His research interests include Chinese nationalism, ethnic relations, and ethnic policy and ethnic identity articulation on the Chinese Internet. He is the author of Ethnic Policy in China: Is Reform Inevitable? (East-West Center, 2013) and Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and co-editor (with Chen Yangbin) of Minority Education in China: Balancing Unity and Diversity in an Era of Critical Pluralism (Hong Kong University Press, 2014) and (with Thomas Mullaney, Stéphane Gros, and Eric Vanden Bussche), Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and Identity of China’s Majority (University of California Press, 2012). His work has also appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, The China Journal, The China Quarterly, Modern China, and other publications.