Isabelle Attané is a senior researcher at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED, Paris). Her current research focuses on sex imbalance and gender discriminations and their consequences in China.

Hugh D. R. Baker is emeritus professor of Chinese in London University. His research work has mainly been conducted in Hong Kong where in the early 1960s he lived in a village studying the history and organization of a long-established clan. He has published widely on Chinese culture, history, society and language.

Tami Blumenfield is the James B. Duke assistant professor of Asian studies at Furman University. She is co-editor, with Helaine Silverman, of Cultural Heritage Politics in China (Springer, 2013). Her first visit to Lijiang, in 1999, was as an actress in a Yunnan Minority Film Studio production originally called The Happy Naxi (the title was later changed to Xingfu huayuan, or Garden of Happiness). She resided in Lijiang for parts of 2002 and 2003, then returned for shorter visits in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2011 and 2012.

Rong Cai is associate professor of Chinese Studies at Emory University. Her book The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature was published by Hawai‘i University Press. Her current research focuses on historical memories in contemporary Chinese popular culture.

Yongshun Cai teaches in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His recent book is Collective Resistance in China: Why Popular Protests Succeed or Fail (2010).

Susanne Y. P. Choi is an associate professor in the department of sociology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research interests include gender, family, health and migration in Chinese societies.

Yanhua Deng is an associate professor at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China. Her research centres on contentious politics and environmental politics. She won a dissertation award from the Chengchi University Press in Taiwan. Her work has appeared in top Chinese academic journals like Zhongguo shehui kexue and Shehuixue yanjiu.

Michael Dillon is author of China: a Modern History, which was long listed for the 2013 ICAS Humanities Prize. Two other books, Xinjiang and the Expansion of Chinese Communist Power: Kashgar in the Early Twentieth Century and Deng Xiaoping: a Political Biography are forthcoming.

Richard Louis Edmonds is visiting professor in the geographical studies programme of the University of Chicago and a lecturer in Johns Hopkins University's undergraduate programme in Nanjing. His interests focus around environmental studies and historical geography. He was editor of The China Quarterly from 1996–2002. Dr Edmonds has written extensively on China, Japan, Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong. He is the author of Macau (World Bibliographical Series, Oxford: Clio Press, 1989) and Patterns of China's Lost Harmony: A Survey of the Country's Environmental Degradation and Protection (1994) and has edited or co-edited: Reappraising Republican China (2000), Managing The Chinese Environment (2000), The People's Republic of China After 50 Years (2000), Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: A Retrospective View (2001), and China's Embedded Activism (2007).

Stephan Feuchtwang is emeritus professor in the department of anthropology, London School of Economics. His recent publications include The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts (De Gruyter, 2010); and as editor and contributor, Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China (UCL Press, 2004); and (with Wang Mingming) Grassroots Charisma: Four Local Leaders in China (Routledge, 2001).

Jonathan Goldstein is a research associate of Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and a professor of East Asian history at the University of West Georgia. His specialties are 19th-century Sino-American commerce and East Asian Jewish trading communities. His books include Stephen Girard's Trade with China (2011), The Jews of China (1999), China and Israel (1999), America Views China (1991) and Philadelphia and the China Trade (1978).

Christophe Z. Guilmoto is a senior researcher in demography at the Institut de recherche pour le développement and works at CEPED (Centre population et développement) in Paris. His current research focuses on gender imbalances in Asia and Europe.

Enze Han is lecturer in the International Security of East Asia at SOAS, University of London. His research interests include ethnic politics in China and China's foreign relations, particularly with Southeast Asia.

Emily Hannum is associate professor of sociology and education at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on poverty and child welfare and gender and ethnic stratification in China. She is currently working on a book project on the topic of childhood experiences of poverty and young adult upward mobility.

Karrie J. Koesel is assistant professor of political science at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Religion and Authoritarianism: Cooperation, Conflict and the Consequences (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Steven I. Levine, research faculty associate in the department of history, University of Montana, is co-author with Michael H. Hunt of Arc of Empire: America's Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (2012). He collaborated with Alexander V. Pantsov on Mao: The Real Story (2012).

Li Shuzhuo is a demographer, and professor and director of the Institute for Population and Development Studies, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.

Chun Lin teaches at the LSE and is the author of, most recently, Reflections on Marxism, History and Contemporary Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

Andrew Mertha is associate professor of government at Cornell University. His forthcoming book is Brother in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (Cornell University Press, 2014).

Carl Minzner is an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School, specializing in Chinese law and governance. Recent academic works include “China's Turn Against Law,” in the American Journal of Comparative Law (2011) exploring Chinese authorities’ shift against legal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, and “The Rise and Fall of Chinese Legal Education” in the Fordham International Law Journal (2013), examining both the expansion of Chinese legal education since the late 1990s, and its impending retrenchment.

Kathryn Mohrman is a professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, where she also directs the University Design Consortium, a joint project with Sichuan University. Past experiences include president of Colorado College USA, executive director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, and Fulbright scholar in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.

Wing Chung Ng teaches Chinese history at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests cover South China and the Chinese diaspora. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on the history of Cantonese opera before the Pacific War. He completed this review while a Fulbright scholar in Hong Kong.

Kevin J. O'Brien is the Alann P. Bedford professor of Asian studies and professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Grassroots Elections in China (2011) (with Suisheng Zhao), Popular Protest in China (2008), Rightful Resistance in Rural China (2006) (with Lianjiang Li), Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (2005) (with Neil J. Diamant and Stanley B. Lubman), and Reform Without Liberalization: China's National People's Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change (1990, 2008).

Yinni Peng is assistant professor of sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include migration, gender, information and communication technology (ICT), and labour politics. Her recent publications appear in The China Quarterly and Gender & Society.

Judy Polumbaum is a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, who's also lived and worked in Boston, Vermont, California, Colorado, Beijing, Nanjing and Hong Kong. She's followed Chinese media developments for the past 35 years.

Meg Rithmire is an assistant professor in the business, government, and international economy unit at Harvard Business School. She is working on a book manuscript on the politics of land control and the role of land in Chinese capitalism.

Sean R. Roberts is associate professor of practice and director of international development studies at The George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. His research focuses on the Uyghur people of Central Asia and China, political development in Central Asia, and China's engagement of Central Asia.

Zhiming Sheng is a PhD student in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His dissertation is about homeowners' self-governance in urban China.

Ezra F. Vogel is Henry Ford II professor of the social sciences emeritus at Harvard, former director of Harvard's East Asia Research Center, Fairbank Center and Asia Centers. He is the author of Canton Under Communism and Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, a best seller in China.

Rudolph Wagner is senior professor of Chinese studies at the Heidelberg research cluster Asia and Europe in a Global Context. His published work includes studies on the Taiping civil war, the late Qing press, transcultural conceptual history and Chinese politics and literature in the 20th century.

Huiyao Wang is the director general of the Center for China and Globalization and Rajawali Senior Research Fellow at the Ash Center, Harvard University. His research focuses on global talents issues, Chinese returnees' development, and China and globalization issues. His recent English language publications include Globalizing China: The Strategy, Influence and Success of Chinese Returnee Entrepreneurs (2012) and, with Zhang Wenxian and Alon Ilon, Entrepreneurial and Business Elites of China: The Chinese Returnees Who Have Shaped Modern China (2011).

Meiyan Wang is professor of population and labour economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on labour migration, employment and wages, human capital development, and labour relations in China. She is working on a project on the topic of China's population and employment policies for inclusive development.

Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik is professor of Sinology at the University of Vienna. Her research focus is on 20th-century Chinese history and historiography, with a special focus on the memory of the great famine and the Cultural Revolution.

Chi-hung Wei received his PhD from the University of Florida in 2013. His research interests are in US–China relations, Chinese politics, cross-Strait relations, international relations theory and economic statecraft.

James H. Williams is associate professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and also chief scientist at Energy and Environmental Economics in San Francisco.

Yang Xueyan is a demographer, and associate professor at the Institute for Population and Development Studies, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.

Miin-ling Yu is associate research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Her research focuses on the Sino-Soviet cultural relations and on the comparison of party-state systems. She is the editor of Divided Rule across the Taiwan Straits: Educational Reorganization, Visual Propaganda, and Ethic Politics (1945–2000) and is currently completing a book on the making of a “new socialist man” in the PRC (1949–1966).

Qian Forrest Zhang is an assistant professor of sociology in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. His areas of expertise are in rural development, agrarian transition, food and agriculture, and stratification and mobility in contemporary China.

Zhang Qunlin is PhD candidate, School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.

Yuping Zhang is assistant professor of sociology and education at Lehigh University. Her research has focused on sociology of education and gender stratification in education and the labor market in China. She is currently developing a new project to investigate social and political influences on the construction and reconstruction of gender identities in women's lives in China.

David Zweig is chair professor, Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and director of the Center on China's Transnational Relations. He is the author of four books, including Internationalizing China: Domestic Interests and Global Linkages (Cornell University Press, 2002).