Professor Gaochao HE is a political scientist by training. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 1993 and served as a professor in the department of political science at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou of China between 2004 and 2017. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program of Harvard Law School in 2016 and has been a Senior Research Associate there ever since. Before he was appointed as the Yeung Family Distinguished Visiting Professor in the East Asian Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University in July 2018, he worked as a Senior Research Fellow in the China Centre (Maritime), Southampton Solent University of England in 2017. He also conducted field research and taught classes in Germany for a year in 2015.

Professor He’s research interests mainly focus on comparative studies of social transformation. Since 1995, he has conducted researches on comparative studies of labor politics and on the changing labor relations among the state, trade union, managers and workers in China. He has conducted various surveys and interviews, and is working on two book manuscripts: (1) Labor Politics in China: Where the state meets market and society, and (2) Voices from Workplace: Workers reaction to the neo-liberal production regime in China. Currently, he is also.conducting a research on documentary photography of a changing China.