His research projects have centered on transnational religious and trading networks, church-state relations, state-business relations, and the religious-economic dynamics of Chinese urban life. After graduating from Peking University with a degree in sociology, he was trained as a sociologist of religion at Fordham University and then did his PhD in anthropology at the Australian National University. He is author of Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou (Stanford UP, 2010) and coeditor of Religion and Mobility in a Globalizing Asia: New Ethnographic Explorations (Routledge, 2013) and Chinese Religions Going Global (Brill, forthcoming).