My research focuses on China’s efforts to promote and govern the relationship between economic development on the one hand and stability and security on the other. It is also about the related challenges and contradictions China faces both at home and abroad.

My research background and interests are a blend of comparative and international political economy together with a focus on country and region-specific politics and economics. My longstanding academic interest has been in the political economy of development in Asia, especially China, and Latin America. I was originally exposed to those topics and regions as an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound, where I studied comparative politics and international economics (and a combination of them both in UPS’s newly created International Political Economy program). I then went on to study Chinese and Latin American political economy at Johns Hopkins SAIS before eventually focusing on the governance of China’s informal economy for my PhD thesis at Cornell. In the case of my original research on China, this meant a focus on China’s street-level governance of the informal economy, including the state’s often-quixotic efforts to maintain a balance between development and stability via the infamous chengguan.

After joining the International Relations (IR) Department at Tsinghua University in 2008, and then becoming a scholar with the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in 2011, I began to focus more on China’s foreign economic and political relations with developing countries. In my teaching and research I focused on the political economy of China’s burgeoning trade, investment and financial ties with Latin America and Southeast Asia, including countries like Venezuela and Myanmar. As part of that research, I also explored how Chinese officials, business people and scholars were attempting to evaluate and manage political risk in countries experiencing economic or political crisis. Through that research, I maintained a focus on how China’s domestic political economy was crucial to understanding many aspects of its foreign policy, especially with countries in the “Global South”.

After moving from China to Europe in 2017, I continued to work on China’s relations with developing countries in Asia and Latin America, but I also began to do more research on China’s economic influence in Europe. I did field research on the Chinese-sponsored railway project in Hungary and Serbia and wrote reports for a number of European research institutions about issues ranging from new EU Indo-Pacific strategies to how Europe was being impacted by growing US-China rivalry.

Given expanding US-China distrust in economic interdependence, my recent focus has been on how countries and firms in East and Southeast Asia are creatively responding to concerns about “economic security” and resilience”. As part of this research, I have a project connecting my previous work on development and stability to how China is attempting to rebalance the relationship between economic prosperity and security goals, including in relations with the Global South.