Ronghui Hu is a global affiliate visiting scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for 2019-20.  From 1990 to 1995, Hu worked in the banking industry - first as a member of the administrative team to establish the first branch of the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ (BTMU) in China, specializing in project finance and foreign exchange trading.  She also served as a manager in the Shanghai branch and was later appointed as director of BTMU China.

Following her time at BTMU China, she utilized her expertise in law to become Senior Partner with the Zhonglun Law Firm where for 20 years she helped build it from a start-up law firm into one of China's largest firms with international influence.  During this time, she handled several high-profile cases, including one in which she acted as the representative legal counsel for 6C (Toshiba, Panasonic, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, JVC, and Time Warner) and succeeded in getting her clients a contract with the Chinese government - the first pool patent license agreement executed by foreign companies with the Chinese government.

In her role as a Zhonglun partner, Hu was often directly involved with negotiations on behalf of Japan (and its various enterprises) with China (and its various state-owned companies).  Her law practice acted as a catalyst for changes in commercial law in China.  Currently, Hu serves as Principal Adviser of Scihead IPR Patent Office.  

Tesalia Rizzo holds a Ph.D. in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research focuses on the demand and supply side of political mediation. Specifically, on how political (formal, informal or clientelist) intermediaries shape citizens’ attitudes and political engagement. She also works with non-governmental practitioners in Mexico to develop and test policies that disincentivize citizen reliance on clientelist and corrupt avenues of engaging with government and strengthen citizen demand for accountability. Her work with Mexican practitioners was awarded the 2017 Innovation in Transparency Award given by the Mexican National Institute for Access to Information (INAI). She is also a Research Fellow at MIT GOV/LAB and the Political Methodology Lab, at MIT. She is a graduate of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City. Prior to arriving at Stanford, she was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for US-Mexican Studies at University of California, San Diego and will join the Political Science Faculty at the University of California, Merced in 2020.

I am a scholar of comparative politics and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Contemporary China. My research is on authoritarianism and corruption control with a regional focus on East Asia—especially China, the Koreas, and Taiwan. My first book, Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2022), is about why some autocrats are motivated to curb corruption, why their efforts succeed or fail, and what the political consequences of such efforts are. I received my Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2019.

My writing has been published or is forthcoming in numerous academic and policy journals, including Perspectives on Politics, Government and Opposition, the Journal of Democracy, Politics and Society, the Journal of Contemporary China, the Journal of East Asian Studies, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the China Leadership Monitor, and The National Interest.

Before academia, I lived and traveled in East Asia for several years, learning Chinese and Korean along the way. I worked for The Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong, taught English in Xinjiang, and studied Korean in Seoul. I received my B.A. (summa cum laude), also from Harvard, in Social Studies and East Asian Studies.