Xiaohong Xu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of Michigan. Xu received his Ph.D. in Sociology in 2014 from Yale University, his M.A. in Sociology in 2005 from Notre Dame, and his B.A. in Sociology from Beijing University in 2001. Prior to Michigan, he taught at the National University of Singapore from 2014 to 2018 and Lingnan University in Hong Kong from 2018 to 2019.
He researches modern Chinese politics from a historical sociological perspective. He has researched and written on the May Fourth Movement and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the development of Communist guerrilla bases, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Hong Kong’s 2019 protests. He is writing a book on how the labor politics during the Cultural Revolution inadvertently led to the demise of Maoism and shaped the strange bedfellowship between post-Mao China and global capitalism.
