Expertise:
Bureaucracy, Institutions, Leninist Party Systems, Policy Making and Implementation, US-China Relations
Prof. Andrew Mertha is the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies since 2018 and Vice Dean of the SAIS Faculty and International Research Cooperation 2020-2021. He has spent the past quarter century examining and analyzing Chinese bureaucratic institutions that are often invisible to observers but play an outsized role in politics, economics, technological development, and societal responsiveness of Beijing, including interactions between the national bureaucracies and their local counterparts, and, most recently, the role of the Chinese Communist Party in colonizing these hitherto government bodies.
Prior to his appointment at SAIS, he was a professor of Government at Cornell University (2008-2018) and an assistant professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis (2001-2008).
Mertha has written four monographs, The Politics of Piracy: Intellectual Property in Contemporary China (Cornell University Press, 2005), China’s Water Warriors: Citizen Action and Policy Change (Cornell University Press, 2008), and Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (Cornell University Press, 2014). His most recent book, Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970-1997, will be published by Cornell University Press as an open-access publication in May 2025.
His articles have appeared in The China Quarterly, Comparative Politics, International Organization, Issues & Studies, CrossCurrents, and Orbis. He has also contributed chapters to several edited volumes. His own edited volume, May Ebihara’s Svay: A Cambodian Village, with an Introduction by Judy Ledgerwood (Cornell University Press/Cornell Southeast Asia Program Press) was published in 2018 with a Khmer translation by the Center for Khmer Studies published in 2024.
Mertha has been quoted in the New York Times, Bloomberg News, the South China Morning Post, National Public Radio, Axios, and other venues.
His current China research project looks at the bureaucratic politics of rectification (整风) from the 1950s up to the present day.
Expertise:
Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Policy Making and Implementation, Development, Globalization, State-Business Relations, Industry Policy
Ling Chen is William L. Clayton Chair and Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She is also affiliated with the Agora Institute at JHU as a member of the Center for Economy and Society. Outside of SAIS, she was a Wilson China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and was also a Non-resident Associate in the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Before joining SAIS, she was a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and Rajawali Fellow at the Ash Center of Harvard Kennedy School.
Chen’s research interests lie in political economy and state-business relations, with a regional focus on China. She studies the nexus between states and business, such as economic, tax, and industrial policies. She is especially interested in the political, coalitional, and institutional origins of economic policies, as well as the relationship between capitalism and the authoritarian state. Her research combines in-depth field interviews with statistical analysis and machine learning. Chen’s articles have been published in American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, New Political Economy, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Society, Review of International Political Economy, The China Journal, and World Development. Her first book, Manipulating Globalization: The Influence of Bureaucrats on Business in China, published by Stanford University Press, explores the politics of government-business coalitions and policy implementation in China. Her second book project is on capitalists and authoritarian governance in China, which has won the Catalyst Award.
Chen’s research has been funded by institutions such as the Social Science Research Council (Andrew Mellon Foundation), Wilson Center, Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, Institute for Humane Studies, and Stanford University. She was recognized as an NCID Diversity Scholar by the University of Michigan. She is also the winner of 2022 American Political Science Association (APSA) Best Comparative Policy Paper Award.
In addition to academic outlets, Chen has also published in The Washington Post, Axios, and the Wilson Center report. She has given congressional testimony in front of the US-China Economic and Security Review Committee. Her comments have been quoted, among others, by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Fortune, Financial Times, the National Committee on US-China Relations, and the USCC Report to Congress.
Expertise:
Asian Studies, China Studies, Chinese Development, Global Political Economy, Global Theory and History, International Development, International Political, Economy, International Relations, Nationalism and Contentious Politics in the Greater China Region, US-China Policy
Ho-Fung Hung is the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and in the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Dr. Hung’s scholarly interests include global political economy, protest, and nation-state formation, with a focus on China and East Asia. He is the author of the award-winning Protest with Chinese Characteristics (2011) and The China Boom: Why China Will not Rule the World (2016), both published by Columbia University Press. His articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Development and Change, Review of International Political Economy, Asian Survey, and elsewhere, and have been translated into ten different languages.
His analyses of the Chinese political economy, Hong Kong politics, and US-China relation have been featured or cited in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, BBC News, The Guardian, Die Presse (Austria), Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil), DW News (Germany), The Straits Times (Singapore), The South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Xinhua Monthly (China), and People’s Daily (China), among other publications.
He received his PhD in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University, and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Indiana University-Bloomington before teaching at Johns Hopkins.
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