, and family economic and subjective well-being and cross-national comparative social policy analysis among China, South Korea and Vietnam.

Doug Guthrie is professor of management at the NYU-Stern School of Business and professor of sociology in NYU's faculty of arts and sciences. He is also faculty director of executive education at the Stern School. He is author of Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press, 2001) and China and Globalization: The Economic, Political, and Social Transformation of Chinese Society (Routledge, 2006).

Heejin Han is a PhD candidate in international relations and comparative politics at Northern Illinois University's political science department. She is currently working on her dissertation on coalition politics over Yunnan's Nu River hydropower project.

You-tien Hsing is associate professor of geography at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford University Press, 2010), and co-editor of Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism (Routledge, 2009).

Rebecca E. Karl is author, most recently, of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World (Duke University Press 2010) and previously, of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century along with other works on modern and contemporary China. She teaches at New York University.

Kevin Keasey is the Halifax Bank chair in financial services and director of the International Institute of Banking and Financial Services at the University of Leeds, UK.

Sascha Klotzbücher is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the department of East Asian studies at the University of Vienna. He specializes in studies of social policy, health and governance in modern China and is a researcher of the project “Capacity-building for pastoral hospitals in Xinjiang (China).” His latest monograph is Das Gesundheitswesen der VR China: Strukturen – Akteure – Dynamik (Peter Lang, 2006).

Shuyu Kong is associate professor in the department of humanities and Asia–Canada Program at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her research interests include both contemporary Chinese literature and culture, and Chinese diaspora studies. She has published numerous articles in academic journals and a book Consuming Literature: Bestsellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2005).

Jon Eugene von Kowallis is head of Chinese studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He has published on the modern and contemporary literature and culture of China and Taiwan. His books include The Subtle Revolution: Poets of the ‘Old Schools’ during Late Qing and Early Republican China (Institute of East Asian Studies, 2006), The Lyrical Lu Xun: a Study of his Classical-style Verse (University of Hawaiʽi Press, 2006), Wit and Humor from Old Cathay (Panda Books, 1986), and the forthcoming Warriors of the Spirit: the Early Essays of Lu Xun's Japan Period.

Peter Lässig is a former UN System employee living in Vienna. He has a law degree and served as administrator and programme manager with UNHCR, FAO, WHO, WFP, and UNIDO in Italy, Iran, Egypt, Switzerland, Lesotho, Zaire and Austria. After retirement he obtained a BA in Sinology from Vienna University and has worked as a consultant in the field of public administration and management, including missions to Italy, Kenya, Ethiopia, Switzerland, Belorus and China. He is an associate researcher to the project “Capacity-building for pastoral hospitals in Xinjiang (China).”

Mingxing Liu is an associate professor at China Institute for Educational Finance Research at Peking University. His main research focuses on political economy and local governance in China. Some of his recent articles have appeared in Agricultural Economics, China Economic Review and Journal of Asia and Pacific Economy.

Paul B. McGuinness is a professor in the department of finance of the business administration faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, New Territories, Hong Kong.

Xiaoyu Pu is a PhD candidate of political science at the Ohio State University. His research interests include Chinese foreign policy, East Asian international relations, and international relations theory. He is writing a dissertation on the politics of great power emergence, focusing on contemporary China. He is also working with Randall Schweller on a project that investigates the international political implications of the eroding US hegemony. His previous publications have appeared in Asian Affairs: An American Review and World Economics and Politics, among others.

Jiangmei Qin is professor of epidemiology and health economics in the Medical College, Shihezi University. Her work focuses on health care services in Xinjiang, the rural medical protection system, and oesophageal cancer in the Kazak population of Xinjiang. She is Chinese co-operation partner in the project “Capacity-building for pastoral hospitals in Xinjiang (China).”

Douglas Reynolds is professor of Chinese and Japanese history at Georgia State University. He is the author of China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Harvard University Press, 1993) and of the completed book manuscript, East Meets East: China Discovers the Modern World – in Meiji Japan, 1877–95, under review for publication.

Michael Schoenhals is professor of Chinese in the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden, and founder of the international garbology school of Cultural Revolution research. He is currently working on a historical study of the use of confidential human sources and agents in compliance-oriented regulatory surveillance of status offenders by competent governmental authorities in post-liberation China.

Wei Shan is a research fellow in the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore. His research interests are mass–elite relations and political participation in China.

Victor Shih is currently assistant professor of political science at Northwestern University. He is the author of Factions and Finance in China: Elite Politics and Inflation (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He currently conducts research on elite politics, fiscal policies and banking reform in China.

Julia C. Strauss is senior lecturer in Chinese politics at the department of politics and international studies, SOAS, and editor of The China Quarterly. She has published widely on state capacity in the 20th-century Chinese state, and is currently working on a book manuscript that compares regime consolidation in China and Taiwan in the 1950s.

Jonathan Sullivan is RCUK research fellow for China, globalization and civil society in the School of Politics, University of Nottingham. He is currently working on a study on the connection between online activism and offline contention in China.

Wang Xiaoqi is a post-doctoral fellow in the department of politics and public administration of the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Chinese politics, public governance and management, institutional analysis, co-ordination and collaboration, comparative public policy and state–society relations. She is now working on a book about civil service reform in China to be published by Routledge.

Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik is professor of Chinese studies at the department for East Asian studies of the University of Vienna. She has published on 20th-century Chinese history and politics with a special focus on rural China, and is lead researcher of the project “Capacity-building for pastoral hospitals in Xinjiang (China).”

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).

Rod Wye is a research analyst at the North Asia and Pacific Research Group of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

Bin Xu is a PhD candidate of Sociology at Northwestern University. His articles about social movements, collective memory, and politics of emotions appear in the Social Psychology Quarterly and an edited volume about East Asian politics of memory. Currently he is working on his dissertation about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China and its symbolic and political aftermaths.

Tiantian Zheng received her PhD in anthropology at Yale University in 2003, and currently teaches as an associate professor of anthropology in the department of sociology/anthropology at SUNY Cortland. She is the author of four books: Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China (University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Ethnographies of Prostitution in Contemporary China: Gender Relations, HIV/AIDS, and Nationalism. (Palgrave Macmillan Press; 2009); HIV/AIDS Through an Anthropological Lens (Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2009); and Sex-Trafficking, Human Rights, and Social Justice (Routledge, forthcoming). She has also published a number of book chapters and journal articles.