PI: J. Curtis McMillen, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
John Curtis McMillan is working to develop and evaluate a school-based mental health intervention for children and adolescents in Guangdong, China, using a quasi-experimental pre- and post-intervention study with a three-level cluster design to examine the effect of a social and emotional learning intervention on children’s social and emotional competencies and other selected mental health outcomes. Professor McMillan will work closely with scholars from Washington University, Hong Kong Poly U and Guangdong Rici to work on the research design and implementation of this project together. The goal of this pilot project is ultimately to scale the program up to other schools in the Greater Bay Area and across China. This research will help in aiding China’s ongoing educational reforms, putting an emphasis on children’s mental health, as mental health education or counseling services are largely absent in Chinese school systems.
PI: Dana Suskind, Department of Surgery
Dana Suskind works on enabling families in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area of mainland China to receive personalized parenting education for their young children’s cognitive and socioemotional development. Dr. Suskind and the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health developed The Survey of Parent/Provider Expectations And Knowledge (SPEAK®), a clinical and research tool used to assess parents’ and providers’ understanding of early childhood cognitive and language development, and to provide feedback and resources based on that knowledge. Dr. Suskind’s colleagues, experts in early childhood development in Hong Kong and the greater Bay Area of mainland China, will work to translate survey items into Chinese and to adapt them for cultural relevance. This work will enable families in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area of mainland China to receive personalized parenting education for their young children’s cognitive and socioemotional development and pave the way for deeper relationships between the University of Chicago and early childhood clinicians, educators and parents in Hong Kong and mainland China.
PI: James Heckman, Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics
Since 2017, UChicago’s Center for the Economics of Human Development and the Institute for Economic and Social Research (IESR) at Jinan University have worked together to collect rich longitudinal data on a variety of aspects of human and child development. This project seeks to build upon that previous research, with a primary focus on understanding the influence of family environments on child development and developing policies to mitigate adverse or under-resourced family environments. Specifically, considering migration and Hukou policies have left many children to be raised by a single parent or less-educated grandparents and thus at a disadvantage to other children in terms of skills, educational attainment, and other life outcomes. They will measure children’s skills and skill development in rural and urban China to better understand the effect of parental migration to cities and Hukou policy on China’s most vulnerable population.
PI: Joanna Ransmeier, Department of History
Johanna Ransmeier conducts research tracing the history of China’s twentieth century experiments with law to the early 20th century. Professor Ransmeier will use archival materials from Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China to describe the legal consciousness of the less-than-literate as vocabularies of adjudication and legal ideas moved through revolutionary China. She will conduct two in-person workshops in Taiwan with both local and international scholars. The grant will also provide foundational support for the research for Professor Ransmeier’s current book on the development of legal literacy in China and the formation of a uniquely Chinese legal imagination in the early twentieth century. This research helps to answer the question “What happens when ordinary people’s expectations of the law get ahead of a state’s capacity to deliver on its promises?” and allows Professor Ransmeier to explore not what the texts of Republican law actually said at the time, but rather how the law was received, negotiated, and envisioned.
PI: James Heckman
Since 2017, UChicago’s Center for the Economics of Human Development and the Institute for Economic and Social Research (IESR) at Jinan University have worked together to collect rich longitudinal data on a variety of aspects of human and child development. This project seeks to build upon that previous research, with a primary focus on understanding the influence of family environments on child development and developing policies to mitigate adverse or under-resourced family environments. Specifically, considering migration and Hukou policies have left many children to be raised by a single parent or less-educated grandparents and thus at a disadvantage to other children in terms of skills, educational attainment, and other life outcomes. They will measure children’s skills and skill development in rural and urban China to better understand the effect of parental migration to cities and Hukou policy on China’s most vulnerable population.
PI: Jean Decety
Inevitably, there are situations in human life in which people are forced to make difficult decisions to save some lives over others. Different cultures do not promote and transmit moral values and behaviors uniformly, however, so it is crucial to understand how cross-societal differences – collectivist versus individualistic social norms, in particular – contribute to this kind of value-based decision making. As such, this project will systematically investigate how specific factors such as age, gender, and culture, as well as framing contexts (positive rights, negative rights, and general policy framings) influence the subjective value of human lives when making decisions in life-or-death situations. By conducting a large cross-sectional and cross-cultural study, in which over 1200 participants will take surveys on a series of life-or-death decisions from early childhood to late adulthood. The study will inform future research on moral decision making and guide policy makers about their citizens’ attitudes about which lives should be saved under extreme circumstances.
