The Lee-Campbell Research Group studies the social and demographic history of China from the 18th century to the present by the construction, analysis, and dissemination of large datasets based on large volumes of primary sources. Our main data projects, summarized on our projects page and described in detail on individual project pages, include 1) the prize winning China Multi-Generational Panel Datasets CMGPD, 2) the China University Student Datasets CUSD, 3) the prize winning China Government Employee Dataset CGED-Qing and the CGED-ROC, 4) the China Rural Revolution Datasets CRRD-LR and CRRD-SQ, and 5) the China Professional Occupation Datasets CPOD. For a complete history of these projects, going back more than four decades, please see the 2020 retrospective by James Lee and Cameron Campbell in Historical Life Course Studies.

Group members publications include five prize-winning or CHOICE award books published by Harvard University Press, 北京三联出版社, MIT Press, and Stanford University Press and articles in major Chinese and English-language journals, including American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, China Quarterly, Chinese Sociological Review, Demography, Evolution and Human Behavior, Journal of Asian Studies, and Social Science and Medicine. Our publications page lists all of our books and articles.

We have publicly released some of our data. In 2010 and 2014, we publicly released 3 million longitudinally linked triennial / annual records for 368 thousand unique individuals from the China Multigenerational Panel Database-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN) and China Multigenerational Panel Database-Shuangcheng (CMGPD-SC), through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Starting in 2019, we have also publicly released records for officials who served 1760-1798, 1850-1864 and 1900-1912 from the China Government Employee Database – Qing (CGED-Q).

We have shared our experiences in historical dataset construction, data analysis, and data analytic teaching in methodological articles published in such journals as 《历史研究》 (Historical Research), 《社会》 (Society), 《文史哲》 (Literature, History, Philosophy), and 《清华大学学报》 (Journal of Tsinghua University), Journal of Chinese History, and Historical Life Course Studies.

We have also summarized key research findings in an online course: Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach.

For further information about our activities, please consult

• our people pages for members’ profiles including institutional affiliations, honors, research projects, and email addresses
• our project pages for information on each project’s principal co-investigators and collaborators, background, history, funding, research output, user guides, and data access
• our publication page for a list of 80 academic publications by group members since 2010 including links to 12 books authored or co-authored by group members
• our prize page for a list of 17 prize winning or equivalent articles, books, papers, and projects
• our news and update page