Redesign The Measure of Class and the American Class
Structure Revisited. (Under review)
Social class indicates individuals’ access to economic resources and
is key to understanding inequality. Current studies of social class
often measure it using aggregate occupational groups. However, this
measure of class may encounter the problem of using a fixed
occupation-to-class mapping that neglects the important changes
occurring within occupation due to technological change and
organizational reform that may change an occupation’s class location
over time. This study addresses this limitation by introducing a new
“task-based class identification” model to evaluate an occupation’s
class location using text data and supervised machine learning based on
Marxist class theory. Drawing on ONET’s occupational task data, I
assessed class locations for detailed occupations in 2002 and 2020,
linking this information to CPS surveys to map the U.S. labor force’s
class structure. Results reveal that while the American class structure
has remained stable across four aggregate classes, significant shifts
occurred within these categories. Particularly, within the
non-managerial employee class, between 2002 and 2020, the share of
proletarian workers declined by 8%. Decomposition analysis attributes
30% of this decline to changes in occupation size and 70% to
within-occupation shifts, where proletarian workers experienced either
“upskilling” or granted new supervisory tasks resulting in an upward
class shifts.
One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Contrasting
Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China. (2025
forthcoming, Sociological Science)
Co-author with Yinxian Zhang, Queens College Sociology, CUNY
This study contrasts official and popular expressions of
anti-Americanism in China by comparing narratives from People’s
Daily and Zhihu between 2011 and 2022. Using computational and
qualitative methods, we examine sentiment trends, topics, and rhetoric
in official and popular discourses. We find that while both discourses
have become increasingly negative toward the United States, they diverge
significantly in specific expressions: official discourse mirrors
Western liberal critiques of various American social problems but
attributes these issues to American democracy; popular discourse blends
far-right and left-wing populism and blame liberal elites and capitalism
for the American decline. These findings highlight both the limits of
authoritarian control over public opinion and the pluralistic nature of
nationalist expressions. The study also situates Chinese
anti-Americanism within a global zeitgeist, discussing how populist
rhetoric transcends borders and shapes local political discourse in
unexpected contexts.
Co-author with Yinxian Zhang, Queens College Sociology, CUNY
This research is one of the first studies that systematically
investigate the cross-language political biases and inconsistencies in
large language models (LLMs). We found that China-related political
issues have significantly higher rates of inconsistency both in terms of
content and sentiment, suggesting that Chinese state censorship and
US-China geopolitical tensions may have influenced the performance of
the bilingual GPT models. In addition, we found that GPT models trained
in different languages have sentiment biases that make them more
positive toward their “own country” while more negative toward “other
countries.” Our study brings public attention to the biases and
inconsistencies in multilingual LLMs, which bear profound implications
for cross-cultural communications.
2023 Best Student Research Paper Award, ASA Section on Asia and
Asian America
2023 Best Student Research Paper Award (Honorable Mention), ASA
Section on Communication, Information Technologies and Media
Sociology
Why do certain ideas catch on? What makes some ideas more powerful
than others? In this article, I examines key predictors of cultural
power—novelty, emotion, status, and linguistic features—using an
innovative diachronic word-embedding method. The study finds a
curvilinear relationship between novelty and resonance, as well as a
positive relationship between status and cultural power. Contrary to
theoretical expectations, moderate emotions, whether positive or
negative, are found to be more effective in evoking resonance than more
intense emotions, possibly due to the mediating effect of the forum’s
“group style.” The study also finds significant effects of linguistic
features, such as lexical diversity and the use of English in Chinese
discussions. This suggests a Bourdieusian “cultural capital signaling
and selection” path to cultural power, which has not been considered in
most studies of resonance.
How to Manage the Market: The Construction of the Economic
Actor in American Bestselling Self-Help Books, 1970-2020
[Review & Resubmit]
Co-author with Carly Knight, NYU Sociology
This paper investigates the portrayal of economic action within
popular American self-help books. By employing a computational,
mixed-method analysis of best-selling titles from the New York Times
over the past five decades, we explore self-help’s “promissory
discourse”—that is, which actions readers are told will lead them to
worldly success. Our findings reveal significant shifts in prescribed
economic action, with a decline in “financialized” behavior and
investment-focused advice, particularly following the Great Recession.
Instead, books increasingly emphasize a “therapeutic” and self-oriented
perspective, advising readers that introspection, emotions, and
practices on the self are essential (and a pre-requisite) to economic
success. These trends hold both across the universe of economic
self-help books and within financial bestsellers. These findings expand
our understanding of the transformation of finance culture,
demonstrating—at least within popular financial advice books—a
transition from hyper-rationalized, calculative investment behavior
towards an increasingly therapeutically-inflected, self-oriented
economic actor.
Co-authored with Lijun Chen (Chapin Hall at the University of
Chicago), Dali Yang (the University of Chicago), and Qiang Ren (Peking
University)
Using data from the longitudinal Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS)
survey, this book analyzes the well-being of Chinese children and youth
from multiple dimensions. We not only pay attention to the economic,
physical, psychological, cognitive, and attitudinal development of
children in China, but also analyze how social and institutional context
(such as migration and parental absence) affects child development.