Anna Zhang joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as APARC Predoctoral Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. She is a PhD candidate at the political science department. Her research interests include civil conflict, state building, and internal migration. Her dissertation studies China's institutional solution to the challenges of territorial control. 

Shan Huang joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as APARC Predoctoral Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year and is currently a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Stanford University. He is broadly interested in urban studies and contemporary social movements with an area focus of Hong Kong and Mainland China. His dissertation examines how Hong Kong government’s developmental schemes are confronted by grassroots actions aimed at democratizing urban planning and promoting alternative urban futures. An ethnographic account of Hong Kong’s political culture in the post-Handover era, it also seeks to reflect on urbanism of our times.

Nhu Truong joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. Her research focuses on authoritarian politics and the nature of communist and post-communist regimes, particularly pertaining to regime repressive-responsiveness, dynamics of social resistance, repertoires of social contention, and political legitimation. As a Shorenstein Fellow, Nhu Truong worked to develop her dissertation into a book manuscript. More specifically, she worked on buttressing the theory by contrasting Cambodia with China and Vietnam, as well as exploring the variable outcomes and knock-on effects of authoritarian responsiveness as groundwork for her next comparative project.

Nhu Truong’s dissertation explains how and why the two most similar communist, authoritarian regimes of China and Vietnam differ in their responsiveness to mounting unrest caused by government land seizures. Authoritarian regimes manage social unrest not merely by relying on raw coercive power, but also by demonstrating responsiveness to social demands. Yet, not all authoritarian regimes are equally responsive to social pressures. Despite their many similarities, Vietnam has exhibited greater institutionalized responsiveness, whereas China has been relatively more reactive. Theory and empirical findings based on 16 months of fieldwork and in-depth comparative historical analysis of China and Vietnam illuminate the divergent institutional pathways and the nature of responsiveness to social pressures under communist and authoritarian rule.

Nhu Truong obtained her Ph.D. in comparative politics in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, with an area focus on China, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia. She received an MPA in International Policy and Management from New York University, Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, an MA in Asian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in International Studies from Kenyon College. Prior to embarking on her doctoral study, she had work experience in international development in Vietnam, Cambodia, and policy research on China.

Jeffrey Weng joined the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center as the Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia for the 2020-2021 academic year.  His research focuses on the evolution of language, ethnicity, and nationalism in China. At Shorenstein APARC, Weng continued to publish papers based on his doctoral research while reworking his dissertation into a book manuscript.

Jeffrey's dissertation examined language in the context of Chinese nation-building. Mandarin Chinese was artificially created about a century ago and initially had few speakers. Now, it is the world’s most-spoken language. How did this transition happen? Weng's research shows how the codification of Mandarin was done with the intention to match existing practices closely, but not exactly. Top-down efforts by the state to spread the new language faced enormous difficulties, and ultimately its wide-spread adoption may have been catalyzed more by economic growth and urban migration. By investigating how these monumental social and political changes occurred, Weng’s work deepens the understanding of societal shifts, past and present, in one of the world’s predominant nations, while also contributing more broadly to scholarship on class, the educational reproduction of privilege, and the construction and reconstruction of race, ethnicity, and nation.

He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a BA in political science from Yale University, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and Theory and Society.

Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar at CDDRL for the Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative. Michael's research interests include infrastructure policy, project finance, public-private partnerships and institutional design in the infrastructure sector. Michael also teaches Global Project Finance to graduate students at Stanford. Prior to Stanford, Michael served as a Captain in the US Army and US Army Corps of Engineers for five years, leading Engineer units, managing projects, and planning for infrastructure development in the United States, Iraq, Afghanistan and Thailand.