Song Yuan joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2018-2019 academic year from the college of Law and Political science at Zhejiang Normal University.  His research interests focus on the transformation of rural politics and peasants’ daily lives in the urbanization process of China. Yuan will conduct a comparative study of rural governance in different regions and locations of China against the background of urbanization and land development.   Yuan conducted fieldwork investigating various regions in China including Henan, Hubei, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangxi, Shandong, Anhui, Guangdong and Zhejiang province since 2008. The accumulative time that he stayed in villages has exceeded 400 days.Yuan holds a PhD and a MA in Sociology from the Center for Research on Rural Governance (CRRG) at Huazhong University of Science & Technology, where the Central China School of Rural Studies is mainly based, and a dual BA in Engineering and Journalism from Wuhan University.