Andrew G. Walder (born 1953) is an American political sociologist specializing in the study of Chinese society.
[3] He received his PhD in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981 and taught at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 1987, where he headed the MA Program on Regional Studies-East Asia for several years.
From 1996 to 2006, as a member of the Hong Kong Government's Research Grants Council, he chaired its Panel on the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Business Studies.
[4] Academic Dongping Han critiques Walder's claim that Mao's pronouncements during the Cultural Revolution were extremely ambiguous, particularly Walder's claim, "It takes an extraordinary amount of energy and imagination to figure out precisely what Mao really meant by such ideas as 'the restoration of capitalism' or 'newly arisen bourgeoise.
'"[5] Han writes even illiterate Chinese did not find the terms hard to grasp, noting that in his fieldwork interviews in Jimo county farmers readily understood "restoration of capitalism" to mean loss of the gains from land reform and a return to old social ways and that they understood "newly arisen bourgeoisie" to mean party leaders who did not work.