Jianhua Xu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Macau. He is also a fellow in the Centre for Criminology at the University of Hong Kong, and an external member of the Pearl River Delta Research Center, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He worked as a police office in China from 2004 to 2006, and held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008-09 and the Australian National University in 2017. He is currently serving as book review editor for Asian Journal of Criminology.

His research interests include sociology of crime and deviance, crime and victimization related to rural-to-urban migrant workers in China, policing, victimology, and urban sociology. He has published four (including three single-authored and one first-authored) articles in one of the top criminology journals The British Journal of Criminology. His publications have also appeared in other top criminology journals such as Theoretical Criminology and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, among others. Since 2013, Jianhua has successfully applied for over five million MOP (USD 620,000.00) funding as a principal investigator and another over four million MOP (USD 500,000.00) as a co-investigator on various research projects.

Jianhua is currently working on several projects including (1) China’s para-police chengguan, (2) the production of crime data in China; (3) the problem of missing children (拐賣兒童) in China; and (4) crime and policing banners/posters in China.