PI: Shaoda Wang
Across the globe, extreme pollution continues to have severe consequences for health, labor productivity, and welfare, but since environmental regulations often impose substantial economic costs, local regulators typically lack incentives to strictly enforce environmental regulations. This project aims to help solve China’s pollution problems by promoting citizen participation in environmental governance in ways that are explicitly encouraged by the central government. To accomplish this, their approach is two-fold: they will reach out to individuals located near major polluting sources – as identified by geocoded social media posts – and feed them information on the ongoing pollution violations being committed by adjacent plants. Then they will use additional experimental treatments to further remove barriers to citizen participation, including reducing private costs of participation, correcting biases in the efficacy of citizen participation, increasing private returns to participation, and correcting higher-order beliefs about other individuals’ participation in environmental governance.
PI: Steven Durlauf
The study of intergenerational mobility has experienced a renaissance in the context of the United States and Europe. The reasons for this are twofold. First, a range of novel data sets have emerged that allow for detailed empirical analysis of the relationships between parental socioeconomic status and various children’s outcomes. Second, the ways in which parental socioeconomic status constrain the future life outcomes of children collectively represent a key dimension of distributive justice and so mobility levels have been increasingly scrutinized in light of general international increases in inequality.
This proposal outlines the first stage of an extended research program on intergenerational mobility in China and Russia. Studies of intergenerational mobility in these contexts are still in their infancy due to historic data limitations as well as the lack of appropriate statistical tools to characterize mobility in transitioning economies. Much of the project involves the development of new measures of intergenerational mobility that consider the coevolution of education, occupation and income across generations and which distinguish between transitional mobility dynamics and longer run dynamics. Both China and Russia have experienced radical transformations of their economies that require that formal tools developed in the West be modified in order to understand mobility in those societies. While the first stage of the project involves measurement, future work will focus on mechanisms. The research will also commence collaborations between the University of Chicago and a new Center on Russia, Eurasia and China that represents a large scale endeavor between Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the New Economic School.
PI: Ming Xiang
The linguistic landscape in China is highly diverse, even though standard Mandarin Chinese is the only official language in mainland China. Along the southern coastline of China, including the Greater Bay Area, many different languages are spoken in the local communities. Economic development in the Greater Bay area has led to tremendous changes in the social, cultural and political environments, all of which have profound implications for language diversity and change. Rapid urbanization of rural areas and increased mobility of workers created many multilingual communities, giving rise to a large number of communities with rich language mixing. Yet, large-scale, research-based knowledge about this phenomenon and its consequences for language development and learning, language vitality and attribution, as well as language use and change, is scarce. Traditional research on language diversity has
focused more on grammar description and documentation, drawing evidence from observational and introspective data; but the complexity of the issues calls for both theoretical and methodological innovation.
This project integrates theoretical insights from formal linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics to study the language contact and shift situation in Guangzhou, China, with state-of-the-art experimental and quantitative methods for data collection and analysis. The long-term goal of this research project is to construct both qualitative and quantitative models that account for how language shift takes place in complex social networks, as the result of the intensive interaction between culture, society and human psychology and cognition.
PI: Alan Yu
PI: Zhiying Ma
PI: Boaz Keysar
As major corporations and small business alike establish operations in international markets due to increased globalization, it has become common for companies to adopt English as a shared corporate language to facilitate communication. This trend has become so ubiquitous that for many business professionals, large segments of their professional lives are conducted through a language that is not native for many. While this shift from the more costly medium of communication via an interpreter-enables multinational companies to rapidly and directly communicate, communicating through a lingua franca may involve hidden costs. The goal of this project is to examine the impact of communication medium on business negotiations. Specifically, we will examine how negotiating either through a lingua franca or through an interpreter influences rapport building, information sharing, and the discovery of integrative solutions during negotiation.
We will conduct two studies. Study 1 will examine factors that influence the choice and preference for a communication medium and expectations of its impact on the negotiation process. Specifically, we plan to examine factors such as proficiency and confidence in the shared, non-native language, perceived trust in the negotiation partner, and perceived impact on rapport building and negotiation outcomes across communication mediums. Study 2 will evaluate how communication medium impacts actual negotiation. We will create cross-national negotiations using either an interpreter or a lingua franca and evaluate the trust building, information sharing, cooperation and efficiency of agreements. These studies will allow us to compare negotiators’ preferences for the communication medium and their expectations regarding its benefits (Study 1) to the real consequences of this choice with the actual costs and benefits of the medium of communication (Study 2). The findings will provide insight into the potentially influential role language plays in improving negotiation outcomes, and would have important implications for international business diplomacy and policy.
PI: Chang-Tai Hsieh
While in most countries, corporate registration data for firms does not include ownership information beyond the holding shells, the State Administration for Market Regulation, with which all Chinese firms are legally obligated to register, identifies all Chinese holding shells as well as their owners. This project will use these records to document the ultimate owners of Chinese firms, the links between these ultimate owners through joint ventures, and how these links have changed over the last two decades. In looking at the owners of each firm, instead of the firm itself, they will analyze how the following three aspects of Chinese firms’ history have changed over time: the distribution of firm ownership, the complexity of the ownership, and the links between state and private owners.
PI: Chang-Tai Hsieh
China is a vast country with a complex economy that has changed rapidly over the past four decades. The Becker Friedman Institute’s China Program is conducting ground-breaking research to provide a better understanding of the factors driving China’s extraordinary economic expansion. A key objective of this Initiative is to develop a reliable database about the impact of China’s institutional structures on economic growth, and to provide access to Chinese and US researchers, as well as scholars from around the world.
To facilitate this work, the Becker Friedman Institute (BFI) partnered with the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Tsinghua University in a collaborative research project – based in the Chinese University of Hong Kong – to explore the role of various institutions in China’s economic growth model. The resulting Data Initiative for the Chinese Economy, launched in October 2018, leverages a unique combination of Chinese commercial data to produce rigorous, world-class research.
PI: Alan Yu
Hong Kong has seen a continuous increase in the number of local children born to ethnic minority families with South Asian heritage and Chinese families that migrated from the mainland. These children speak a minority language as their mother tongue and belong to a minority culture within a larger community. Learning Cantonese, the dominant language of Hong Kong, is a crucial step for them to integrate into a community of peers and acquire academic skills. Measures like language classes and new curriculums have been available to help these populations to learn Cantonese. Yet, they only apply to older individuals. There is a complete absence of direct support allocated to younger children to learn Cantonese, although early years are the most crucial for language acquisition. This gap in policy planning may be due to a lack of knowledge regarding the language environment of these children, particularly with respect to Cantonese as one of their first languages.
This study worked to fill the gap by examining the relationship between the language input received by these young children and the language the children are producing. Specifically, the investigators studied the quantity and quality of the Cantonese used by the children towards their caregivers and the Cantonese input from those caregivers.
PI: Zhiying Ma
This project seeks to develop and evaluate a peer support training, certification, and supervision program for persons with serious mental illnesses in Guangzhou, China. Peer support has been shown to be effective in raising mental health service users’ levels of hope, empowerment, and quality of life, and in improving peer supporters’ social skills and economic conditions. It is especially needed in mainland China, where mental health services are still pharmaceutically driven, symptom-focused, paternalistic, and institution-based.
We will use a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to develop the peer support program (PSP). The PSP will be culturally responsive and power-sharing; integrative of global expertise; rights-based and oriented toward community inclusion; focused on peers’ personal growth and poverty alleviation; as well as systematic and evidence-based. This partnership will give local stakeholders adequate ownership of the program and ensure that it will be scaled up to other social service agencies in Guangzhou, the Greater Bay Area, and across China. This project will also systematically introduce peer support and CBPR to health and human services in China.
PI: Michael Greenstone
Over the past three decades, China’s remarkable economic growth has raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and improved living standards on a scale unrivaled in economic history. But the inexpensive, reliable energy that has fueled this growth has also increased environmental pollution that is damaging human health and carbon dioxide emissions that are contributing to climate change.
