Professor Yu Xie is involved in several projects concerned with the dramatic social and economic changes that have been taking place in China since the inception of the economic reform in 1978. Collaborating with Professor Pan Zhongdang at the Chinese University in Hong Kong and Dr. Yu Xuejun at the China Population Information and Research Center in Beijing, Yu Xie conducted a survey of about 1000 families in three Chinese cities: Wuhan, Shanghai, and Xi'an. The three cities were chosen to reflect varying degrees of market penetration, with Shanghai the most marketized, Xi'an the least marketized, and Wuhan in between. The fieldwork was conducted in summer 1999.  Detailed information was collected about the respondents' residence history, education history, work history, fertility history, health status, consumption, and family support. Yu Xie, his Chinese collaborators, and other Michigan researchers will be using data from the survey for further analyses in the coming years.  This research will document how the economic reform has influenced the economic, social, family, and health well-being of urban Chinese, with an heightened emphasis on the impact of marketization on social inequality and family relationships. 

China Population Information and Research Center, established in 1980, is the research arm of the State Commission of Family Planning in the People's Republic of China.  It has a staff of 88, including 60 researchers with professional training in such diverse fields as demography, economics, sociology, statistics, medicine, and computing science.  It conducts academic as well as policy research, collect population-related information, archive and distribute electronic data, provide counseling to decision makers, and collaborate with scholars from abroad.  It also has close contacts with parallel research organizations under the State Commission of Family Planning at the provincial/ municipal level.  In the past, it has successfully conducted a number of large-scale demographic surveys.  Its web site is: http://www.cpirc.org.cn/.