John Osburg is a Fellow on Chinese Society at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. His book, Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality among China’s New Rich (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2013), examines elite state-business networks and documents the changing values, lifestyles, and consumption habits of China’s new rich and middle classes. In 2018, he was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to support research examining the emergence of new forms of spirituality and religious practice among China’s middle class. Currently, he is completing a book tentatively titled Consuming Belief: Tibetan Buddhism and the Search for Meaning in Urban China. He has conducted several years of ethnographic research in urban China and published articles on topics including masculinity, consumer culture, political corruption, and Chinese state capitalism. 

John received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow in Chinese Studies at Stanford University. While conducting his field research in China, he enjoyed a brief stint as the cohost of a variety show on a provincial television station.