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.
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.
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.
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 is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Duke Kunshan University. Fangsheng Zhu is a sociologist and studies education, particularly the interactions between families, education providers and governments. His research topics include parenting, school admissions and education policies. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include public policy, methods and education.
Junius Brown is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Duke Kunshan University, though his research primarily relates to topics in political science. Prior to receiving his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, he spent two years in Cornell’s Sociology PhD program. His research interests include state-society interaction, the responsiveness of street-level bureaucrats, law and society, and political psychology. At DKU he teaches courses on international political economy, development, and institutions.
Yanran Yang is a Assistant Professor of Sustainability Studies at Duke Kunshan University. Yang's research applies behavioral decision science to characterizing and communicating scientific results to inform risk-related decisions. More recently, she has been working on risk communication to better inform public health decisions, while her previous research focused on risk communication on advanced energy technologies. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include health communication and decision making. She received her Ph.D. degree (2017-21) from the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also served as a postdoctoral research associate (2022). She received her M.S. in nuclear engineering and B.A. in English literature and journalism from Tsinghua University.