Peer-reviewed Journal Articles
Informed Inattention: How Political Connections Undermine Judicial Responsiveness in China. (with Zhaowen Guo and Zhaomin Li) Chinese Political Science Review. [Publisher’s Version] [SSRN]
The integration of information and communication technology (ICT) has significantly transformed the interaction between governments and citizens. While past studies have focused on how citizen appeals affect responses from public servants, less attention has been paid to the role of officials' attributes in shaping government responsiveness. This paper explores how political connections influence responsiveness within the Chinese court system. Using a formalized principal-agent model, we argue that connected local judges, who have better information about central authority's task priorities, tend to allocate less effort to routine tasks of lower importance. To test this hypothesis, we constructed a novel database containing biographical information of provincial chief judges in China and their online interactions with citizens from 2014 to 2020. Our empirical analysis shows that politically connected judges are less responsive in routine tasks of responding to citizens. This study offers new insights into how internal political dynamics impact the responsiveness of government institutions.
Working Papers
Domestic Political Risks and Outward FDI in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from China
Existing IPE studies emphasize host-country determinants of FDI, but few studies pay attention to home-country factors. How do home-country political risks affect firm-level decisions on outward FDI (OFDI)? In this paper, I propose that the relationship between home-country political risks and OFDI is time-contingent and conditional on the firm’s political connection. Firms with strong political backgrounds enjoy better property protection and favorable treatment and thus have fewer incentives to make OFDI than their domestic competitors. However, a strong political background will become a political disadvantage during the political purge. The crackdown of politicians will put connected firms under scrutiny by state agencies and make them unable to allocate assets overseas. Using information from publicly listed firms and a generalized difference-in-difference method, assisted by a qualitative case study, the paper provides empirical results that support the above argument.
Social Capital of Business Elites and Pro-Business Reform
What motivates the Chinese authoritarian government to provide public goods for business elites? While some literature depicts state-business relations in China as crony capitalism, I propose that business lobbying through connective action is likely in China and can facilitate the provision of public goods that are universally favorable to the business class. Using prefecture-level administrative licensing centers as a typical pro-business policy, I find that the social capital among business elites does not matter for the initiation of reform, but they help improve the quality of this pro-business public good after the establishment of the administrative licensing center.
Risk-averse Policy Entrepreneurs and Multilevel Agenda Settings in China’s COVID-19 Crisis (with Chao-yo Cheng) under review
How do one-party states respond to crises? Existing studies have extensively examined how elite patronage networks tackle principle-agent problems and improve governance, but less is known about how central and local governments coordinate policymaking during emergencies. Using a text-as-data approach, we analyze over 16,000 Chinese policy documents during the COVID-19 crisis to explore how policy agendas cascade between different levels. We find that central leaders aligned with their provincial allies, while provinces followed unconnected prefectures. We argue that this contrast reflects differing risk preferences. Prefectures are risk-averse to avoid blame, but unconnected ones may take bold moves to outshine their connected counterparts. Meanwhile, provincial leaders allow unconnected prefectures to pursue risky initiatives while shielding their connected allies. These tested measures can then be used to bolster provincial elites' standing with the central leader. Our study highlights how multilevel patronage networks drive policy innovation in an increasingly centralized hegemonic party regime.
Legal Mobilization and Popular Engagement with Courts in China (with Chao-yo Cheng and Chao Ma)
The courts outside advanced democracies are usually viewed as weak and act as an instrument of political control and corruption. Citizens can thus only resort to the streets rather than the courts to voice their grievances. In this paper, we draw on a unique national conjoint experiment (n > 4,000) in China, the largest hegemonic party regime in the world, to explore when the citizens are more likely to resolve their disputes with government agencies through administrative litigation. In the experiment, we consider a wide range of factors such as the plaintiffs’ demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, their political ties with the regime, and their litigation strategies while randomizing our respondents across various case scenarios and different top-down reform initiatives, which were introduced by the Center. Findings reveal that while these reforms reduce certain judicial biases, they inadvertently increase barriers for disadvantaged groups, particularly low-income individuals, who may perceive higher costs and complexities in administrative litigation. The study highlights the dual outcomes of judicial reforms in China, emphasizing the need to consider both the intended and unintended effects on access to justice and fairness in the legal system.
Book Reviews
Book Review: The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China? (by Nicholas R. Lardy). China Review 22, no. 2 (2022): 344-348. [Link]
Publications in Chinese
2024. 促进我国人工智能训练数据的生产与流通（Promoting the Production and Circulation of AI Training Data in China），载《中国科学院院刊》2025年第3期. (已录用，即将刊发)
Selected Work in Progress (tentative titles)
Business Demand for Public Goods
Regime and State Capacity (with Chao-yo Cheng)
Trade War, Information Manipulation, and Authoritarian Support: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in China (with Zelda Hanyu Zhao)
Governing under Uncertainty: Public Discontent and Government Responsiveness in China’s COVID-19 Lockdown (with Zhaowen Guo)