Chinese policymakers have begun implementing an ambitious agenda to address these challenges. Over the past five years the central government has made incredible progress in its “war on pollution” and taken positive steps to confront climate change. Yet, as policymakers continue to work toward additional improvements to reduce pollution and carbon emissions without sacrificing economic growth, it will be crucial to identify the most cost-effective and efficient policies available.
The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) is an interdisciplinary research institute focused on solving the world’s most complex energy challenges through an integrated approach that combines cutting-edge research with outreach and government partnership. In 2019, EPIC launched a dedicated effort in China to work with the government entities throughout the country to identify highly effective solutions to the twin challenges of air pollution and carbon emissions. Led by EPIC Director Michael Greenstone, EPIC-China has already formed critical partnerships with regulators and local research institutions and is positioned to rapidly expand several projects underway. EPIC-China’s team includes senior staff in Beijing and Hong Kong, including a research director based at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
PI: Eugene Chang
PI: Marc Downie
Near instantaneous contact tracing is essential to lowering the transmission growth rate of current and future waves of COVID-19 and future novel infectious diseases. The recently released Google Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) system provides for device-to-device tracing in a private, secure, and energy-efficient way. But crucially, despite adoption in several countries over the course of summer 2020, much about the practical functioning of this system remains unknown, while the system, as designed, leaves much data uncollected. Specifically, GAEN neglects spatial and temporal aspects of disease transmission that could be used to warn people, inform policy, and ground transmission models.
Our proposal for this grant is to continue studying a potentially simple solution to both these problems: the creation of a Spatial Contact Tracing (SCT) system that tethers a decentralized system of static cell-phone-like devices to specific spaces. While simple, this idea improves both the breadth and precision of exposure risk estimates by providing more accurate measures of the interaction between environment, distance, time, location, and infection. In the immediate term these metrics enable rapid and comprehensive contact tracing.
Taken together--the SCT devices and the cell phones of students in the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Architecture--we will have all of the elements required to collect and explore data concerning the efficacy of the GAEN and SCT systems. This grant would provide bridge funding for the continuation of this research--our prototype working SCT implementations and apps already exist, and we are in the final stages of securing long term research funding for next year of an international group of researchers (as finalists in the Hong Kong One-off Collaborative Research Fund grant process).
PI: Wu Hung
The Smart Museum of Art held a public lecture and roundtable discussion intended to highlight the intellectual and theoretical foundations of The Allure of Matter: Material Art in China, the Smart Museum of Art’s most ambitious exhibition to date.
The Smart Museum’s presentation of The Allure of Matter opened February 7, 2020 and represented over six years of research by Professor and Curator Wu Hung. Through the lens of materiality, works by 27 contemporary artists from China, known for their uses of unconventional materials were presented. Through the serious and enduring use of these materials, these artists have developed an individualized visual language. When taken together, this constitutes a major movement in contemporary Chinese art that has been identified for the first time in this exhibition.
To celebrate the rigorous academic and curatorial research that provided the foundation for this groundbreaking exhibition, the Smart hosted an academic forum and public lecture at the Hong Kong Center to introduce the exhibition for audiences in Hong Kong.
PI: Boaz Keysar
Cervical cancer causes the death of around 250,000 women each year, mainly due to human papillomavirus (HPV). Although early screening could prevent such deaths, in Hong Kong many women have never participated in cervical cancer screening due to barriers such as stigmatization and lack of understanding. Our goal is to investigate communication interventions to overcome such barriers to promote the health and wellbeing of women in Hong Kong.
HPV self-testing is an effective, low cost means of detecting HPV as first step in cervical cancer screening. We propose investigating how different methods of communicating health information about HPV and cervical cancer impact the uptake of HPV testing on self-collected samples. We will focus on Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong because they are less likely to undergo preventative health measures than their native born peers. We will take advantage of our recent discoveries in the psychology of communication and decision making in order to investigate how communicating information influences uptake. Specifically, we will rely on our discovery that people make less biased decisions in a foreign language than their native tongue, and that people perceive less risk when they hear than when they read information. We will collaborate with colleagues at the University of Hong Kong on a field study that will involve real health-related choices by Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong. The study will inform health care providers and policy makers about effective communication regarding HPV self-testing among migrant women, and about encouraging cancer screening more generally.