Cheris Chan received her PhD in sociology from Northwestern University. Before joining HKU, she was an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. She was also a fellow at the Summer Institute on Economy and Society in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a recipient of a global fellowship from the International Institute at UCLA.

Her writings have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Theory and Society, Social Psychology Quarterly, International Sociology, China Quarterly, and Modern China among others. She has won a number of article and book awards, such as Best Scholarly Publication by an International Scholar Award, Best Scholarly Article Award, Best Book on Globalization Award, and Book Award for books in Asian Studies; and also received Honorable Mentions from the Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Scholarship Award and Mary Douglas Best Book. She was also awarded the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship by the Research Grant Council in Hong Kong in recognition of her outstanding scholarship.

Chan’s award-winning book, Marketing Death: Culture and the Making of a Life Insurance Market in China, was based on extensive ethnographic research. In this book, Chan analyzed the role of culture in shaping the trajectory and features of a new market. She detailed how the Chinese cultural taboo on discussing premature death affected the organizational strategies of transnational and domestic life insurance firms. This project was subsequently expanded to include Hong Kong and Taiwan’s markets for a comparative analysis, examining how culture and the local state shaped transnational corporations’ business strategies together.

Her second large project is on hospital care and doctor–patient relationships in urban China. She examined the cultural and institutional underpinnings of trust between doctors and patients, and published articles on the moral economy of informal payment and social network in gaining access to hospital care. She has been writing about the tension between doctors and patients, and comparing their informal exchanges in China and Taiwan.

Chan’s current project, entitled “Quantifying Morality: Socio-Cultural Implications of the Social Credit System in China,” investigates how socially desirable behaviors are defined, classified, evaluated, and negotiated in urban and rural China. It documents the design and implementation of the Chinese social credit system, and analyzes the influence of big data and algorithms as well as the classification practices on individuals and local communities.

Chan served as Editor of Economic Sociology: Perspectives and Conversations, published by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, in 2021-22; and co-Editor of Special Issue on Ethnography in the age of Covid-19, published in Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa (Italian journal of Ethnography and Qualitative Research) in 2020.