I am an associate professor in Cornell University's Department of Government.

My research focuses on Chinese and authoritarian politics. My first book, Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China, was published by Oxford University Press. The New York Times profiled the book in January 2015. I currently lead Cornell's China's Cities research group. 

My next book, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts: Information, Ideology, and Authoritarian Rule in China, explores how and why authoritarian regimes rule as they do, integrating information, interests, and repression. I wrote about this research in pieces for the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog, on Xi Jinping's increasingly personal rule, China admitting that its statistics are unreliable, and the political implications of China’s stock market crisis. My article on the quality of Chinese GDP statistics, "Juking the Stats? Authoritarian Information Problems in China," was published by the British Journal of Political Science in January 2016. 

My research has been supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation, Cornell's Institute for the Social Sciences & East Asia Program, Ohio State University's Mershon Center & Institute for Population Research, NASA, and Yale University's MacMillan Center, among others.

I hosted and hope to return to the ChinaLab podcast, discussing current research on China.