Studying the Chinese City from the Ground Up
Neighborhoods, Households, and Urban Social Change through Large-Scale Metropolitan Surveys
Guest Editors: Xiaogang Wu, Zhuoni Zhang and Jia Miao
Overview
China’s four decades of rapid urbanization have reshaped the social structure and social fabric of its cities, offering social scientists a rare opportunity to observe large-scale social change as it unfolds. Yet the empirical infrastructure for studying that change has lagged behind. Nationally representative surveys, for all their value, disperse their samples too thinly to capture intra-city heterogeneity, residential segregation, migrant integration, or grassroots governance; the ethnographic community studies that long anchored Chinese urban sociology, in turn, deliver interpretive depth at the cost of comparability and cumulative knowledge.
This special issue invites contributions built on a new generation of urban data designed to close that gap. Organized around the framework of Community Study 2.0 (Wu 2024), a coordinated program of large-scale, multilevel, longitudinal household surveys treats the single metropolis as an analytical vantage point—examined in depth and then extended through cross-city comparison. Three flagship surveys exemplify the approach: the Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics (HKPSSD), the Shanghai Urban Neighborhood Survey (SUNS), and the Guangzhou Metropolitan Panel Survey (GPS). Together they offer harmonized sampling designs and shared questionnaire cores across three cities with markedly different institutional, political, and cultural contexts—Hong Kong as an internationally oriented, free-market metropolis; Shanghai as a strongly state-led megacity; and Guangzhou at the intermediate juncture of market and state.
Scope of the Issue
We welcome empirical papers that draw on any one of these surveys—HKPSSD, SUNS, or GPS—on its own. A single-city study grounded in one of these datasets is fully within scope; cross-city comparison is encouraged where the data allow, but is not a requirement for submission. Papers that link survey data to census records, administrative data, or spatial “big data” (e.g., street-view imagery, geocoded points of interest) are especially welcome, as are methodological and data-focused contributions.
The Data Resources
Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics (HKPSSD)
A city-wide, representative household panel spanning a full decade (2011–2021) across five waves. Phase I established a 2011 baseline of 3,214 households (7,218 adults and 958 children), sustained through subsequent waves and refreshment samples. Phase II added Waves 4 and 5, a second refreshment sample, a neighborhood and collective-efficacy module, geocoded spatial linkage, an elderly module, expanded political and list-experiment modules, and a COVID-era mixed-mode pivot to online and telephone collection. The panel captures family, inequality, intergenerational mobility, aging, identity, and political attitudes across a decade of consequential social and political change.
Shanghai Urban Neighborhood Survey (SUNS)
The first large-scale household panel survey in China focused on a single megacity, built to collect linked data at three levels—neighborhood, household, and individual. Its Household Survey interviewed 5,102 households (8,629 adults, 1,880 children) in 2017 and re-interviewed the panel in 2019; a Community Survey covering 537 residents’/villagers’ committees documents grassroots governance; and a Neighborhood Observation program (2018 and 2024) provides longitudinal, photograph-rich records of the physical and social environment. SUNS is distinctive for its T-roster design capturing full intra-household relationships, its stratified PPS sampling on neighborhood socioeconomic status and migrant share, and an embedded module of six randomized survey experiments.
Guangzhou Metropolitan Panel Survey (GPS)
The third pillar of the program, extending the harmonized design to Guangzhou and including a dedicated Greater Bay Area module. Together with HKPSSD and SUNS, GPS completes a coordinated platform whose overlapping questionnaire cores—household composition, housing, employment, education, health, migration, neighborhood, and the elderly module—support cumulative and, where desired, comparative analysis across the three metropolises.
Themes and Topics
We invite theoretically motivated, methodologically rigorous empirical papers on—but not limited to—the following themes. Contributions grounded in a single city are welcome under every theme.
- Neighborhood effects, collective efficacy, and well-being. Social cohesion and informal social control in the Chinese institutional context; neighborhood socioeconomic status and residents’ physical and mental health; the buffering role of community ties under stress, aging, and public-health crises.
