Yu Xie


Yu Xie is a Chinese-American sociologist and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Sociology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University, where he is also the Director of the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China. Xie has made contributions to quantitative methodology, social stratification, demography, Chinese studies, sociology of science, and social science data collection. He was Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished University Professor of Sociology, Statistics, and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Sinica, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Biography

Xie was born in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, China in 1959, the second of two brothers. His parents were both physicians. Xie’s education was delayed by the Cultural Revolution in China, and his family suffered many hardships, but after the Revolution ended, he was accepted at Shanghai University of Technology, where he received a B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering in 1982. He then came to the United States to study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from which he received an M.A. in the History of Science and an M.S. in Sociology in 1984 as well as a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1989. After completing his doctorate, Xie came to the University of Michigan as an assistant professor, where he was appointed associate professor in 1994 and full professor in 1996. He became an American citizen in 1997. Xie now lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and their two children.
Along with his sociology appointment, Xie has held various positions in other departments at the University of Michigan. He was appointed Professor of Statistics in 2000 and Professor of Public Policy in 2011. Xie is also a Research Professor at the Population Studies Center and the of the Institute for Social Research, and a Faculty Associate at the . Since 1999, he has been directing the at the Survey Research Center. During his over twenty years of career at the University of Michigan, Xie held multiple chair professorships. In 2007, he was appointed Otis Dudley Duncan University Distinguished Professor.
Xie has been active in promoting empirical sociology in China. His primary institutional affiliation in China has been with Peking University, where he has directed the China Family Panel Studies, China’s largest national longitudinal social science data collection project and founded the Social Research Center. Xie has also been active at several other institutions in China, holding honorary adjunct professorships at Renmin University of China, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Shanghai University.

Professional recognition