Shilin Jia

Shilin Jia joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia for the 2024-2025 academic year.  He was previously a postdoctoral teaching fellow in computational social science at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. degree in sociology. He received an M.A. degree in sociology from National Chengchi University, Taiwan and a B.A. degree in Philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. His scholarly interest lies in applying computational methods to the study of political culture and organizations, with a special focus on post-reform China.

Jia has spent years analyzing job transfers of communist party elites in China. It is a project that he built up from scratch by using machines to code party elites’ CVs. His goal is to understand how the party-state has evolved through the division of labor and circulation of its elite members. He is also working on a computational content analysis project tracking ideological changes in the full text of 60 years of the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China. The aim of that project is to understand how incompatible ideas in an ideological system can be gradually reconciled and how the concept of “market” was unfettered in that process. More recently, He has started a new project building word-embedding models based on multiple languages of Google N-grams and studying identity formation across language communities.

At APARC, while continuing to work on his existing projects, Jia will begin a book manuscript that provides a comprehensive analysis of the changing career patterns of CCP elites over 30 years of China’s economic reform.