Governing China

The Governing China cluster examines how public authority is organized, exercised, contested, and communicated in contemporary China. Members study state institutions, public administration, law, policy design and implementation, state-society relations, education and social policy, environmental governance in China.

Cluster Lead

Jiahua Yue

Jiahua Yue is an Assistant Professor of political science at Duke Kunshan University. His research focus is international political economy, comparative international development, and Chinese politics. He is also interested in applied computation methods in social science, such as text analysis and image processing tools. His work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, World Development, among others. He teaches a wide range of topics on international conflict, trade and foreign investment, public opinion, and authoritarian politics.

Cluster Co-Lead

Valerie Li

Valerie Li is an Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at Duke Kunshan University. Her research brings computational methods, including text-as-data, network analysis, and statistical modeling, to the study of politics and society in China. Substantively, she uses large-scale data to examine how Chinese citizens engage with government in everyday life and what these interactions reveal about state responsiveness, political behavior, and quasi-democratic institutions under authoritarian rule. At DKU, she teaches computational and statistical methods.

Cluster Faculty Members

Coraline Goron

Coraline Goron is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy, Duke Kunshan University. Dr. Coraline Goron obtained a double Ph.D. degree in Political Science from the University of Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles under the aegis of the Erasmus Mundus GEM program. Before joining DKU, Coraline was a postdoctoral research fellow funded by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation at the University of Oxford China Centre.

Fangsheng Zhu

Fangsheng uses mixed methods to study the social, political, and technological contexts of education. His current research follows three questions: Why are educational inequality and intensity so difficult to reduce? How does technology change the organizational forms of education? How do families choose joint-venture universities? At DKU, he teaches courses on research methods, comparative education, policy analysis, and social theory.

Junius Brown

Junius Brown is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Economy at DKU. His research, however, lies within the subfield of comparative politics, and he received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His current research project draws on a mixed-methods toolkit, including survey data and content analysis of online text, to study citizen-state interactions on Chinese local government message boards. He currently teaches courses on international political economy, development, and institutions, as well as Common Core/GChina 101.

Yanran Yang

Yanran Yang is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability Studies. Her research addresses energy decarbonization, public health communication, and medical decision making, with a focus on how people understand and integrate uncertain evidence and how communication can support informed decisions and policymaking. At DKU, she teaches courses in environmental science and behavioral science.

Adjunct Faculty

Jennifer L. Turner

Jennifer Turner is a Visiting Professor of public policy, teaching a Climate Communication Writing Course for the past two years. She obtained a joint degree in Environmental Policy and Comparative Politics at Indiana University. She has been leading China energy, environment and climate research and convenings in Washington DC think tanks for 26 years. Her current research projects focus on China's clean energy and critical mineral investments in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.