Publications

"When Socialist Legacy Meets International Norms: Gender Quota Adoption and Institutional Change in China." (with Yunyun Zhou),  Journal of Contemporary China, forthcoming.
  • Gender quotas have a long history in China, with the earliest gender quota introduced in 1933 in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s border regions. Yet, research on China’s gender quotas has been scarce. This study addresses the gap by examining the process of gender quota adoption in China’s subnational Party-States and the People’s Congresses. Using an institutional approach, we argue that quota adoption in China was a process of “institutional layering” that lasted from the late 1980s to the 2010s, during which domestic actors contested the CCP’s existing personnel rules and strategically exploited the CCP’s ideological commitment to gender equity and its need for an improved international image during the second wave of global gender quota adoption. During the process, we see two changes: the slow diversification of domestic actors, including both state and non-state ones, and the shifting of the actors’ working strategy from an informal and network-based approach to an institutionalized one that operated through formal channels. In so doing, this article expands the comparative literature on gender quotas, which has been preoccupied with quotas in elected parliaments, and enriches understanding of Chinese politics.   
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"Women’s Work: Gendered Appointment Politics in Subnational China." (with Sarah Eaton and Genia Kostka) Government and Opposition, published online, October 13th, 2023.
  • While comparative research on gender and politics has produced a sizable literature on the appointment of women to cabinet positions in democracies, we know surprisingly little about appointment practices in authoritarian contexts at the subnational levels. We address this gap with the resumés of 3,681 political appointees in subnational China (2003-2020). Our analysis reveals that subnational Chinese politics meet most of the criteria scholars put forward as being indicative of gendered institutions: 1) Women and men’s career patterns are different; 2) women get assigned to more feminine posts, while masculine posts provide more promotion opportunities; and 3) regarding backgrounds, women are younger, better educated, and more likely to be ethnic minorities due to the implementation of tandem quotas. The findings advance the literature on gender and politics, showing that gender’s effect transcends the dichotomy of democracy/autocracy and national/subnational politics.

"Gender Difference in Policy Preference: Evidence from China’s National Legislature." (with Chuanmin Chen) Politics & Gender, published online, September 28th, 2023.
  • Do female legislators have different policy preferences than male legislators? Despite a large body of literature from liberal democracies and recent studies from electoral authoritarian regimes, this topic has received little attention in the context of single-party regimes. Based on quasi-experimental methods and regression models, we analyze original data from 38,383 proposals introduced at China’s 12th national legislature and test the effect of gender on policies concerning both conventionally selected feminine issues and “political stance,” issues unique to single-party regimes. The analysis confirms the effect of gender on policy preference across several feminine issues. However, the effect of gender is null on issues concerning “political stance.” Our findings suggest that while single-party regimes allow gender differences to emerge among legislators on issues not politically important, they tend to discourage such differences on politically prominent issues. As such, this study advances the literature on both gender politics and authoritarian politics.

"Provinces in Command: Changes in Prefectural Appointments from Hu Jintao to Xi Jinping (2003–2020)" (with Sarah Eaton and Genia Kostka) Journal of Contemporary China, published online, April 20th, 2023.
  • China’s ‘Xi-Li era’ is said to be defined by both the concentration of power in the center and the strengthening of Party authority. In this paper, we ask whether these trends have been evident in local appointment practices since Xi Jinping took office in 2013. By comparing the career histories of 3,682 prefectural mayors and Party Secretaries under the Hu-Wen and Xi-Li administrations, we find that while appointment practices have shifted, the observed changes are not wholly consistent with the center- and Party-strengthening narratives. First, developments in the Xi-Li era suggest that while provincial authorities are increasingly using prefectural appointments for their own ends, the center remains high and far away in these decisions. Second, we do not find evidence that cadres with a strong Party background have a particular advantage in the Xi period. Instead, cadres with strong track records in key functional xitong, particularly those with an economic profile, are still the most likely to attain leadership positions. These findings contribute to the current debate on the nature of power reconfigurations unfolding in Xi’s China.

