I study how the terms of being governed are worked out, and by whom.

My work sits between development economics, the political economy of institutions and the anthropology of the state. I began with an economist’s question, where state capacity comes from, and it has turned into an anthropological one: what governing looks like from inside the relationships that carry it. In most of the places I care about, very little of the capacity to govern was designed, and much of what was inherited was built for extraction. What governs is worked out day by day between officials, the people they govern, and the outsiders who arrive to help, in grey zones where coercion and consent are not cleanly separable, and where whether something counts as a duty, a favour or a threat depends on who is asking. The same ambiguity that lets capacity be generated is what lets it be captured.

I grew up in Jixi, in China’s northeast, and have studied and worked in Changshu, Chicago, Washington, Saint Paul, Beijing and New York. At Yale I read anthropology and political science within the African Studies MA. I am learning Kiswahili, and have begun Kinyarwanda, with the intention of working in them rather than around them. Alongside research I work with the UN Office of the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict and with the World Bank’s youth engagement program, and in 2018 I founded SEESALT, a volunteer network of researchers and practitioners working on development.

Research

Four projects, one question: what people actually do with rules that are left open, and what an institution comes to be credited with as a result. The cases (Rwanda, Brazil, the Himalaya, North Africa) are chosen for what they let me observe, not for where they sit on a map. East Africa is where the question is most open, and where I expect to spend most of my time answering it.

• Who keeps the record? Rwanda’s gacaca courts left an enormous documentary trace of how communities negotiated justice after the genocide. As that trace moves into digital archives, it is looked after by a small number of archivists, ministry staff and intermediaries who catalogue, digitise and care for it day by day. I am interested in that work as a practice rather than as a policy: what preservation involves in the room, which choices it requires, and how those choices shape what the archive can later be read for. This is where most of my time goes now.
• Negotiation-based capacity. Beginning with Rwanda’s post-1994 institutions, I argue that capacity can be generated inside institutional grey zones where the state is at once extractor and provider, and where citizens decide, reading ambiguous signals, how much to give, drawing on a skill Bert Ingelaere’s interlocutors called ubwenge. What results is a set of power relations more than a stock of administrative ability, and it does not wait for the sequence development theory assumes.
• Who fails the filter? A rule that is written but never checked still changes behaviour, and it does so unevenly. Using the full Brazilian firm registry, I trace who is screened out by a minimum capital requirement that nobody verifies, and where the screening actually happens.
• Attributive ambiguity. When a disaster can be read either as an act of nature or as a failure of governance, states anticipate the reading and invest accordingly: visible response capacity grows, quiet prevention lags. Cases from the Himalaya and North Africa.

The evidence differs by project: sixty-nine million administrative records in one; in another, an archive, the people who look after it, and whatever I am able to learn by being there long enough to be told something twice. I take the mismatch to be the point rather than a problem. A claim about what an institution does should not depend on the instrument that happened to be at hand.

Where this is going. My undergraduate thesis argued that Rwanda’s post-genocide institutions could not be transferred. Rwanda has since set out to be learned from anyway: it sends soldiers abroad as peacekeepers, and through the Rwanda Cooperation Initiative it hosts delegations from across the continent and co-designs systems with other governments. The doctoral project I am building follows the officials who host these visits and the delegations who come to learn: what each side thinks it is showing and seeing, what changes on arrival, and what standing being learned from confers on the state at home. It will be done in Kinyarwanda, beginning in Kigali.

Read the full research program, with the concepts and the cases that test them.

Papers

• Who Fails the Filter? Size, Verification and the Incidence of an Unchecked Minimum Capital Requirement. Solo-authored. Submitted to NEUDC 2026, Cornell. SSRN working paper, 2026.
• Attributive Ambiguity: How Anticipated Deniability Deforms State Disaster Capacity. With Luoxianer Peng. Accepted, AAG Annual Meeting, New York, February 2027.
• Who Keeps the Record of Negotiation? Custody, Capacity, and the Digital Afterlife of Rwanda’s Gacaca Archive. In progress. Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era graduate cohort, Genocide Studies Program, Yale, 2026–27.
• 全球南方国别经验与新发展主义理论要素探索：兼论区域国别研究的方法论贡献 (Country Experience in the Global South and the Theoretical Elements of New Developmentalism, with a Note on the Methodological Contribution of Area Studies). Xu Xiuli (China Agricultural University) and Zhijun He. Chinese-language; cases from China and Rwanda. Final manuscript, September 2026, commissioned for 《全球南方研究》.
• Does AI Clinical Decision Support Build or Erode Physician Competence? A Randomized Evaluation with Standardized Patients in Rural Primary Care. Research design. Award of Excellent Abstract, PKU–Yale Global Health Economics Summer Institute 2026: AI for Planetary Health, Beijing, July 2026.
• After the Catastrophe: Rwanda’s Transformation. Honours thesis, Macalester College, defended April 2026, highest distinction. Full text.

The full list, with status, press and corrections.

Positions

• 2026 – 27MADE Graduate Fellow, Genocide Studies Program, Yale MacMillan CenterMass Atrocities in the Digital Era cohort; the preservation and digital afterlife of post-atrocity judicial records in Africa
• 2026 – 27Graduate seminar participant, Program in Agrarian Studies, YaleAgrarian Societies, the program’s graduate seminar, and its colloquium series
• 2026 – 27Don Lavoie Fellow, Mercatus Center at George Mason UniversityMarket and Political Orders cohort; seminars on Lavoie’s work on economic knowledge, and on the knowledge that lives in practice rather than in words
• 2026 –Convener, Yale MacMillan Center–Yale Center Beijing Dialogue SeriesConversations with people who have built institutions in their own countries, for audiences in China and the Asia-Pacific; each session is devoted to one place and completes the series title The View From. First session, 20 October 2026
• 2026 – 27Graduate Affiliate, Pierson College, YaleOne of the residential college’s graduate affiliates, organising and hosting events for its students across the year
• 2024 –Research fellow for Tonderai Chikuhwa, Senior Policy Advisor, UN Office of the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in ConflictMachine-learning analysis of five decades of Security Council resolutions
• 2023 –Lead, Informal Economy, World Bank Youth Advisory Group (CIVIC)Washington, DC
• 2018 –Founder, SEESALTA volunteer network of researchers and practitioners working on development; its members run programmes in five countries
• 2026Invited moderator, Youth Dialogue on Global DevelopmentCollege of International Development and Global Agriculture, China Agricultural University

Education

• 2026 – 28MA in African Studies, Yale UniversityFull-tuition fellowship, Council on African Studies
• 2026BA Honors in International Studies, magna cum laude, Macalester CollegeKofi Annan/Turck Scholar
• 2021 – 25Graduate credentials, Harris School of Public Policy, University of ChicagoInternational policy; monetary policy and international finance; policy analytics
• 2019 – 22International Baccalaureate, UWC Changshu China

Recognition

• Rhodes Scholarship finalist, China constituency, 2026
• Brown University Global Fellows in Courage, finalist, 2025
• First place, UN Tech Over Hackathon 2025, Team SEESALTUN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, with UNICEF
• Qingmiao Scholar, Chinese Academy of Social SciencesRanked first of 274
• Rise Global Finalist, Schmidt Futures and the Rhodes Trust, 2021
• 13th Soong Ching Ling Scholarship, 2018

Beyond research

Thirteen years of Peking opera training; I also play the guqin. I write literary nonfiction in Chinese under the project name 野花繁盛处 (Where Wildflowers Grow), and I draw 星河兔, a WeChat sticker series modelled on a real rabbit named Pampam, who now serves as SEESALT’s Chief Happiness Officer.