Research

• 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.
• Political Biases and Inconsistencies in Bilingual GPT Models —the Cases of the U.S. and China. (2024, Scientific Reports)
  • 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.
• The Elements of Cultural Power: Novelty, Emotion, Status, and Cultural Capital (2022, American Sociological Review)
  • 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.
  • Accepted Version available for download.
• 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.
• Child and Youth Well-being in China (2019)
  • 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.