Shilin Jia

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Computational Social Science

Shilin has spent years analyzing job transfers of communist party elites in China. It is a project that he built up from scratch by using machines to code party elites’ CVs. His goal is to understand how the party state had evolved through division of labor and circulation of its elite members. He is also working on a computational content analysis project tracking ideological changes in the full text of 60 years of the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China. The aim of that project is to understand how incompatible ideas in an ideological system can be gradually reconciled and how the concept of the “market” was unfettered in that process. More recently, he has been working on building word-embedding models based on multiple languages of Google N-grams and studying identity formation across language communities.

sjia@uchicago.edu | CV | Personal Website

Research Interests

Organization, Ideology, Culture, Computational Method

Working Papers

(Co-authored with Benjamin Rhor) Vacancy Chain as Strategy: Inter-Administration Mobility of Political Elites in Reform China

(Co-authored with Linzhuo Li) New wine in old bottles: Ideological transformation and rhetorical creation of market in China’s People’s Daily, 1946 – 2003.