My research focuses on how processes of economic development affect the individual-state relationship in non-democracies. My publications can be grouped into the following themes:

• Authoritarian citizenship

  • Variation in rights outcomes

• Globalization, business and development

• Graduate education

You can also find my Google Scholar profile here and my eScholarship profile with full text articles.

You can view a chronological listing of publications on my CV.

Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China. Forthcoming. Stanford University Press.

In my book, Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China (October 2024 Stanford University Press), I explain how authoritarian leaders manipulate internal citizenship regimes to both ensure social stability and advance economic development goals. The consequence, I argue, is particularistic access to citizenship rights. To ensure the authoritarian bargain whereby autocrats provide some socio-economic rights in exchange for at least tacit political support, autocrats must conserve resources for redistribution and maintain privileged status for supporters, reducing who gets access to socio-economic rights. But exclusion from redistribution can also undermine economic development. To maintain economic development and the steady flow of resources necessary for the authoritarian bargain, autocratic leaders expand access to redistribution when doing so serves development, creating highly varied access to citizenship rights within one country. Autocrats use internal citizenship regimes—institutions defining subnational membership that predicate rights entitlements—to strategically manipulate who is, is not, and who can become entitled to largely socio-economic citizenship rights to achieve both security and economic goals.

Empirically, the manuscript focuses on the case of China, where access to citizenship is dependent on one’s household registration, known as hukou. A hereditary identity document, local hukou is required for permanent access to locally-provided citizenship rights, including public education, health insurance, and local voting rights. To balance the competing security and economic incentives, the central state decentralized control over hukou management over time, encouraging both the continuation of hierarchies of citizenship as a tool of social control but also locally-driven flexibility to advance economic interests. Municipal governments manipulate who is and is not allowed to obtain a local hukou through local naturalization processes modeled on international immigration regimes. I argue that local officials use these domestic citizenship regimes to strategically include populations that support local development policies. As development strategies vary, so too does access to citizenship across China’s cities, as local citizenship policies target migrants most beneficial for local development. Migrants themselves influence outcomes, as the state strategically uses voluntarism to soften policy reform. When given the opportunity to naturalize locally, migrants face conflicting incentives to relinquish old identities to obtain new rights. The manuscript draws on more than 30 months of field research, 100 semi-structured interviews with government bureaucrats, police officers, and human resource managers; an analysis of over a thousand government policies, and an experimental survey of migrants themselves.

Articles and Book Chapters:

“Dividing the People: The authoritarian bargain, development, and authoritarian citizenship.” 2023. Comparative Politics. 56(1): 95-119.

Autocrats must redistribute to survive, but redistribution is limited and selective. Who is entitled to redistribution underlying the authoritarian bargain? I argue redistribution is a question of citizenship. Authoritarian citizenship is characterized by particularistic membership and group-based rights rather than inclusive membership and individual rights. Autocrats use citizenship institutions to strategically limit and extend socio-economic rights to ensure both security and economic development. I apply this framework to China, where control over particularistic membership decentralized in conjunction with development strategies. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, government policies, and a database of local citizenship policies in China, I trace how local citizenship creates closure while development incentivizes strategic inclusion. By evaluating how authoritarian citizenship functions, this framework increases our understanding of individual-state relations in autocratic contexts.

“Hukou as Benefits: Demand for hukou and wages in China.” with Gordon G. Liu. 2022. Urban Studies. 59(15): 3167-3183.

As China encourages urbanization, a necessary process is the urbanization of its people, granting local-urban hukou, or local citizenship, to migrant populations. But reforms encouraging urbanization are dependent on migrant populations wanting to become formal, registered urban residents. What is demand for hukou? Based on a unique probabilistically-sampled contingent valuation survey of over 900 migrants in Beijing and Changsha, we use migrants’ willingness-to pay for hukou as a measure of demand for urbanization. We find that migrants in Beijing are willing to give up between 9 and 14 percent of their income over five years to gain local-urban hukou. Migrants in Changsha are much less willing to pay for hukou with a WTP indistinguishable from zero and rural migrants have a negative WTP. This study contributes to the broader literature on the impact of China's hukou system by providing a unique test of migrant workers' willingness-to-pay for local citizenship.

