Research

My research addresses core questions in public administration and governance, examining how digital technologies reshape delegation, accountability, administrative capacity, and institutional legitimacy in China and beyond, combining experimental and computational methods.

My research program has produced 8 papers, including 5 as first author and 6 as corresponding author. These include publications in Telematics and Informatics and Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, with articles under review at Governance, Policy & Internet, and Government Information Quarterly.

Publications

[1] Scope of Public Aversion to AI-Labeled Policy Communication: A Survey Experiment

First and corresponding author; Telematics and Informatics; IF = 8.3, SSCI Q1

Job Market Paper, published on ScienceDirect

Summary

Explicit labeling of online content produced by AI is a widely discussed policy for ensuring transparency and promoting public confidence. Yet little is known about the scope of AI labeling effects on public perception of policy communication. To examine the potential transparency–trust trade-off, I present evidence from a preregistered, nationally representative survey experiment (n = 3,861). I demonstrate that AI labeling of a news article about a proposed public policy reduces perceived accuracy and policy interest. However, its effects do not spill over to policy support or general misinformation concerns. Counterintuitively, increasing the salience of AI use reduces the negative impact of AI labeling on perceived accuracy, while one-sided versus two-sided framing has no moderating effect. Overall, my findings indicate that the adverse effect of AI labeling is limited in scope and empirically support its proper implementation.

[2] Panacea or Pandora’s Box: Diverse Governance Strategies to Conspiracy Theories and Their Consequences in China

Co-first and corresponding author, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2025; IF = 3.6, SSCI Q1
Published on nature.com (Nature Portfolio); highlighted by LSE DSI on LinkedIn, X, and official newsletter

• Analyzed state governance strategies for managing conspiracy theories (CTs), including propagation, tolerance, and rebuttal
• Combined qualitative case analysis, social network analysis, and topic modeling of 46,387 Weibo posts
• Found that state governance strategies mobilize public opinion but risk undermining administrative control and provoking backlash

Under Review

[3] Bureaucrat–Expert Collaboration in Generative AI Adoption: Institutional Logics in China
Second author; under review at Governance; IF = 3.8, SSCI Q1
Full text at SSRN

• Examined conflicts between political risk control and expert innovation in generative AI adoption
• Showed that bureaucrats retain control over public-facing outputs while accommodating technical innovation, producing an innovation–control equilibrium

[4] Governing Online Political Discourse: Computational Analysis and Social Simulation
Second and corresponding author; under review at Policy & Internet; IF = 3.6, SSCI Q1

• Applied LLM-based annotation on 343,764 posts with counterfactual social simulation
• Found that regulatory intervention reshapes citizen expression through gradual adaptation rather than immediate deterrence

[5] Framing Trump in Chinese and US News: A Computational Visual Analysis of Policy Discourse
Sole author; under review at Government Information Quarterly; IF = 10.0, SSCI Q1
Abstract at SSRN

• Applied computational emotional profiling of 257,056 images to examine state visual communication strategies
• Found systematic cross-national differences in how state and international media deploy visual framing

Working Papers

[6] Administrative Judgment under AI Sycophancy: Evidence from Citizen–State Deliberation Experiments
First and corresponding author
Supported by research grants totaling US$12,300 from OpenAI, Google, and LSE

• Examined how AI-mediated citizen–state deliberation distorts the informational foundations of administrative decision-making
• Developed an AI-mediated citizen–government conversational survey experiment on a representative sample (N = 3,170)
• Showed that AI-assisted deliberation entrenches citizens’ prior beliefs and polarizes policy judgment

[7] Administrative Authority in the Age of Automation: Public Acceptance of AI Welfare Decisions
Sole author

[8] How AI Labeling Affects Policy Support in Social Networks: Simulation and Survey Experiment
Second and corresponding author
Extended abstract at SSRN

[9] Silicon Respondents, Homogenized Opinions? Benchmarking AI Survey Simulation Against Human Responses
Sole author

Conference Acceptances

Public Administration and Political Science
    American Political Science Association Annual Meeting (APSA 2026, 2025, 2024)
    Annual Conference of European Political Science Association (EPSA 2025)
    Annual Meeting of Society for Political Methodology (PolMeth 2025)
    Annual Conference of International Communication Association (ICA 2025)

Computational and Digital Governance
    International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2026, 2024)
    Association for Computing Machinery Web Science Conference (ACM WebSci 2024)