Social Science Approaches to Chinese Society: Part 1

Cameron Campbell's research focuses on kinship, inequality, and demographic behavior in China and in comparative perspective. With James Lee and other collaborators in the Lee-Campbell group, he has published on a wide variety of topics, including economic, family, and social influences on demographic outcomes such as birth, marriage, migration, and death, fertility limitation in historical China, and the role of kin networks in shaping social mobility. This early work made use of datasets of population registers from Qing China that his collaborators constructed, the China Multigenerational Panel Datasets (CMGPD), with two of these now released via ICPSR. Currently, with other members of the Lee-Campbell group, he is conducting a study of the careers of bureaucrats during the Qing by constructing and analyzing a database of office holders based on the 缙绅录. Additionally, he is participating in group projects related to the origins of educational elites in China from the Qing to the present. Cameron is also collaborating with the Shanxi University Research Center for Chinese Social History on a study of rural society from 1949 to the mid-1960s, utilizing village-level microdata compiled by researchers at the RCCSH, as well as another Lee-Campbell group study examining the social origins of students at universities in China during the first half of the twentieth century.