随着中国鼓励城市化，一个必要的过程是其人口的城市化，即给予流动人口当地城市户口或当地市民身份。但鼓励城市化的改革有赖于流动人口渴望成为正式的、登记在册的城市居民。对户口的需求状况如何呢？基于对北京和长沙 900 多名农民工的独特概率抽样或有评估调查，我们使用农民工为户口付费的意愿作为城市化需求的衡量标准。我们发现，北京的农民工愿意花费其五年内 9% 到 14% 的收入来获得本地城市户口。在长沙，移民的付费意愿则要低得多，付费意愿几乎为零，而农民工的付费意愿则为负。通过对农民工为当地市民身份付费的意愿进行独特的测试，本研究为关于中国户口制度影响的更广泛的文献做出了贡献。

“Hukou as a Case of Multi-level Citizenship.” 2021. in Zhonghua Guo, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship. London: Routledge. 132-142.

Citizenship in China cannot be understood by looking at the national level alone. The membership rules that define access to citizenship rights operate below the national level. The local, not central, state provides most citizenship rights and define who is entitled to those rights—controlling local membership. Like other contexts with sub-national citizenship, China’s citizenship system must be understood at multiple levels, with individuals belonging not only to the national polity but also the local level. This chapter outlines how the subnational nature of China’s citizenship is a fundamental design and functional feature of Chinese citizenship. Local citizenship through the hukou, or household registration, system is required to access the full suite of local citizenship rights and to be considered a citizen by the local state. It is rooted in historically driven institutional forms of state belonging and deeply intertwined with the social welfare systems of the modern Chinese state. Issues related to hukou-defined citizenship complicates traditional Western conceptions of citizenship by de-nationalizing the concept. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how lessons from China’s hukou system can broaden the existing literature on citizenship by understanding the Chinese system in comparative context.

"China’s Missing Children: Political Barriers to Citizenship through the Household Registration System." 2019. The China Quarterly. 238: 309-330. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741018001716 . Appendix.

Approximately 13 million Chinese lack hukou, the formal household registration. This prevents them from claiming full citizenship rights, including social welfare, formal identity documents and employment in the state sector. The government blames birth planning policies for the unregistered population, but this explanation ignores the role of internal migration. Because citizenship rights are locally determined and the hukou system is locally managed, migrants face significant barriers to registering their children. This article systematically analyses the political determinants of the unregistered population nationwide. Based on a logit analysis of a sample of 2.5 million children from the 2000 census, I find that children born in violation of the one-child policy do have lower rates of registration and that children born to migrant mothers are four times more likely to be unregistered than registered. Continuing government focus on the effect of birth planning ignores the more fundamental institutional barriers inherent in the hukou system.

中国人口中大约有 1300 万人没有户口，属于户籍制度外人口。户口的缺失意味着权利的缺失。户籍制度外人口无法享受社会福利，无法申办身份证， 也不能在国有部门就业。政府官方对此的解释是违反计划生育政策是户口缺失的首要原因，但是这一解释忽略了流动人口因素的影响。由于公民权利以及户口制度是由当地政府管理， 外来流动人口往往不能给子女在当地上户口。本文对户口缺失的政治决定因素进行了系统的分析研究。根据对 2000 年人口普查中 250 万儿童的样本进行 logit 分析，本文作者发现违计划生育政策的超生儿童的户口登记率偏低。在流动人口儿童中，没有户口儿童是有户口儿童的四倍。在户口缺失这一问题上，政府仅仅对计划生育政策的影响加以关注，而忽略了户口制度本身所固有的制度性障碍。

“Localized Citizenships: Household Registration as an Internal Citizenship Institution.” 2015. In Zhonghua Guo and Sujian Guo, eds. Theorizing Chinese Citizenship. Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield.

