Bob

About the blogger:
Bob is a social scientist working on China rather than a sinologist. His research includes political participation, village and urban governance, rural welfare reform and political iconography. The State of China Atlas was published in August and he is writing a book, ‘Contemporary China’. He is also a collector!

His schooling was in Brighton. But hey, wait a minute - Brighton, New York State, not the Brighton where he now lives. After receiving his first two degrees in the USA, he was awarded a one-year studentship at Manchester University.

He has taught at the University of the West Indies, Hull University, Smith College, Massachusetts, The Chinese Peoples' University and Sussex University since 1972. He first went to China in 1975, just before the end of the Cultural Revolution and met Michael Norton on an overland tour to China in 1983.

Although formally retired, he still hold positions at Sussex and at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Westminster University. He is also a publisher with Myriad Editions which produces atlases, online mapping and City Books.

One of his strongest motivations to keep going is that it is not difficult to make a difference.

His reason for joining the learning journey is to get a comparative on India's and China's development. Since China's approach is top-down and India's is bottom-up, he argues that China has much to learn from India and more specifically from Youth Development Banks.

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