- Housing, stratification, and social mobility. Homeownership and its social, psychological, and political consequences; housing regimes and inequality; the use of institutional randomization (e.g., Hong Kong’s Home Ownership Scheme lottery) for causal identification of structural effects.
- Migration/immigration, hukou, identity, and social integration. Residential clustering and social distance; the effect of hukou and residence-permit gradients on migrants’ local identity; intergenerational and cross-city differences in attitudes toward migrants and immigrants.
- Grassroots governance, participation, and the local state. Residents’/villagers’ committees as nodes straddling state and society; governance performance and “power-space”; Party-member participation and the interplay of administrative incorporation and community autonomy.
- Political attitudes, public opinion, and social movements. The dynamics of political attitudes amid social mobilization and crisis; spatial proximity to protest and its attitudinal consequences; measurement of sensitive attitudes through list experiments and related designs.
- Population aging, family, and eldercare. Living arrangements, caregiving, and intergenerational support; the capacity of neighborhoods to serve as carriers of eldercare; later-life health and social participation under demographic transition.
- Methodological and data innovations. Multilevel panel design; survey experiments and anchoring vignettes embedded in household surveys; linkage of survey data with census, administrative, and spatial big-data sources; measurement harmonization and item comparability across cities.
- Comparative urban research. Cross-city analyses that test the general applicability and local specificity of social mechanisms across Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Guangzhou; conceptual and methodological contributions to the Community Study 2.0 agenda.
Types of Submissions
- Original empirical articles using one or more of the surveys.
- Comparative articles that exploit harmonized measures across two or three cities.
- Methodological and data papers on design, measurement, data linkage, or replication.
Submission Timeline
The following dates are proposed and should be confirmed with the journal editorial office.
Abstract submission (300–500 words)……………………………………………………………………. [Oct 2, 2026]
Invitation to submit full manuscripts…………………………………………………………………… [Oct 16, 2026]
Full manuscript deadline……………………………………………………………………………………. [Jan 15 2027]
Peer review and revision……………………………………………………………………………….. [Jan–April, 2027]
Anticipated publication…………………………………………………………………………………… [Summer 2027]
Submission Guidelines
Prospective authors are invited to submit an extended abstract of 300–500 words, stating the research question, the dataset(s) used, the analytic strategy, and the expected contribution, to the Guest Editors by the abstract deadline above. Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full manuscripts through the journal’s online system for peer review. All submissions should follow the Chinese Sociological Review author guidelines. Invitation to submit a full manuscript does not guarantee acceptance; all papers undergo the journal’s standard peer review. Papers written in Chinese will be simultaneously considered in the Journal of Cities and Society 《城市与社会学刊》(ISSN 2957-4099 [print], ISSN 2958-8006 [online]).
Data Access
Information on data access, codebooks, and questionnaire instruments is available by application through the project team’s website (www.nyucaser.com). For the first four waves of the HKPSSD, data files are released in Stata format with codebooks and bilingual questionnaire instruments, under a signed data-use agreement. The questionnaires for SUNS and GPS are also available on the website. However, the two datasets have not yet been fully released, and researchers must obtain data-use authorization from the respective data management teams.
Contact
Please direct abstracts and inquiries to the Guest Editors, specialcsr@gmail.com.
Key references:
Wu, X. (2016). A decade of Hong Kong panel data (2011–2021): HKPSSD Phase II within a comparative Chinese Urban Research Program. Chinese Sociological Review https://doi.org/10.1080/21620555.2026.2704485
吴晓刚 2025上海都市社区调查：设计理念、内容特色与初步发现《城市与社会学刊》4（02）：1-30 https://caser.shanghai.nyu.edu/journal-of-cities-and-society/#flipbook-df_17871/1/
张卓妮、叶一舟.2025. 广州都市动态调查：研究设计和初步发现 [J]. 城市与社会学刊 （01）：26-52
https://caser.shanghai.nyu.edu/journal-of-cities-and-society/#flipbook-df_16972/3/