Writing Statement of Purpose for Graduate School
Application: Political Science as a Case
yuhuawang@fas.harvard.edu
https://scholar.harvard.edu/yuhuawang
Focus on your research interests.
Talk like a political scientist.
Show your passion.
Start early.
I am here to help you.
yuhuawang@fas.harvard.edu
Examples
I am applying to the Ph.D. in XXX at XXX University to pursue my academic interest in
comparative political economy. Specifically, my first line of interest is the political economy of
corruption and good governance. My interest in this field was solidified through my graduate
courses and research. My second line of research interest is the political economy of inequality
and poverty, which derives from my undergraduate and graduate coursework. For both lines
of interest, I strive to develop new arguments and test them with innovative empirical methods,
building on the solid methodological training I received from several institutions. My current
theoretical and empirical point of departure draws from the case of China, while I plan to
generalize to other authoritarian countries and developing democracies. I also hope to discover
new topics in the broad field of comparative political economy during my Ph.D. studies.
In the XXX program at XXX University, my research focuses on two questions regarding political
economy of corruption and good governance. First, how does corruption influence political
participation and what is the mechanism through which corruption exerts an impact?
Conventional wisdom suggests that corruption decreases subjective political efficacy, which
undermines engagement in politics. Utilizing hierarchical generalized linear models and
mediation analysis, my empirical research, drawing on the XXX dataset, suggests a more
complex relationship via decomposing the mechanism. First, citizen perceptions of and their
experience with corruption decrease election turnout. Second, this negative correlation is
moderated by low political trust in elections and democracy. Third, activities of electoral
corruption increase turnout, arguably through vote buying. In sum, although corruption can
directly “buy” votes, it may undermine voting overall by decreasing political trust in both the
elections and the regime. My findings are expected to shed some light on the dual effect of
corruption on elections in authoritarian regimes.
I plan to further develop this line of research with additional empirical studies. First, I propose
to identify the causal effect of corruption on turnout in authoritarian China by comparing the
XXX dataset with the XXX data. Specifically, I will use China’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign
to study how corruption reduction decreases turnout by practically eliminating vote buying. I
also plan to supplement quantitative data analysis with in-depth fieldwork. Given that
qualitative evidence of corruption and voting is sparse in China, I plan to do fieldwork in rural
China to gauge how corruption exerts both direct and indirect influences on voting. In addition
to elections, examining corruption’s impact on petitions and protests will also contribute to
studies on political participation. Finally, I plan to generalize my study on corruption’s dual
effects to other authoritarian regimes and developing democracies. Anti-corruption reforms in
Brazil and India, for instance, can provide fertile grounds for testing my arguments. Since
competitive elections are routinely held, evidence from these states can help me build a
comparable theory of corruption and participation across countries.
Why do governments exert effort to reduce corruption? In my second research question, I ask
how rule of law (RoL) influences investment and whether the impact varies by local
circumstances. Conventional wisdom suggests a consistent positive effect of RoL on investment.
Based on the cutting-edge interaction effect analysis developed by Hainmueller et al. (2019),
my empirical study in China shows that municipal RoL has a conditional impact on foreign direct
investment (FDI): for fast-growing regions, RoL promotes FDI, and vice versa. Therefore, RoL’s
influence on FDI varies across municipalities with different economic conditions. Slow-growing
cities are more likely to suffer, rather than to benefit, from RoL reforms in FDI attraction.
This counter-intuitive relationship between RoL and investment leads to several questions I
hope to further investigate. First, how do qualitative cases substantiate my arguments on
conditional effects of RoL? Second, do corruption and RoL have similar impacts on domestic
investment as on FDI? Finally, since subnational variation in RoL qualities is typical for most
regimes, does a conditional effect of RoL apply to other authoritarian countries and developing
democracies? These questions supplement our understandings of how the quality of
governance influences economic development.
