Xu Yong is Professor at Central China Normal University who currently serves as Chief of its Political Science Department. He has been devoted to the research of rural China and Chinese politics and has had a significant influence on the research on the relationship between the state and the country based on field study. His representative works include Unbalanced Chinese Politics: A Comparison of City and Country (1992), Villager Autonomy in Rural China (1997) and The State: In the Change of Social Relations (Volume I and II) (2020).