Yu Xie

Yu Xie is Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, a leading sociologist, and one of the world’s foremost scholars of contemporary China. Born in China in 1959, he was among the first cohort of students to enter college after the Cultural Revolution and among the first Chinese students to pursue graduate study in the United States after China reopened to the world. 

Xie’s scholarly achievements have been recognized through election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academia Sinica, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is the founding director of Princeton’s Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, the founding director of the Center for Social Research at Peking University, and the director of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), the most comprehensive longitudinal survey of Chinese families and individuals. Through his scholarship and leadership, Xie has helped transform the study of contemporary China.