In addition to corruption and good governance, I am also interested in the political economy of
inequality and poverty. This interest originated from my undergraduate studies of migrant
workers in China. A directed reading course at XXX has further inspired me to investigate on
origins of different aspects of inequality. Overall, I am fascinated by two unsettled questions
regarding economic and political inequality. On the one hand, how does economic growth
impact inequality levels? I am particularly interested in disaggregating inequality into within-
nation and across-country trends. On the other hand, what is the level of underrepresentation
for the poor or rural population in legislatures in authoritarian regimes and developing
democracies? Does this underrepresentation influence the distribution of preference
expression through bill sponsorships? Given that related studies mainly focus on developed
countries, my further work on developing countries would shed some light on whether their
legislatures, even for the “window-dressing” sorts, add to inequality of interest articulation.
I expect to advance my research on comparative political economy at XXX University given its
renowned methodology training and resourceful faculties. In particular, I hope to work with
Professors XXX. Professor XXX’s expertise in rule of law, corruption, and state capacity would
assist my fieldwork and empirical research on political participation, business-state relations,
and governance in China. Professor XXX’s knowledge of accountability, clientelism, and
elections in Africa and Latin America would contribute to my studies of how corruption and
political brokers impact turnout in authoritarian regimes and developing democracies. I can
also learn about how good governance – e.g., provision of education and information –
influences political participation. Finally, Professor XXX’s broad interest in inequality,
redistribution, and electoral institutions would facilitate my research on how political
representation interacts with interest articulation and distributive policies. Therefore, with
targeted and rigorous instruction from the faculty, I am confident that XXX will best prepare
me to realize my academic pursuits on corruption, good governance, and inequality. It will also
guide me along the path towards a well-trained scholar in the broad field of comparative
political economy.
Statement of Purpose, Political Science
My passion for politics flows from witnessing two facets of the Chinese state. Growing up in
an urban state-owned enterprise (SOE) compound in China, I enjoyed public education with low
tuition and various benefits conferred by an SOE. The other facet, however, burdens my rural-origin
parents as they strive to support our extended family in the countryside—a direct result of urban-
biased redistribution. Living through these contrasts brought about a deep fascination with the
tremendous impact of politics on individual welfare, especially with regard to how non-democratic
regimes craft relationships with their people to maintain power. I hope to pursue a Ph.D. in
Political Science to examine how redistribution underpins authoritarian rule, and to engage with
the field of comparative politics that speaks to the core questions driving my inquiry.
My undergraduate and master’s research projects lay the foundation for my interests in the
infrastructural mechanisms of authoritarian rule that I will be addressing in my doctoral studies.
My work initially focused on coercive capacity, studying how China’s local states respond to labor
protests. Through quantitative analyses of protest event data from 2013 to 2017, I find that the
deployment of coercive force in China is not only selective and controlled, contingent upon the
amount of social disruption, but also highly predictable from the timing of significant political
events.
Despite the above findings on the credible threat of repression, one lingering question remains:
How was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) able to build its powerful state apparatus? Inspired
by the calls to probe historical sources of durable authoritarianism, my master’s thesis asks why
the CCP was able to control some localities, but not others, in its struggle against other major
political forces during World War II. Analyzing a county-level longitudinal dataset I constructed, I
argue that the CCP’s mobilization and infiltration of local militias and its progressive tax reforms
explain the birth of communist strongholds, measured by the survival of CCP county committees.
A key conclusion is that redistribution during wartime—rather than pure extraction—facilitates
authoritarian state-building. Building on its revolutionary success, the CCP bound the masses to
the regime through institutions that made access to resources, services, and opportunities dependent
on the state.
Having examined the CCP’s redistribution efforts during World War II, I have become fasci-
nated with the ways in which authoritarian regimes remold their redistributive infrastructure over
time. During my Ph.D., I want to ask: What causes the varying degrees of welfare expansion at
the subnational level in urban China? Who are included in welfare expansion, and why? To answer
these questions, I will examine local revenue structures and the preferences of local interest groups.
Empirically, I will address these questions specifically in reference to the household registration
(hukou) system in China, which ties residency registration with welfare coverage and public finance.