Working Papers:

“China’s Household Registration Reform: An Update on Progress.”

“The Digital Revolution and China’s Internal Migrants: Discrimination, connections, and integration in China’s cities.” with Shamma Alam and Ye Jiang.

Articles:

“Rural population’s preferences matter: a value set for the EQ-5D-3L health states for China’s rural population.” With Gordon G. Liu, Haijing Guan, Xuejing Jin, Han Zhang, and Hongyan Wu. 2022. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes. 29;20(1):14. (Available on eScholarship)

The socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics vary between urban and rural population in China. This study is the first attempt to provide a value set of weights for health states based on the preferences of Chinese rural registrants, and offers an evidence-based approach to health utility measurement in policy decision-making for urban–rural health care system integration and health equity promotion as an important supplement to the Chinese urban populations.

“Disaggregating China’s Political Budget Cycles: ‘Righting’ the U.” 2019. World Development. 114:95-109. (Available on eScholarship)

What impact does spending time horizon have on political budget cycles? While traditional political budget cycles increase visible spending with immediate gains before political turnover, I hypothesize that spending in categories with less-immediate gains categories increases when opportunity costs are lower. In this article, I build on existing literature on budget cycles in both democracies and non-democracies to disaggregate types of budget cycles: those with long-run versus short-run benefits. In China, after central-level reforms, welfare targets, with long-run gains, became visible to local leaders’ constituents, the central leaders above them. Local leaders then had an incentive to provide welfare, but only when it was the least costly in terms of opportunity costs. Using fixed-effects models panel data from China's 333 municipalities for 1994–2012, I find welfare spending minimizes both relatively and absolutely around year three, and maximizes at the beginning and end of a politician's tenure, when opportunity costs and probability of political advancement are lowest. These cycles are the most dramatic in western provinces, where education is a particularly important tool for ideological spread. Health and Social Security spending also see expansion at the end of mayor's tenures, although the cycles are less pronounced than in education spending. This study expands the literature on political budget cycles by disaggregating government spending and considering the impact of timeliness on cycles.

“China's Health Reform Update.” With Gordon G. Liu and Xuezhi Hong. 2017. Annual Review of Public Health. 38: 431-448.

China experienced both economic and epistemological transitions within the past few decades, greatly increasing demand for accessible and affordable health care. These shifts put significant pressure on the existing outdated, highly centralized bureaucratic system. Adjusting to growing demands, the government has pursued a new round of health reforms since the late 2000s; the main goals are to reform health care financing, essential drug policies, and public hospitals. Health care financing reform led to universal basic medical insurance, whereas the public hospital reform required more complex measures ranging from changes in regulatory, operational, and service delivery settings to personnel management. This article reviews these major policy changes and the literature-based evidence of the effects of reforms on cost, access, and quality of care. It then highlights the outlook for future reforms. We argue that a better understanding of the unintended consequences of reform policies and of how practitioners’ and patients’ interests can be better aligned is essential for reforms to succeed.

“The Effect of the Reimbursement Policy on Residents’ Healthcare Utilization in China.” with Qin Zhou, Gordon G. Liu, and Yankun Sun. 2016. China Journal of Social Work. 9(1):38-61.

In current Chinese health insurance programmes, there are two types of cost-sharing methods: the time-of-service copayment policy and the reimbursement policy. In contrast to the copayment participants, reimbursement participants need to pay for all medical expenses in advance. We study the effect of the reimbursement policy on the utilisation of healthcare services in China. The theoretical analysis indicates that the medical consumption of low income households will be less than the optimal consumption level when enrolled in a reimbursement programme instead of a copayment programme. Empirically, using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we find that the total inpatient expenditure of the reimbursement participants is 12.7% lower than that of copayment enrolees, and the reimbursement arrangement negatively impacts low-income and rural populations. Therefore, reimbursement participants, those who are financially constrained, are more likely to suffer the up-front payment burden and finally reduce their healthcare needs.

