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 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 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 CC1.
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.
Zhu, Fangsheng, and Jiaming Xue. “The Inclusion Paradox: Why Inclusive Space Excludes Migrant Children, and Vice Versa.” Chinese Education & Society, vol. 57, nos. 1–2, 2024, pp. 121–40.