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Statement of Purpose, Political Science
As statist institutions and state-created group identities unravel, the hukou system has been un-
dergoing reforms with considerable local discretion from the late 1990s to present. This allows
me to adopt a subnational research design and use mixed methods for empirical analysis. To ex-
plain within- and cross-city variations, I will combine quantitative data from administrative, fiscal,
and online sources for statistical analyses, and draw on interviews and archives for a comparative
historical analysis of selected cases that are nested in the cross-city statistical analyses.
This research speaks to the current literature on redistribution under authoritarian regimes,
which agrees on the importance of redistribution in sustaining authoritarian rule, but differs over
redistributive patterns and the underlying mechanisms. The first line predicts selected redistribu-
tion or punishment based on political loyalty, the threat of instability, or societal demands. The
second line explains broader redistribution aimed at improving performance legitimacy or cultivat-
ing dependence. My case presents new questions since the most substantial state-conferred benefits
in urban China are granted based on depoliticalized and arguably meritocratic standards (credit-
based hukou system), which can be influenced by revenue sources and the bargaining power of
various enterprises, and induce political inaction on the part of ordinary citizens. This study aims
to improve our understanding of how redistribution under authoritarian regimes can be driven by
variables beyond concerns of direct political support or social stability, through an investigation of
the subnational variation in the design of redistributive institutions.
I have substantially prepared for my doctoral study. (RA experience & quantitative training
omitted.)
The Ph.D. program in Political Science at UMich will provide me with an ideal intellectual
home to realize my academic ambitions, given its overall excellence, rigorous methodological train-
ing, and notable strength in comparative politics. My proposed project directly speaks to Mary
Gallagher and Yuen Yuen Ang’s interest in the relationship between economic development and
political development in China. Mary Gallagher’s research on Chinese labor has informed my in-
quiry into state responses to labor protest, and I will draw from her expertise in explaining how
market-oriented interest groups influence welfare expansion in China. I could also borrow analytical
insights from Yuen Yuen Ang’s dynamic framework for unpacking adaptive governance and state-
market coevolution. Dan Slater’s recent work on coercive distribution has helped me articulate
my proposed project, and I hope to engage with his expertise in the relationship between state
power and authoritarian rule. I look forward to working with Anne Pitcher, for her work on urban
political economy; and Brian Min, for his expertise in distributive politics. I would be thrilled at
the opportunity of joining this community and look forward to pursuing questions that shed light
on authoritarian countries and expand the debates of the discipline.
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Statement of Purpose
Department of Government
Harvard University
How does new information technology reshape classic principal-agent relationships? The original
principal-agent model is built on a premise of information asymmetry between the principal and the
agent. However, modern technology has altered the quantity and quality of information flows within large
organizations like bureaucracies. This forces us to rethink power relationships within bureaucracies: Does
information technology reduce existing information asymmetries by making monitoring much easier for
day-to-day governance? Will information technology create new demands for power delegation to collect
and process vast quantities of information?
My interest in bureaucracy stems from working in three different agencies within the Chinese central
government. The fluctuating balance of power I observed between central policymakers and subordinate
officials was in tension with Max Weber’s descriptions of power position within the bureaucracy. I found
that bureaucratic power relies on control over information, not merely formal positions. At each level of
government, information is interpreted into a narrative. After going through several levels of bureaucracy,
there arises a “telephone game” effect in which details are lost and subjective information creeps in. This
creates different nexuses of power due to information control. For example, while subordinate agents are
better informed about detailed tax codes, their superiors are more able to synthesize a general pattern of
industrial conditions. The divergent information nexus means subordinate agents have a greater say in
policymaking for individual investment projects, while the principal retains greater power in initiating or
vetoing bundles of policies over the long term.
My past research sought to understand the role of information in shaping bureaucratic politics.
