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Hsing’s research and teaching has been focused on the political economy of development in East Asia, especially China. Her book, Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) analyzes the cultural and institutional configuration in the processes of Taiwanese direct investment in southern China in the 1990s. In the last few years she extended this work in two directions. The first one concerns the politics of growth in Chinese cities and towns. In her upcoming book temporarily entitled The Politics of Land Development in Chinese Cities, Hsing discusses the issue of land rights and the territorial power consolidation of the local state in China’s late socialist transformation. The second project, which she started this year, focuses on telecommunication as a technological, political-economic, as well as social-cultural platform in China’s interaction with the global.

Gillian Hart is dean of the Center for African Studies and Chair of the undergraduate major in Development Studies. A native of South Africa, she is author of a number of publications on comparative development in her native country and globally. Her book Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (University of California Press, 2002) traces divergent post-apartheid dynamics in two towns and adjacent townships, and their connections with East Asia. She has also published numerous papers on critical ethnographies of power and neoliberal globalization, as well as on rural-urban linkages. Most notably, this includes the paper “Beyond the Urban-Rural Divide: Linking Land, Labour, and Livelihoods,” Transformation (55) 2004 (with Ari Sitas).