Qin Hui

b. 1952

Historian, social critic

Qin Hui is now a professor at Qinghua University. He graduated from Lanzhou University (1981), where he majored in Chinese history, and then taught at several universities before being recruited by Qinghua. Qin started his academic career as a historian, specializing in peasant studies and the socio-economic history of imperial China. In the 1990s, his academic interests shifted to contemporary issues. He organized and directed a series of field studies in rural China, discussing the various problems emerging from the recent reforms, and edited a book series: A Series of Peasant Studies.

His work greatly promoted peasant studies in China and he is considered one of its most authoritative scholars. Since the mid 1990s, Qin has also paid great attention to urban reform and has done many comparative studies of economic reform in China, Eastern Europe and Russia. In his writing, he has criticized those economists who have used ‘neo-institutional’ economics (see economic thought) to justify the corruption that has resulted from the reform and privatization of state-owned enterprises, emphasizing that in contemporary China, the most urgent and important issue with respect to the transformation of state ownership and to the definition of property rights is to uphold social fairness and justice, rather than to reduce as efficiently as possible the so-called transaction costs. His critical views have made him a prominent spokesman for, and defender of, public interests. His current research focuses on the history and reality of rural China, the comparative study of reform, and issues of globalization and China’s modernization.

Further reading

Qin, Hui (2004). ‘Dividing the Big Family Assets’. In Wang Chaohua (ed.), One China, Many Paths. London: Verso: 128–59.

LIU CHANG