I examined how information asymmetry shaped individual-level
incentive structures, as well as institutional-level bureaucratic capacities, through the lens of political
corruption. Leveraging an interrupted time-series design, my research showed that if prosecutors were
well-informed of promotion criteria, they focused on increasing the quantity of corruption cases they
pursued, not the quality. This strategic action adversely affected judicial integrity. further
explored information asymmetry between principal and agent during anti-corruption investigations. I
found that inspection agents who better understood issue-specific bureaucratic norms were more capable
of identifying local corruption than agents with general accounting and legal expertise. This finding
speaks to the ongoing debate on endogenous versus exogenous foundations of bureaucratic expertise. My
findings align with the endogenous explanation in showing that insider knowledge translates into
monitoring capacity during corruption investigations. While proponents of endogenous explanations
extensively focus on the policymaking aspect of bureaucratic expertise, my findings complement the
literature by addressing the implementation aspect.
Going forward, I propose a research agenda at the intersection of information, technology, and
bureaucracy in the digital era. Building on my past research on bureaucracy, I plan to incorporate the
influence of information technology as a key variable. My central questions are: Theoretically, how does
new technology affect information asymmetry, reshaping principal-agent relationships? Empirically, will
technical innovations make bureaucracies more centrally powerful? Or will subordinate bureaucrats still
figure out ways to maintain autonomy and protect their turf?
To understand the governance angle of informatization, China provides an ideal case to study. Its
“digital Leninism” has shaped principal-agent relations to an extent that has few parallels in other
regimes. Existing research on technology and governance in China focuses narrowly on censorship and
mass surveillance, eschewing the fact that big data collection has broader implications on the
infrastructural power of the state. For my proposed research, I plan to focus on China’s social policy
process, particularly on its recent adoption of a series of modern information technologies. Aiming to
establish a comprehensive “social credit system,” the central government has begun collecting vast
quantities of data on individual citizens—including migration and welfare information from residential
committees, loans and tax data from financial institutions, and online activity logs from Internet giants
Alibaba and Tencent. Four years after the first published blueprint of the social credit system, however,
credit-related data is still stuck on “isolated islands,” as local governments guard their information and
undermine efforts to build a unified database. If new technology has facilitated the central bureaucracy’s
information collection by reducing the demand for manpower, why does data fragmentation still prevail
in the digital age?
I have accumulated the skills and expertise to carry out this research. Drawing from
, I hope to employ a mixed methods design for my project by combining quantitative text analysis
with in-depth case studies I have taken three graduate-level quantitative methods
and formal theory courses
I have also developed archival and documentary research skills by taking a graduate-level
research methods seminar While working with after
finishing my graduate studies, I have been learning natural language processing, principal component
analysis, and network analysis to study state-building reforms in China. As my study of the social credit
system further develops, I am interested in extending my research to other policy domains and different
political contexts beyond China.
I believe that Harvard University’s Department of Government is the ideal place to pursue my proposed
research. Not only have I been inspired by work on guerrilla-style policymaking and adaptive
governance, I am also fascinated by her recent study of convergent comparison on China and India. I also
want to continue learning from who has been a devoted mentor and whose research on state-
building and bureaucratic capacity closely overlaps with my research interests. Beyond China, I aspire to
work with to expand my empirical horizons
and situate my research of data governance under authoritarian rule in a broader scope of time and space.
Furthermore, I aspire to learn from , whose in-depth knowledge of American
bureaucracy would help me further develop my research on bureaucratic power delegation amid fluid
technical innovations and societal changes.
The rigorous training at Harvard will not only help me as I pursue an academic career in political science,
but it will also allow me to develop the capability to shed light on important questions facing both China
and the world in the digital era.
Statement of Purpose
In my first year at XXX, I took a class on XXX politics. During the professor’s first three lectures,
he conveyed a single point: how critical, yet difficult, it is for Chinese political scientists to avoid
writing only what the state wants. I felt awakened. Having been raised in a small, isolated city
in China, I had only experienced pro-regime political socialization in school and at home and
had never been exposed to the political views of liberal intellectuals. The professor helped me
realize that the state’s control of society can be problematized both politically and analytically.
I decided to take more political science classes and gradually discovered my passion for using
the tools of empirical political science to understand politics in nondemocracies. As an MA
student at XXX, I enhanced my background in political science by focusing on comparative
politics and quantitative methods for my coursework, reading extensively in the field, working
with political science professors as a research assistant, and conducting independent research.
