Yin-wah Chu joined the Department of Sociology in 2007 to teach courses on globalization and East Asian social and economic development. Her research centers on two major areas: the political economy of development and social and political movements, both pertaining to countries and societies in East Asia. Specifically, she has examined business networks in Hong Kong and the developmental states of South Korea and Taiwan, analyzing their changing contours and assessing their effectiveness in tackling the societies’ continuous political-economic challenges, thus allowing them to articulate with the global economy and achieve rapid economic transformations. At the same time, she has examined the democratic transitions of South Korea and Taiwan, analyzing the contrasting sub-ethnic and social class dynamics in the processes, thus evaluating the relative merits of the political contingency and social-structural approaches. She has also examined labor and environmental movements in Hong Kong and, more recently, the issues of urban development and land expropriation resistance in China.

East Asian development (State-business relations, democratization, labor conditions); Social and political movements