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48 Baxter Street, Athens, GA 30602
“The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China," Bin Xu, associate professor, Department of Sociology, Emory University.
The 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed 87,000 people and left 5 million homeless. In response to the devastation, an unprecedented wave of volunteers and civic associations streamed into Sichuan to offer help. In his The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford 2017), Xu examines how civically engaged citizens acted on the ground, how they understood the meaning of their actions, and how the political climate shaped their actions and understandings. Using extensive data from interviews, observations, and textual materials, Xu shows that the large-scale civic engagement was not just a natural outpouring of compassion, but also a complex social process, both enabled and constrained by the authoritarian political context.
Xu's research interests lie at the intersection of politics and culture. He is the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford University Press, 2017). He has finished a book manuscript on the collective memory of China’s “educated youth” (zhiqing) generation—the 17 million youth sent down to the countryside in the 1960s and 1970s. His research has appeared in leading sociological and China studies journals. He is currently writing his third book The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (under contract with Polity Press, in the “Cultural Sociology” series).
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