Having improved my mastery of the language of political science, I identified the core puz-
zle that had underpinned my motivation to study the subject and that will drive my future
research: How can we explain the state capacity and regime durability of autocracies? While
both autocracies and democracies project power into society by enforcing fiscal extraction and
policy, a robust autocracy imposes tight control over society and maintains the compliance of
its subjects for a sustained period. Why are some autocracies able to do so but not others? I am
especially intrigued by the regime–mass nexus. I am interested in how autocracies such as the
Chinese party-state can enjoy voluntary support from the masses while imposing tight political
control and why the masses in autocracies throughout the world often remain compliant when
they distrust their rulers. I aim to address autocratic state capacity and regime durability by
empirically examining autocratic political control and mass political behavior.
My research to date has focused on China to explore both the dynamics of autocratic repres-
sion and expropriation and the determinants of citizens’ political attitudes. For one project, I
used a difference-in-differences design to estimate the impact of state repression on protest mo-
bilization in China’s Tibet region. The results suggested that repression stifled mobilization in
the short term but intensified it in the long term. My MA thesis examined excessive fiscal ex-
traction, a covert form of expropriation in China; by applying firm–year two-way fixed effects
models to a large firm-level dataset, I demonstrated how local politicians’ career competition
may have led to excessive extraction. I am currently preparing to launch a survey experiment in
China to examine how exposure to violent prodemocracy protesters affects bystanders’ regime
support and protest propensity. For this project, I have designed a list experiment to com-
pensate for the likelihood of respondents falsifying their preferences due to China’s sensitive
political context and have validated my design in a recent pilot study.
These initial endeavors have helped me consider how to structure my future work on po-
litical control and behavior to extend current theoretical understandings of autocratic state ca-
pacity and regime stability. Theories of autocratic rule emphasize the role of elites—dictators,
their ruling coalitions, and their challengers—in state building and regime survival. Most of
these theories consider t he masses relevant only insofar as dictators are seen to react to mass
revolutionary threats through patronage and repression. In reality, dictators also actively boost
mass compliance and support, and they may do so without using repression or patronage: Re-
pression frequently backfires, and patronage rarely buys voluntary support.
Going forward, I aim first to complicate the conventional wisdom regarding autocratic po-
litical control. I will highlight indirect, informal, and innovative control strategies (e.g., infiltra-
tion, persuasion, and digital surveillance) rather than patronage and repression and explore the
role of dictators’ local political and bureaucratic agents operating outside the security appara-
tus. While examining these overlooked facets of political control, I will focus on two underlying
issues: First, how do dictators and local agents overcome obstacles to controlling citizens, such
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as insufficient information? Second, how do principal–agent problems between dictators and
local agents affect the outcomes of control strategies? And how do dictators solve such prob-
lems? I also aim to use the tools of psychology to study mass political behavior in autocracies.
While much is known about active dissent and passive compliance under authoritarian rule, we
know little about voluntary pro-regime attitudes and actions, including support for repressive
tactics of political control. How are these outcomes shaped by emotion, personality, identity,
and information through psychological mechanisms? I believe that t hese empirical inquiries
will enable me to complement elite-focused theories of autocratic rule by t heorizing the mech-
anisms through which mass support and compliance facilitate state and regime strengthening.
My training has prepared me to address these questions through rigorous quantitative anal-
ysis. At XXX, I took various graduate methodology courses offered by different departments
and schools, which covered econometrics and its intersections with machine learning and com-
putational methods. My desire to hone my quantitative skills led me to my current position as
a XXX supervised by economist XXX. For one project, I am working as part of a team to ex-
amine the political economy of African development using high-resolution satellite data. For
another, I am responsible for implementing a meta-analysis of the effects of weather and cli-
mate change on political violence. The first project has equipped me with new skills in causal
inference and GIS data processing, while the second has filled gaps in my knowledge of econo-
metrics. As such, I am prepared to engage in PhD-level training, and the Harvard Government
Department, with its leading methodologists, is an exciting environment in which to do so.
Harvard is also an ideal place to study political control and behavior in autocracies, espe-
cially in China. My interests in political control and behavior have been profoundly shaped
by Dr. A’s work on adaptive gover nance and citizens’ political awareness and by Dr. B’s work
on regime support. Drs. X, Y, and Z’s expertise in political psychology will greatly benefit my
work on political behavior. I also look forward to collaborating with Harvard’s methodologists
to develop survey methodologies and causal inference techniques to overcome challenges in
studying political behavior in autocracies, such as preference falsification and a lack of detailed
data on protest participation.
As well as being an ideal place to pursue my current research agenda, Harvard is the best
place for me to explore alternative thematic and empirical approaches to explaining state ca-
pacity and regime durability. Although I have considered state capacity and regime durability
to be closely interrelated outcomes, I look forward to exploring their respective evolution and
mutual interactions. Drs. B, C, and D have all challenged the conventional wisdom on the de-
velopment of state and regime institutions. I am eager to work with Dr. B to examine state
development in pre-communist China. Drs. B and D both combine quantitative analysis and
long-term historical perspectives to produce theoretically meaningful work; this is the kind of
research to which I aspire. The Harvard Government Department, with its leading methodol-
ogists, its commitment to historical analysis, and its strength in the study of state institutions,
will allow me to pursue my core interests while maximizing my potential.
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Statement of Purpose for Political Science Ph.D. Program
Cheng Cheng
State infrastructural power is "two-faced" when authoritarian governments are in control.
Growing up in a state-owned company neighborhood, I benefitted from state welfare. At the same time,
though, I can also testify to the state restrictions on the private sphere. Within seventy years of the
young regimes' establishment, households were dragged into the public domain by authoritative rules:
Cadres terminated unauthorized pregnancies without blinking. The neighborhood party branch sealed
residential buildings to contain COVID-19. However, in my parents' lifetime, this same infiltration of
society lifted children out of malnutrition. More recently, it controlled the spread of COVID. While
the police and military may serve as a temporary aid, street-level bureaucrats are the key to routine
policy implementation and, ultimately, the state's capacity to overcome the crisis. How can a state
penetrate to the household level within decades of its establishment? What determines a state's
infrastructural capacity? Intrigued by the state's power to legitimately impinge upon private lives and
curious about its stability, I hope to pursue an academic career in political science.
My previous research provides a foundational understanding of the topic. For my master's
thesis at Harvard University, I analyzed the state's infrastructural power in the public health sphere.
Using the enforcement of the One Child Policy in rural northeastern China (1971–1989) as a case study,
I sought to understand the causes of uneven policy efficacy in curbing fertility rates. I found that
regional variation in China's fertility rates departed from the conventional wisdom of modernization:
Impoverished counties had an earlier drop in their fertility rates while wealthier counties lagged. What
enabled poorer counties to enforce the unwelcome One Child Policy more successfully than affluent
counties? I hypothesized a self-reinforcing process of forming bureaucratic interests at the micro-level.
When the initial payment package outweighs pressure from the bureaucrats’ kin, the bureaucrats push
hard for policy implementation and further alienate themselves from the villagers’ interests. I then
evaluated my hypothesis with a comparative case study of four counties and quantitative analysis using
census data and original data. This evaluation confirms my theory. The research enriched my
understanding of the state-society relationship by demonstrating how a state strengthens its social
control power with its welfare expansion. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of authoritarian
resilience, I argued that a regime's stability might predominantly come from providing social services
instead of responding to occurrent challenges or becoming more tolerant of civic activities.
As I came to the end of my thesis project, I noticed that the civic organizations actively
collaborated with the state and supported social penetration by being absorbed by the state apparatus
in the One-Child Policy implementation. Therefore, the importance of local resource mobilization and
various local villages' responses called for a re-examination of state penetration from the social capital
and social organization pattern perspectives. How are social forces mobilized? How does social
resistance interact with policy adaptation? These puzzles led to a joint working paper with a Ph.D.
candidate at Harvard's History Department. We are examining the strategies whereby family-planning
offices recruited workers from communes, particularly those who received limited financial support
from higher government levels. From 1971 to 1989, rank-and-file bureaucrats enforced the highly
unpopular One Child Policy in the same communities where they had long lived. We hope to
understand the on-the-ground operation of the state-society negotiation process through our archival
research into the recruitment process. We also hope to address what enables society's collaboration
level when the state infringes private spheres, therefore avoiding social instability and undermining
society's potential challenge for an authoritarian regime.
