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Jeffery Wang
Jeffery Wang is a postdoctoral scholar at the 21st Century China Center. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Indiana University Bloomington, where he also completed interdisciplinary training in informatics, complex networks and systems. His research examines changes in global order, international institutions and trade networks, using computational and network-based methods.
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Xiaohan Wu
Xiaohan Wu is a postdoctoral researcher at the China Data Lab at UC San Diego, where she earned her Ph.D. in political science with a specialization in computational social science. Her dissertation uses text-as-data methods and large language models to study media and courts in China, showing how media coverage shapes public access to legal and governmental information. Substantively, her research examines how emerging technologies and media platforms influence political communication and legal governance. Methodologically, she develops and applies computational and statistical techniques for data-rich social science, with a growing interest in both AI for the social sciences and the social science of AI.
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Yin Yuan is a postdoctoral researcher at the China Data Lab at the UC San Diego, where she also earned her Ph.D. Her research explores the intersection of propaganda and elite politics in China. One line of her work examines how the state uses institutional mechanisms to replicate their messages across media platforms--including commercial newspapers, the internet, and even large language models (LLMs). Another line of research, including her dissertation, investigates the role of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official discourse in intra-elite communication and develops methods to automatically identify political catchphrases (tifa), the building blocks of CCP discourse, and to interpret their political and policy implications.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Past Postdoctoral Fellows
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Patrick Chester was a postdoctoral researcher at the China Data Lab at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in political science from New York University. His dissertation demonstrates a new method to measure propaganda using word embeddings and applies it towards determining whether a specific rhetorical strategy is being employed by Chinese state media. His research focuses on quantifying how China and other autocracies utilize propaganda in traditional and social media by applying text as data and machine learning tools towards the measurement of political science concepts.
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Yao Lin
Yao Lin was a lecturer at the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and his J.D. from Yale Law School, and was an assistant professor of practice in political science at NYU Shanghai before joining UC San Diego. His main research project explored the epistemic and practical implications of China’s party-state authoritarianism on global politics as well as on domestic and transnational social movements. He also researches and publishes widely in other areas of comparative politics, political theory, law and philosophy.
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Michael Thompson-Brusstar was a postdoctoral fellow at 21CCC and received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan. His research focused on the evolution of China's administrative and legal systems, with a special focus on the politics of bureaucracy and the use of political text to study policy change. His published work has focused on the relationship between the party and state in China, the changing role of China's public prosecutor, and the politics of administrative supervision. His projects focus on the role of study teams in international policy learning, the role of organizational policy in China's reform era political-economy, and on validating large-scale digitization processes for historical text data.