"No County is an Island: The Rise of Interjurisdictional Cooperation among Counties in China." (with Sarah Eaton and Genia Kostka) Regional Studies, published online, January 19th, 2023.
  • ​Why are China’s notoriously competitive local governments increasingly cooperating with each other? Combining interjurisdictional cooperation data from 820 counties and fieldwork in 24 localities, we argue the increasing trend of inter-county cooperation is the newest manifestation of China’s state-rescaling initiative. It is the combined result of the state’s devolution of governance responsibilities and competitive-minded local cadres’ interests in benefits associated with scaling up. The study contributes to understanding how counties’ growing interdependence intersects with the regime’s survival logic in the unfolding reconfiguration of China’s counties. 

"​Gendered Pathways to the County-Level People’s Congress in China.” ​The China Quarterly, published online, December 23th, 2021.
"Not at the Table but Stuck Paying the Bill: Perceptions of Injustice in China’s Xin’anjiang Eco-compensation Program." (with Sarah Eaton and Genia Kostka) Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, published online, November 25th, 2021.
  • A growing body of research highlights the decisive role that justice claims play in creating sustainable payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs. Employing Sikor et al.’s approach to the study of justice claims in ecosystem governance​along three dimensions--distribution, procedure and recognition--we study the negotiation process behind China’s flagship interprovincial PES agreement: the Xin’anjiang River eco-compensation agreement between Huangshan (Anhui province) and Hangzhou (Zhejiang province) prefectures. We find that divergent claims between stakeholders on matters of distributive and procedural justice undercut one party’s commitment to the agreement. Local officials in the upstream locality (Huangshan) see themselves as having been disadvantaged in both procedural and distributive aspects of negotiation. They claim to have been insufficiently included in a bargaining process that involved not only the downstream locality (Hangzhou) but also the central government. Huangshan stakeholders also see themselves as largely excluded from the benefits of cleaner water and bearing too much of the pollution abatement cost. For their part, Hangzhou stakeholders have advanced a ‘polluters pay’ view of distributive justice and found partial support for this claim from Beijing. Our findings suggest that attending to environmental justice considerations should be given top priority in China’s design of PES schemes.

“Coalition-Based Gender Lobbying: Revisiting Women’s Substantive Representation in China’s Authoritarian Governance.”  (with Yunyun Zhou) Politics & Gender,  published online, October 15th 2021.
  • While research on women’s substantive representation in legislatures has proliferated, our knowledge of gender lobbying mechanisms in authoritarian regimes remains limited. Adopting a state-society interaction approach, this article addresses how women’s interests are substantively represented in China despite the absence of an electoral mandate and the omnipresence of state power. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this article maps out the intertwining of key political agents and institutions within and outside the state that mobilize for women’s grievances and demands. We find that representation of women’s interests in China requires the emergence of a unified societal demand followed by a coalition of state agency allies navigating within legislative, executive, and Party-affiliated institutional bodies. The pursuit of women’s interests is also politically bounded and faces strong repression if the lobbying lacks state alliances or the targeted issue is considered “politically sensitive” by the government.

"A New Generation of ‘Incorporated Wife’? Making Sense of International Students’ Spouses in the US." (with Busra Soylemez-Karakoc and Maryam Hussain) Gender, Place & Culture, 28:7, 933-954.
              Political Science Graduate Paper Award, University of Delaware, 2018.
  • Responding to the feminist call to reconfigure the outlook of transnational moving, this article explores the gendered experiences of the international students’ spouses behind the booming international education industry in the United States (US). With 20 in-depth interviews, we examined how immigration and university policies feminize the spouses of international students and how they navigate this feminized role. We show that the categorization of spouses as ‘dependents’, by the Department of Homeland Security of the US, justifies and normalizes the discriminating policies towards the spouses, which introduce and perpetuate the gendered binaries of student/spouse, initiator/follower, independent/dependent, and public/private, during which the spouses are repositioned to the feminized half. That said, spouses demonstrate agentic contestations during this process. Particularly, we show that female and male spouses adopt different strategies to transcend the femininity conferred by this role: female spouses’ contestation is more alliance-based while male spouses tend to follow an individualist approach.​