
Biography
My scholarship seeks to answer this key question: How do we become moral persons? I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to examine this question, by putting anthropological and psychological theories in conversation, combining ethnographic, experimental and computational methods, and drawing from the broad field of Chinese studies. My work spans multiple geographic regions and historical periods, i.e., contemporary China, Martial-Law era Taiwan, and cross-cultural comparative contexts. Together my research pursues three inter-related themes: 1) moral development in familial and educational settings in contemporary China; 2) Continuity and change in thoughts of morality and education in Chinese communities across time and space; and 3) cross-cultural comparison of socio-moral cognition.
My first monograph, The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (Stanford University Press, 2017), based on fieldwork in Shanghai, it integrates ethnography and experiments to examine preschool children’s moral development under China’s one-child policy and a widely perceived societal “moral crisis.” It was translated into Chinese as part of a popular ethnography series "Mint Experiment" (East China Normal University Press, 2021).
My second monograph, entitled "Unruly" Children (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), traces how rural Han Taiwanese children learn morality at the height of Taiwan's Martial-Law era. It is an unconventional ethnography, a re-analysis of a unique set of historical fieldnotes collected by renowned anthropologists Arthur & Margery Wolf. Combining ethnographic and computational approaches such as NLP and social network analysis, I highlight children's active learning, including learning from and with peers, rather than parenting. Writing through and about fieldnotes, I connect the two themes of this book, learning morality and making ethnography, in light of human social cognition, and invite all of us to take children seriously.
I am a co-investigator of two new, interdisciplinary projects on learning and cultural transmission. One project, funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation, examines children's and youth's truth-seeking and truth-communication behavior in a polarized world, i.e., Northern Ireland. I am leading the Text Analysis strand. Another project, funded by Economic and Social Research Council (UK), examines imitation and knowledge transmission from early childhood to adolescence in Congo, America and Scotland. I am leading field-research on Chinese American children and families in Seattle.
With an anthropology PhD and postdoctoral training in psychology, I have published in journals spanning multiple disciplines, in both English and Chinese. Recently I have become interested in making anthropological knowledge more relevant, not only to other disciplines but also to the people we study, through talking to media, writing for the public, and working as an Associate Editor of American Anthropologist.
Research
Selected Research
- Xu, Jing. 2024. "Commentary: East Asian Educational Migration as Narrative Quests." Global Networks. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12512. Download PDF
- Sui, Z., Wang, Q. & Xu, J. Modeling children’s moral development in postwar Taiwan through naturalistic observations preserved in historical texts. Scientific Reports 14, 9140 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-59985-6
- Xu, Jing. "Unruly" Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village. Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.
- Xu, Jing & Yang Zhan. "Can Anthropologists Get Humor? A Collaborative Experiment on Empathetic Knowing at a Time of Predicaments." American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13980.
- Xu, Jing. "Unruly" Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village. Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.
- Xu, Jing. 2023. Re-discovering "the Child": A Re-interpretation of Arthur & Margery Wolf's Classic Fieldnotes. Sociological Review of China, no.9: 65-88. In Chinese.
- Xu, Jing. 2022. "The Moral Child": Anthropological Perspectives on Moral Development in China, in Ryan Nichols ed., The Routledge International Handbook of Morality, Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior in China. Routledge, pp.193-214.
- Xu, Jing. 2022. "Middle-aged Old Mothers" in China: Childrearing Anxiety, Humor and the Narrative Self. Ethos. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12327
- Xu, Jing. 2022. Learning Morality with Siblings: The Untold Tale of a Mid-Twentieth Century Taiwanese Family. Journal of Chinese History. doi:10.1017/jch.2021.31
- Xu, Jing. 2020. The Mischievous, the Naughty and the Violent in a Taiwanese Village: Peer Aggression Narratives in Arthur P. Wolf's "Child Interview" (1959). Cross-Currents: East Asia Culture and History Review (33). https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-33/xu
- Xu, Jing. 2020. Tattling (Gaozhuang) with Chinese Characteristics: Norm Sensitivity, Moral Anxiety, and the “Genuine Child”. Ethos 48(1): 29-49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/etho.12262
- Xu, Jing. 2019. Learning "Merit" in a Chinese Preschool: Bringing the Anthropological Perspective to Understanding Moral Development. American Anthropologist. doi: 10.1111/aman.13269
- Xu, Jing. 2018.Review on Educating the Chinese Individual: Life in a Rural Boarding School by Mette Halskov Hansen. University of Washington Press. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 24: 646-647.
- Xu, Jing. 2018.The Good Child: How do Culture and Mind Intersect in Moral Development in China? Anthropology News. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2018/06/27/culture-and-mind-in-moral-development-in-china/
- Xu, Jing. 2017. Review on The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan by Andrea Gevurtz Arai. Stanford University Press. Journal of Anthropological Research 73(2): 351-352.
- Xu, Jing. 2017. The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
- Xu, Jing, Saether, L., & Sommerville, J. 2016. Experience Facilitates the Emergence of Sharing Behavior among 7.5 Month-Old Infants. Developmental Psychology 52(11): 1732-1743. Download PDF
- Xu, Jing. 2015. Review on Children, Rights and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens by Orna Naftali. Palgrave Macmillan. The China Journal (74): 219-221.
- Xu, Jing. 2014. Becoming a Moral Child amidst China’s Moral Crisis: Preschool Discourse and Practices of Sharing in Shanghai. Ethos (2): 222-242. (Winner of 2013 Condon Prize in Society for Psychological Anthropology) Download PDF
- An, Mengzhu, Jing Wang, Jing Xu and Wei Ye (equal authorship). Finding Wang Tonghui: The Life & After-life of a Pioneer Female Chinese Anthropologist. Feminist Anthropology. Forthcoming.
- G. W. Skinner. Stevan Harrell & William Lavely eds., Chen, B. trans., Xu, J. review & revise (trans.), Rural China on the Eve of Revolution: Sichuan Fieldnotes, 1949-1950. Zhonghua Shuju. Forthcoming. (In Chinese).(施坚雅著, 郝瑞、雷伟立编,陈波译,许晶审校,《解放前夕的中国乡村:四川田野笔记,1949-1950》,中华书局。)
Courses Taught
Winter 2025
Winter 2024
2023 Winter Quarter Co-Instructor (with Ben Marwick), Special Topics in Social Science and Statistics: "Text as Data."