Andrew G. Walder


Andrew G. Walder is an American political sociologist specializing in the study of Chinese society. He has taught at Harvard University and Stanford University, where he joined the faculty in 1997 and is the Denise O'Leary & Kent Thiry Professor of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
His research interests include Collective Action, Social Movements, Comparative and Historical Sociology, and Political Sociology. He has published extensively on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Chinese industry and industrial reform, and Chinese society under Mao Zedong.

Education and career

Walder was born in 1953. He received his PhD in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981 and taught at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 1987, where he headed the 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. He joined that Stanford Department of Sociology in 1997. 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.
In 1985, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of sociology.

Selected publications