Christian Sorace is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colorado College. His work is grounded in the intersection of comparative politics, political theory, and aesthetics. His recent book Shaken Authority: China's Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell University Press, 2017) argues that the post-earthquake reconstruction was intended to be a showcase of the Communist Party's benevolence, glory, state capacity, economic strength, and urban-rural development models. Sorace analyses how Communist Party discourse and ideology provide the shaken, yet sturdy, bulwarks of political legitimacy in China. At the same time, he examines from a bottom-up perspective, how the reconstruction plans often failed to address the concrete and particular needs of the earthquake survivors.
Sorace is now focused on the Mongolian steppe, and is currently researching urbanization patterns in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and several localities in China's Inner Mongolia. He speaks Chinese fluently and Mongolian at an intermediate level.
His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Critical Inquiry, Telos, and Journal of Contemporary Asia. He is also the editor of the Arts section of a new open-access quarterly called Made in China.
Courses he teaches include Politics of China, Conduct of China's Foreign Policy, Utopia and Dystopia, Language and Power, Power and Everyday Life, and Introduction to Comparative Politics.
Previously, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University's Australian Centre on China in the World (ANU-CIW), obtained a PhD in Government from the University of Texas, Austin, MA from the University of Chicago, and BA from Trinity College (Hartford, CT).