中国现行的医疗保险费用报销方案中，有两类型成本分摊方法﹕实时报销政策和垫付政策。相对实时报销计划下的投保人，垫付计划参加者在使用医疗服务时，需要先行缴纳全额医疗费用，在就医结束后再至相关部门进行医疗费用报销。本文研究垫付政策对中国参保居民医疗服务利用的影响。理论分析显示，当投保人参与垫付计划而非实时报销计划时，低收入家庭的医疗消费将低于理想的消费水平。利用中国健康与养老追踪调查(CHARLS)数据，我们发现垫付计划投保人的住院总开支比实时结算计划投保人要低12.7%；垫付计划对低收入和农村投保人的医疗服务利用有显著负向影响。因此，医保垫付制度给经济水平有限的参保人群造成了明显的垫支压力，进而抑制其合理的医疗需求。

Book Reviews:

“Book Review: Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers by Jennifer Pan.” 2022. The China Journal. 87:119-120.

“Social protection under authoritarianism: Health politics and policy in China. By Xian Huang, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020.” 2023. Governance. 36(2):675-677.

One of the important findings from my work on authoritarian citizenship is the influence of the business community on outcomes. In my second project, I build on my existing work to identify the globalization-rights-social stability nexus. This project creates new, micro-level data to break down the "foreign economy" operating in China. As an introduction to the Foreign Invested Enterprises in China Dataset, early publications focus on the timely issue of the US-China trade war and its impact on foreign firms operating in China.

Articles:

“Political Risk and Firm Exit: Evidence from the US-China Trade War.” With Jiakun Jack Zhang. Forthcoming. Review of International Political Economy. (Request replication data)

Does international conflict induce foreign firms to “follow the flag” and exit from a profitable market? We show that the US-China trade war broadly elevated political risks for multinational corporations (MNCs) operating in China, increasing firm exit overall. However, investment treaties can mitigate political risks at the country level while firm entrenchment determine resilience to risk at the firm level. Using a new dataset on all foreign-invested firms registered in China between 2014 and 2019, we implement difference-in-difference and triple-difference models to isolate the impact of increased political risks on MNC exit in the context of the US-China trade war. Our findings show that US and allied firms were not more likely to exit China, suggesting that foreign direct investment outflows do not "follow the flag." Instead, firm exit is determined by the balance of heightened political risks against the availability of firm-level and institutional resources to mitigate these risks.

“In the Middle: American Multinationals in China and Trade War Politics.” With Jiakun Jack Zhang and Rigao Liu. 2022. Business and Politics. 24(4): 348-376. (Available on eScholarship)

Which factors make some American multinational corporations (MNCs) take political action in response to the U.S.-China Trade War and cause others to stay on the sidelines? We identify China-based subsidiaries of U.S. firms to identify firms' political actions in response to the trade war. We combine data on firms' tariff exposure, economic actions in China, and political actions in the United States during the trade war. Together these data highlight the divergent strategies firms engage in. Even though over 63 percent of MNCs in our sample were adversely impacted by tariffs, only 22 percent voice opposition and 7 percent exit in response to the trade war. Our analysis reveals that U.S. MNCs in China differ in their business models, ownership structure, experience in China, and size of capital investments. These firm-level factors determine the degree to which U.S. MNCs are embedded in China. This in turn shape how firms perceive political risk and choose from the menu of options to deal with the trade war. Size and age increase voice while joint-venture status decrease it.

“Personnel Power: Governing State-Owned Enterprises.” with Wendy Leutert. Business and Politics. 2021. 23(3): 419-437. (Available on eScholarship)

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) retain a strong presence in many economies around the world. How do governments manage these firms given their dual economic and political nature? Many states use authority over executive appointments as a key means of governing SOEs. We analyze the nature of this “personnel power” by assessing patterns in SOE leaders’ political mobility in China, the country with the largest state-owned sector. Using logit and multinomial models on an original dataset of central SOE leaders’ attributes and company information from 2003 to 2017, we measure the effects of economic performance and political connectedness on leaders’ likelihood of staying in power. We find that leaders of well-performing firms and those with patronage ties to elites in charge of their evaluation are more likely to stay in office. These findings suggest that states leverage personnel power for economic and political stability when SOE management is highly politically integrated.

国有企业是世界许多经济体的重要支柱。鉴于其特殊的经济与政治地位，国有企业的治理是许多国家经济发展中的一个重要挑战。目前各国政府是如何管控这些企业的？许多国家将行政任命权作为治理国有企业的关键手段之一。本文通过研究中国国有企业行政人员的政治升迁规律，分析并探讨了“人事权”在中国这个最大国有经济体中所扮演的角色。作者使用分对数模型和多项式模型对2003年至2017年央企领导人和公司信息原始数据进行了量化分析，测量了经济绩效和政治关联对国企领导人留任的影响，并发现较高业绩的国企领导以及与绩效考核人员政治关联密切的国企领导更有可能留任。由此可以得出结论，当国有企业管理与政治高度融合时，政府能利用人事权力来有效实现经济和政治的稳定。

Working Papers:

“FDI and Internal Migration: Skill-dependence and labor market management in China.” Under Review.

“The Domestic Political Geography of Firm Exit in the US-China Trade War.” With Jiakun Jack Zhang and Rigao Liu. Working Paper.

“Economic Development Zones and Foreign Multinational Exit in China (2017-2023)” With Jiakun Jack Zhang and Kyle Jaros

“FDI and Environmental Outcomes: New Evidence from China” With Melisa Perut

“Practicing Effective Time Management.” with Coyle Neal. 2022. In Julia Marin Hellwege, Kevin Lorentz, Dan Mallinson, Davin Phoenix and Cherie Strachan (eds.), Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond. Washington DC: American Political Science Association. 107-112.

Time management is one of the most important skills graduate students need to succeed and thrive in their training. This chapter emphasizes the importance of time management as a practice. It focuses on three larger strategies that encompass most time management tricks out there: know your priorities, know yourself, and invest time in yourself. By properly understanding the priorities of your program and your personal goals for your graduate studies, you are best able to focus on the work that must get done to achieve them. Knowing yourself allows you to maximize work efficiency, both a key mechanism and result of successful time management. Finally, investing in yourself helps you balance work life demands and centers your own mental and physical health. This manuscript is part of Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond, a forthcoming volume for those interested in pursuing graduate education in political science (Fall 2022 publication).

“Building a Supportive Mentoring Network” with Mary Anne Mendoza. 2022. In Julia Marin Hellwege, Kevin Lorentz, Dan Mallinson, Davin Phoenix and Cherie Strachan (eds.), Strategies for Navigating Graduate School and Beyond. Washington DC: American Political Science Association. 41-46.

Building a supportive network of faculty, near-peer, and peer mentors both inside your department and the political science community more broadly helps you advance your career and makes the often challenging process of graduate school easier. Mentors provide a range of support, including direct career advice, research guidance, emotional support, and a sense of belonging. Developing a supportive network is important for all graduate students, but is particularly beneficial for graduate students from under-represented backgrounds, as mentors can provide a sense of belonging in an alienating environment and open doors to important resources. In this chapter, we outline the who, what, where, when, why, and how of building a mentoring network. We argue that you should think of mentorship not as a single relationship between yourself and your advisor, but broadly as a network for support that provides guidance from a variety of sources. We highlight the types of roles mentors can play and provide advice on where to find mentors and existing resources to help you build the support you need to thrive in graduate school and your career.