I am currently in a five year Postdoctoral Research Fellow position at the China Research Centre of Australia's University of Technology, Sydney, researching the politics of the Chinese news media.
I received my Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley in May 2010, with concentrations in comparative politics, East Asian politics, and public organizations. My book manuscript, "Pressing Back: The Struggle for Control over China's Journalists," investigates journalistic resistance to government demands and censorship in China.
I became interested in Chinese politics after taking Mandarin Chinese as an undergraduate (Amherst College, 2002) and spending a semester abroad in Beijing. The Chinese media is a microcosm for many of the broader changes in Chinese society, representing a fascinating and contradictory blend of commercialization and state oversight, resistance and censorship.
From 2008-2009 I was a visiting scholar at Peking University funded by a Fulbright-Hays fellowship to conduct field research on Chinese journalists. While there, I interviewed dozens of reporters, editors, academics and others in an effort to understand the changing contexts of the Chinese media. This fieldwork complements an extensive (15.4 million word) computer content analysis I conducted on 26 Chinese newspapers in an effort to look at systemic factors like region and market competition that affect newspaper content.
I am also involved in evaluating how public professionals (mainly journalists and lawyers) control their own behavior (with Rachel E. Stern, article forthcoming 2012 in Comparative Political Studies), in investigating the curious politics of time zones (with Bartholomew Watson, article under revision), and in looking at the politics and mechanics of Chinese micro-blogging.
When not working, I enjoy watching movies and otherwise shamefully staying indoors, despite the natural beauty and absurdly nice weather of Sydney, Australia.
Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have at: jonathan [dot] hassid [at] uts [dot] edu [dot] au.