In addition to my own research, I have had the opportunity to explore temporal variations in
infrastructural power from the broader perspective of the rulers and the ruled by working as a research
assistant for Professor Yuhua Wang. Delegated with the task critical to evaluating his theory on state
capacity and elite networks, I gathered China’s historical fiscal revenue data from the 8th to 20th
century as a proxy to measure the state's extractive power over society. I pulled together data on fiscal
revenues based on purchasing power parity with intensive archival research to facilitate comparative
evaluation across a long-time span. The data collection process was an excellent experience for
studying economic history and allowed me to gain insight into the changing balances between rent
extraction and social stability. The long temporal perspective helped me better understand the political
elites' power-sharing process from the central-local fiscal capacity perspective, which speaks to regime
resilience within the ruling class.
Moving forward, I would like to continue investigating subnational variation in infrastructural
power, using modern China's history of epidemic management as a case. From tuberculosis in the early
1950s to the current coronavirus, China has dramatically improved its local medical care facilities and
public health emergency infrastructure. The nature of epidemics calls for localities to obey national
guidelines, provide timely medical treatment, and enforce regulations on non-compliant citizens to
prevent major outbreaks. However, despite the central state's uniform directions, pandemic control has
not been equally effective everywhere. I hope to focus on temporary mobilized, and routine forces,
such as cities' public hospitals and temporary workers rallied against the epidemic. I will also address
social factors by observing how local communities organize and the private sector interacts with
regulations and state penetration. I intend to collect time-series data for national epidemics since 1949
via archival research.
This research will be especially significant when directed at populous developing countries
like China, India, and so on. These countries also perfect cases for sub-national evaluations as there
are plenty of variations and possible scenarios of pandemic coping given their uneven socio-economic
conditions across the region. By unraveling the fast-expanding infrastructural power puzzle, I hope to
uncover China's exceptional stability from both the rulers' and subjects’ perspectives. The epidemics
will serve as an ideal case for observing principal-agent issues within the bureaucratic system due to
the pandemic's nature. Both passive social control and positive measures ensure the state employs
social collaboration methods to cope with epidemics, which will answer authoritarian resilience from
societal and bureaucratic perspectives.
I have prepared myself for a Ph.D. through courses and research experiences at Peking
University and Harvard. I familiarized myself with statistical programming and methods such as
likelihood estimation, causal inference, and formal models. My training in the geospatial analysis will
also facilitate my research into local variations. Furthermore, the intensive training in archival research
at Peking University and my collaboration with Yuhua Wang, Saul Wilson (Harvard Government
Department), Hao Chen (USC Political Science Department) and Patric Xu (Peking University
Government School) to research the China’s Communist Party's organizational history have made me
sensitive to systemic patterns. They have given me the ability to comprehend issues through
comparative reading. The interdisciplinary training at Politics, Philosophy and Economics program
and my reading of classical texts in philosophy, sociology, and political theory courses have provided
me with a theoretical foundation.
Given New York University’s world-class faculty and exceptional academic resources in
related fields, I see no better place where my academic interests can flourish genuinely. I would love
to work with Professor Congyi Zhou for our shared interest in public policy and political science. I
also hope to work with Professor Pablo Querubin for his research in redistributive politics and
Professor Tara Slough for her expertise in bureaucratic politics. To bring my research into dialogue
with post-communist countries, I hope to work with Professor Joshua Tucker and Professor Arturas
Rozenas. I plan to take advantage of the ample chances to co-author with faculties as well as the
research assistant opportunities to develop my research skills, which will undoubtedly enrich my NYU
experience and help me further pursue a career in academia.
