Thomas Heberer


Thomas Heberer, Ph.D. is a Senior Professor of Chinese Politics & Society at the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He studied Social Anthropology, Philosophy, Political Science, and Chinese Studies in Frankfurt, Göttingen, Mainz and Heidelberg. In 1977 he completed his Ph.D. at the University of Bremen on the Mass Line concept of the Chinese Communist Party. The same year he went to China, where he worked as a translator and reader for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing for more than four years. During that time he witnessed the post-Cultural Revolution events in China and the gradual development of reform policies there.

Career

Heberer worked from 1983 to 1985 as a research fellow with the Oversea's Museum in Bremen, where he was put in charge of the Chinese Collection and established the museum’s permanent China exhibit. He was then appointed as a research fellow at the Institute of Geography of the University of Bremen and carried out a research project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, on the development of the private economic sector in China. This project was followed by his habilitation thesis on the role of the individual economic sector of urban and social development in China. In 1989 he received the venia legendi, or authorization to lecture, in Political Science at the University of Bremen.
From 1991 to 1992, Heberer served as a professor of Chinese Economic Studies at the University for Applied Sciences in Bremen. From 1992 to 1998, he acted as a professor of political science with a focus on East Asian politics at the University of Trier. From 1998 to 2013, he has held a chair professorship of political science with a focus on East Asia at the University of Duisburg-Essen's Institute of East Asian Studies. Upon his retirement in February 2013 he was appointed a Senior Professor of Chinese Politics and Society by the university president. Since then, he is still actively involved in conducting basic research on China and its political and social development.
Heberer has held visiting professor roles at: Seoul National University, University of Washington; China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics; National Taiwan University and National Sun Yat-sen University; Zhejiang University; University of Vienna and Peking University.

Research

Heberer’s thinking has been inspired by social scientists such as James C. Scott, Pierre Bourdieu, Theodor Adorno, Norbert Elias, Lucian W. Pye and Michel Foucault. At the same time, his oeuvre is heavily influenced by his continuous field research in China since 1981, a product of his anthropological studies. Field research, he argues, is the most crucial tool for understanding societies from within. He conducted his first field research in 1981 on the issue of Chinese nationalities’ policies and development policies in ethnic minority areas among the Yi, one of the largest ethnic minorities in China, in the Liangshan Mountains in Southwestern Sichuan province. Since then he has continuously worked on various aspects of the Yi society such as ethnic entrepreneur and environmental governance, and has been actively involved in creating academic and public awareness for the Yi minority. In 1998 he hosted the “Second International Yi Conference” at the University of Trier, and in 2006 he organized a major exhibition on the history, culture, religion, and society of the Yi at the Duisburg Historical Museum. In 2000/2001 he collected 250,000 Deutsche Mark among several German institutions for establishing a primary school for Yi minority children in Meigu County including a scholarship program.
Throughout the following decades, Heberer continued his dedicated field research, extending it into the areas of behavior of social actors and institutional change and investigating such diverse topics as the development of China’s private sector, rural urbanization and social change, the political and social role of private entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam, the diffusion of intellectual ideas into politics, environmental governance, urban communities, mobilized participation and co-production; administrative reforms; new patterns of governance in rural areas; and the agency of local cadres.
In recent years, he has been concerned with formal and informal political participation and organizational behavior of social groups in China. In the process, he has further developed the sociological concept of “strategic groups” in the context of both local cadres and entrepreneurial groups in China. In addition, he is concerned with social and policy innovations in China, and with critical junctures of authoritarian systems. He is also working on new patterns of political representation and new political representative claims from a comparative perspective, and on social disciplining and civilizing processes in the context of modernization.
Thomas Heberer is also on the editorial board of a number of renowned international academic journals, including the International Journal of Political Science & Diplomacy, The China Quarterly, the Journal of China in Comparative Perspective, the European Journal of East Asian Studies, the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, the Journal of Chinese Governance, the Chinese Political Science Review, the International Quarterly for Asian Studies, the International Journal of Political Science & Diplomacy, the journal 国外理论动态/Foreign Theoretical Trends, etc.). He is co-founder of the “Association of Social Science Research on China” and was for quite some years on the Advisory Board of the Europe-China Academic Network of the European Commission.

Publications (Selection)

Heberer has authored or co-authored more than 42 books and has also edited or co-edited 23 volumes in German, English and Chinese. His articles have been published in many international journals and volumes in a total of ten languages. Among his more recent and major English book publications are:
He also attaches great importance to publishing in Chinese and presenting his work to a wider audience in China.
On the occasion of his 70th birthday in 2017 the renowned Zhejiang University Press published a Chinese collection of Heberer’s major research articles on China, edited by the political scientist Professor Yu Jianxing.
Among his book publications in Chinese are: