“Product Display Room” and “General Director Office” of a Chinese Manufacturer in Binh Duong, Vietnam

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science and an A.M. candidate in Statistics at Harvard University. I work on International Political Economy, specializing in the politics of foreign direct investment, multinational corporations, international finance, and industrial policy. My current research centers on the interaction between foreign investment and state sovereignty. In my dissertation book project, I investigate how states enforce costly labor and environmental laws on foreign investors—specifically, under what conditions law enforcement favors or discriminates against foreign-invested firms relative to domestic firms. In other ongoing projects, I examine how governments tax and regulate mobile capital, using tools such as tax treaties, capital controls, and financial regulations, and how nationality and nationalism shape these dynamics. Trained in both Comparative Politics and International Relations, I have regional expertise in China and Japan, and have also conducted fieldwork in Indonesia and Vietnam to study foreign firms operating there.

“Product Display Room” and “General Director Office” of a Chinese Manufacturer in Binh Duong, Vietnam (July 2024)

At Harvard, I am a resident affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS). My research has been supported by the IQSS, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA), the WCFIA Research Cluster on Business and Government, the Harvard Center for International Development, and the Harvard University Asia Center. I have also served as a graduate student research peer for the WCFIA Program on US-Japan Relations.

Before coming to Harvard, I spent three years at Stanford, studying comparative politics and East Asia as a master’s student in East Asian Studies and then working as a data analyst at the Center on Food Security and the Environment. Born and raised in Shandong, China, I studied Japanese and International Relations at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, during which I also spent time at universities in Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore.