Guoguang Wu is a Senior Research Scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, Stanford University. His research specializes in Chinese politics and comparative political economy, including, in China studies, elite politics, national political institutions and policy making mechanisms, transition from communism, the politics of development, and China’s search for its position in the world, and, in comparative political economy, transition of capitalism with globalization, the birth of capitalism in comparative perspectives, the worldwide rise of the economic state, and the emergence of human security on global agenda.

He is the author of four books, including China’s Party Congress: Power, Legitimacy, and Institutional Manipulation (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Globalization against Democracy: A Political Economy of Capitalism After its Global Triumph (Cambridge University Press, 2017), editor or coeditor of six English-language volumes, and author or editor of more than a dozen of Chinese-language books. His academic articles have appeared in journals such as Asian Survey, China Information, China Perspectives, China Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, Pacific Review, Social Research, and Third World Quarterly. He also frequently contributes to The China Leadership Monitor. Some of his works have been translated and published in the languages of French, Japanese, and Korean.

Guoguang received a Ph.D. and a MA in politics from Princeton University (1995; 1993), a MA in journalism/political commentary from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (1984), and a BA in journalism from Peking University (1981). During the late 1970s, he was among the sent-down youth in Mao's China, and a textile factory worker following the death of Mao. In the late 1980s, he worked in Beijing as an editorialist and a political commentator in Renmin ribao (The People's Daily) and, concurrently, a policy adviser on political reform and a speechwriter to the Zhao Ziyang leadership. His later appointments include: a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University (1989-1990), a Luce Fellow at the East Asian Institute of Columbia University (1990-91), and an An Wang Post-doctoral Fellow at the John King Fairbank Center of Harvard University (1995-96). Before joining Stanford in 2022, he taught at the University of Victoria in Canada and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Currently he is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for China Analysis of the Asia Society Policy Institute.

Fanny Schardey, M.A., is a PhD student in international relations and foreign policy at Heidelberg University, Germany. In 2021, she was a visiting doctoral student at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. Previously, she studied Political Science at Sciences Po Paris, Heidelberg, Würzburg and Geneva University.

Fanny’s doctoral thesis contributes to the research strand on comparative liberal alliance politics using East Central Europe as a case study. The first part of her thesis deals with the development of dominant societal preference configurations. The unintended consequences of Europeanization processes on societal values take a central position in her explanatory approach.
The second part of her thesis focuses on the functionality of representation mechanisms. The question of representation concerns less the political regimes per se but rather dynamic processes of preference transmission in these countries.

Fanny explores these assumptions on dominant preference configurations, their representation as well as their impact on alliance behavior in East Central Europe by using quantitative and qualitative methods of causal inference.

Irene Kyoung was a Research Associate for the Korea Program and Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL) at Shorenstein APARC, where she supported research projects regarding Korean politics and society and US-China relations. Irene received her MA in Political Science from Columbia University and graduated with honors in Government and Legal Studies from Bowdoin College. 

Aidan Milliff joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as the 2022-2023 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia. 

Milliff obtained his Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University, and a 2021-2022 USIP/Minerva Peace and Security Scholar. Aidan’s research combines computational social science and qualitative tools to answer questions about the cognitive, emotional, and social forces that shape political violence, migration, post-violence politics, and the politics of South Asia. His work appears or is forthcoming in journals and proceedings including AAAI, Journal of Peace Research, Political Behavior, as well as popular outlets including the Washington Post Monkey Cage Blog, War on the Rocks, and India’s Hindustan Times. Before MIT, Aidan was a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He holds a BA in political science and MA in international relations from the University of Chicago. He was born and raised in Colorado.

Aidan’s dissertation asks: in complex political violence scenarios, like inter-communal conflict in South Asia, what determines the strategies that people pursue to keep themselves safe? Aidan develops a political psychology theory, situational appraisal theory, which focuses on variation in individual interpretations of violent environments to explain civilian behavior. The dissertation first uses situational appraisal theory to explain the behavior of Indian Sikhs who encountered violence in rural insurgency and urban pogroms during the 1980s. Pairing original interviews with a novel method for applying multilingual text classification algorithms and automated video-analysis tools to analyze an archive of hundreds of oral history videos, the project shows that situational appraisals of control and predictability explain substantial variation in individuals’ choice of survival strategies when confronting violence.  The dissertation then demonstrates the generalizability of situational appraisal theory to international security domains, using a large survey experiment to show that control and predictability framing influences foreign policy preferences about hypothetical U.S.–China military confrontation.

At APARC, Aidan transformed his dissertation project into a book manuscript, and extend his ongoing research on decision-making, political violence, and Indian politics.

Laura M. Stone joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as Visiting Scholar and China Policy Fellow for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years. She currently serves the U.S. Department of State, recently as Deputy Coordinator for the Secretary's Office for COVID Response and Health Security. While at APARC, she conducted research with the China Program and Professor Jean Oi regarding contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.