Hello! Welcome to my website.
I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Public and International Affairs at the City University of Hong Kong. In 2025–2027, I am a non-residential Fellow at the Governance and Local Development Institute (Cornell University and University of Gothenburg). My research focuses on Chinese politics, political economy, and political behavior in authoritarian systems. My work on China speaks to key debates on uneven socioeconomic structures, state capacity, and distributive conflict in both domestic and international politics of China and other autocratic states.
My primary research interests are the political economy of development, political behavior in authoritarian regimes, and the political implications of these dynamics for domestic and international politics. In particular, I am interested in how authoritarian regimes sustain economic reform and liberalization when they upset entrenched distributions of resources and power and threaten elite interests. My book manuscript explores this question in the context of China’s distributional politics of economic reform. My publications in peer-reviewed journals explore this question from three integrated perspectives: elite management, bureaucratic implementation, and public opinion management. In addition, my study seeks to connect China’s domestic politics to its international behaviour and strategies, from the BRI to its climate change commitments. My research on this agenda has received the honorable mention for the Nils Petter Gleditsch Article of the Year Award for the Journal of Peace Research in 2024.
My research has been funded by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong. Some of my works have appeared, or will soon appear, in China Quarterly, Democratization, Environmental Politics, Governance, Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and others.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the Department of Political Science at Maxwell School, Syracuse University. Before Syracuse, I also studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science (MSc) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University (BBA).
Please find my C.V. here.