Ho-fung Hung is an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and he researches and publishes on global political economy, contentious politics, nationalism, and social theory. His current projects include one that examines the changing dynamics of global capitalism in the context of the rise of China and other emerging powers from the developing world. He also scrutinizes the origins and limits of China’s export- and investment-driven growth. Another project traces China’s contradictory and unfinished transition from empire to nation-state through delineating Beijing’s contentious interaction with Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan since 1949. His award-winning book, Protest with Chinese Characteristics, expounds how the Confucianist legacy shaped China’s trajectories of state formation and popular protests from the 18th century to the present, in contrast to the Western trajectories, and reflects on the universality of Western modernity. Besides these major projects, He has also published about the orientalist origins of classical social theories, globalization of epidemics, China’s environmental movements, among others.

His articles have appeared in American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, New Left Review, Sociological Theory, Review of International Political Economy, Social Science History, among others. His works have been featured or cited in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian (UK), New Internationalist (UK), Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil), Expresso (Portugal), Straits Times (Singapore), South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Xinhua Monthly (China), Toronto Star (Canada), and others.