Families are often thought of as private spaces of care, support, and everyday life. But they are also one of the most important places where inequality begins, deepens, and is passed on. For Xiaojie Shen, a new postdoctoral fellow at the HKU Stone Centre, this connection between family life and inequality lies at the heart of his work.
Xiaojie received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Peking University, where he was affiliated with the Center for Social Research, Guanghua School of Management, and earned his B.A. in Public Affairs Management from Renmin University of China. His research focuses on family demography and social stratification, with particular attention to how family behaviors shape and reproduce inequality over the life course.
His work has appeared in China Population and Development Studies, Population Research (Chinese), and Chinese Journal of Population Science (Chinese), among other outlets.
In this interview, Xiaojie shares what drives his research, why family life is central to understanding inequality, and what he hopes to uncover in the years ahead.
In plain language, what’s the core question driving your current research on inequality?
My research is about the relationship between families and inequality. I study how decisions such as getting married, having children, and different ways of organising family life shape people’s socioeconomic outcomes. At the same time, I examine how socioeconomic inequality influences these family decisions and people’s opportunities later in life. Ultimately, I hope to understand how families and inequality shape one another across the life course.
What personal, academic, or professional experience first sparked your interest in this specific area?
I grew up in a large network of relatives, where I observed considerable diversity in wealth and living conditions across different families. Seeing those inequalities from an early age made me curious about why some families accumulated advantages while others struggled. Later, studying demography and sociology at Renmin University gave me the theoretical perspectives and methodological tools to investigate these questions more systematically. I am especially grateful to my PhD advisors, Professor Hao Dong and Professor Yu Xie, who inspired me to study family demography and social inequality through rigorous empirical research.
The Business School and Social Sciences look at problems differently. What unique method, dataset, or theoretical approach do you bring to your work?
I bring a sociological and demographic perspective to the study of inequality, with a particular focus on how family dynamics, population processes, and social institutions shape socioeconomic outcomes across the life course. Depending on the research question, I draw on a wide range of data sources, including population census data, national time-use data, and social surveys such as the CFPS, CGSS, PSID, and NLSY. Looking ahead, I hope to incorporate computational methods and emerging data sources to explore aspects of inequality that are difficult to capture with traditional approaches.
If you had unlimited resources, what is the one inequality puzzle you would most want to solve?
I would like to understand how wealth is built, maintained, and transmitted across generations. As wealth differences between families continue to grow, we still know relatively little about how these differences emerge and accumulate over multiple generations. With unlimited resources, I would build multigenerational longitudinal data to better understand these long-term processes. Of course, that would probably take decades—but I think it would be worth the wait.