Thomas Cao is Assistant Professor of Technology Policy at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. An interdisciplinary political economist, his research examines technology policy, economic governance, and the political implications of digital and technological transformation. His recent public work has focused on issues such as disinformation, Chinese technology, and the broader relationship between technology and political economy.

Bai Gao is Professor of Sociology at Duke University. His research lies at the intersection of political economy, globalization, and Chinese society, with a particular focus on state industrial policy, technological transformation, and international political economy. His current work examines the rise of the electric vehicle industry in China and explores how large-scale historical shifts, including the changing balance between market forces and social protection, hegemonic transitions, and adv

Armando Lara-Millán is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. A political economic sociologist, he studies changing markets and their enabling institutions with particular attention to history, knowledge, power, and organizational life. His work has been especially influential in the study of public hospitals, jails, law, and fiscal austerity, and his book Redistributing the Poor received the American Sociological Association’s 2022 Distinguished Scholarly

Jeff Lockhart is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research explores the social and political dimensions of science and technology, with particular attention to the contested boundaries of gender and sexuality. Combining computational social science with archival, qualitative, and technographic approaches, his work examines how technical systems shape knowledge, classification, and social difference.

Xiaobo Lü is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines fiscal policy, party-building, and state-society relations in authoritarian regimes, with a particular focus on China. More broadly, his work explores the formation and functioning of political parties and institutions in both historical and contemporary authoritarian contexts.

Victor Shih is Director of the 21st Century China Center and Professor and Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego. A leading scholar of Chinese political economy, his research focuses on Chinese banking, fiscal and exchange rate policy, and elite politics.

Cihan Tuğal is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research centers on political sociology, social theory, religion, capitalism and development, and social movements, with particular expertise in Islam and the Middle East, comparative and historical sociology, and ethnography. His recent work examines populism, neoliberalization, state capitalism, and the far right across Turkey, the United States, Hungary, Poland, India, and the Philippines.

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of the Center on Digital Culture and Society and Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. His research focuses on digital media, social movements, civic engagement, and the cultural and political transformation of contemporary China. A leading scholar of digital activism and communication, his work examines how media technologies resha

Han Zhang is the Young Family Assistant Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. A political sociologist and computational social scientist, his research examines how digital surveillance technologies reshape social movements, state-society relations, and governance in authoritarian regimes, especially in China. Using computer vision, deep learning, and large-scale data, he studies protest dynamics in China, global surveillance camera densities, and the br

Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, Professor of Sociology, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His research focuses on institutional change in contemporary Chinese society, especially Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relations. His work has been especially influential in the study of Chinese bureaucracy, governance, and organizational processes.