[5][6] Oi's dissertation committee was co-chaired by Allen S. Whiting and Michel Oksenberg, and the other members were Samuel Barnes, Robert Dernberger, Albert Feuerwerker, and Martin King Whyte.
[5] She became the William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics in 2001, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in 2006.
State and Peasant in Contemporary China arose from Oi's PhD dissertation at the University of Michigan,[7] combining research interviews and field work to study the interaction between peasant leaders and state officials, and in particular the relationship between power at the level of villages and higher regional powers.
[8] Summarizing Oi's findings, Edward Friedman wrote that she "concludes that the form of politics during China's imperial era, republican period, Maoist rule, and the present post-Mao reforms remained traditional, that is, personalistic, based on clientalistic relations," and that "Oi locates the cause of the traditionalistic continuity not in culture but in structural circumstances".
[11] Oi also co-authored the 2013 book Syncretism: The Politics of Economic Restructuring and System Reform in Japan with Kenji E. Kushida and Kay Shimizu.