Bing Xu is Associate Professor in the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2006-) and Visiting Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (August 1, 2009 - July 31, 2010). He received his B. A. of Psychology (1989) from Beijing Normal University, M. A. of Social Psychology (1996) and Ph.D. of Sociology (2003) from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has been on the editorial board of the Chinese journals Social Theory and Chinese Social Psychological Review.
He is interested in cultural psychology and cultural sociology, which overlap each other from the hermeneutical approach he advocates. He has authored more than twenty papers in top Chinese journals in the fields of sociology, social psychology and social theory on the theoretical subjects of the self-aware Chinese psychology and sociology, the hermeneutical approach in social sciences, the Chinese traditional concept of the self, the qingli (the emotional reason) in Chinese traditional social context and the empirical subjects of the values of contemporary Chinese college students, the needs of the Chinese internet users, the inner motive and social pattern of contemporary Chinese people’s lying, etc.. His collection The Hermeneutical Approach between Psychology and Sociology has been sent into the process of the application and examination of the Press of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He recently edited and wrote a long introduction for the fifth volume of Chinese Social Psychological Review, which focuses on cultural psychology and will be published within 2010. He is currently working on framework for his empirical study—A “deep description” of the identity crisis of the contemporary Chinese.