The Dutch sociologist Eric C. Hendriks conducts a Thyssen-funded postdoctoral research of place of the Chinese regime in globalized world society. Previously he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Sociology Department of Peking University.

Hendriks studied philosophy, history, and sociology at University College Utrecht, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Chicago. His Ph.D. dissertation, which was supervised by Hartmut Wessler (Mannheim) and Rodney Benson (NYU), compared the role of American-style self-help advice industry in China and Germany so as to study the public interaction between “popular culture” and state institutions under different regime types. It earned a summa cum laude and was published by Brill under the title: Life Advice from Below: The Public Role of Self-Help Coaches in Germany and China.

In a theory paper in Communication Theory, Hendriks contradistinguishes the dynamics of charismatic authority and celebrity culture.

At Amsterdam University College, Hendriks lectured on the inability of politics to steer the whole of society in a controlled manner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XavUJnv12yc

Hendriks regularly writes essays, op-eds, and reports for newspapers and magazines, discussing a wide range of political and cultural topics. He has published essays in Times Higher Education, Quillette, the Taipei Times, American Affairs, and literary magazine Quadrant. Read his essay on Xi Jinping and the China model: https://quillette.com/2018/04/10/china-model-failing/

In Dutch, he has published in newspapers such as the NRC, the Volkskrant, De Kanttekening, Elsevier, and Doorbraak.be. Here in an overview of his NRC contributions: https://goo.gl/RDPTDi For an overview of his public intellectual engagement in the Netherlands, see the following newspaper interview (in Dutch): https://dekanttekening.nl/interview/liberale-democratie-kan-moeilijk-aarden-buiten-de-westerse-wereld/ Or watch this television interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLC2bYVmq8