Government

Misook Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Socio-information and Communication Studies at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, Tokyo University, Japan. Her research examines the possibility of a transnational public sphere beyond international borders in the case of democratization movements in South Korea in 1970s and 80s. Transnational solidarity for South Korean democratization movements from overseas, including from Germany, Japan and the U.S., has been reported on since 2000. However, there is little academic research examining the method and reasons why overseas citizens formed transnational solidarity. Her research tries to articulate the process and the meaning of transnational solidarity within the issue of Korean democratization movements, especially focusing on activities in Tokyo. Tokyo was the center for sending Korean grassroots underground information to overseas and the location of many foreign missionary and correspondent offices. In her dissertation, Lee Misook’s goal is to understand the work and meaning of transnational advocacy networks (including overseas Korean communities, Christian networks, and intellectual activist groups) in empowering democratization movements in South Korea.

Li Lifeng is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science, Nanjing University. He is also a guest professor at the John Hopkins-Nanjing Center for American and Chinese Studies. His research mainly focuses on Chinese political history, especially the transformation of grassroots politics in 20th century China. Dr. Li has published The Revolutionary Party and the Rural Society (Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2011) and numerous articles and reviews in China’s leading academic journals. He is the Chinese translator of Awakening China (John Fitzgerald), Political Philosophy (David Miller), and History (John Arnold). The undergraduate and postgraduate courses he offers include “Political Institutions and Thought in Modern China”, “Political Sociology”, “History of Chinese Political Institutions”, and “Rural Politics in China”.

Dr. Ikuo is the current governor of Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. To read a recent article about Dr. Ikuo, please click here.

Guoqin Wang is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Zhejiang Institute of Administration and a Researcher at the Institute for China Stability, Southwest University of Political Science & Law. He received his doctoral degree in Political Science from Renmin University of China in 2008. His main research interests focus on social conflict and collective action in contemporary China. His current research is Political Socialization and Legitimizing Collective Violence in Collective Actions.

Dr. Qiang Zhang is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Development & Public Policy, Beijing Normal University. He received his Ph.D in Management from Tsinghua University. His research interests involve crisis management, policy process in China, volunteering, social innovation and social management. Dr. Zhang has spent over ten years in government. He most recently served as an independent consultant for UNDP, UNESCO and UNV. His recent publications include A Study on NGOs’ Participation in the Post-disaster Reconstruction for the Wenchuan Earthquake (Zhang Qiang, Yu Xiaomin, Peking University Press, 2009) and An Outlook on the Chinese Model of Emergency Management Based upon the Review of Wenchuan Earthquake Response: an Interactive Perspective of Strong State and Strong Society (Zhang qiang, Lu Qibin, Zhang Xiulan, Chinese Public Administration, 2011.5).  

Wilson Wong is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  He has his undergraduate degree, with major in government and public administration and minor in sociology, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  He received a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree and a Ph.D. degree in Public Administration from Syracuse University, New York, USA.  In 2002-03, Professor Wong served as a visiting fellow in the Center for Northeast Asian Policies, the Brookings Institution, in the Washington, D.C., USA.  His major research interests are public administration and management, public budgeting and finance, public policy analysis, and Hong Kong politics.  During his stay in the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he worked on a project to study the post-1997 political changes in Hong Kong after the return of its sovereignty from Britain to China.  The title of his research project was “Hong Kong after 1997: Hong Kong's Post-Handover Governance and Implications for China, Taiwan, and the US.”  It studied the post-handover governance of Hong Kong and used it as a lens to understand China's institutional capacity, and the craft and mechanisms of public governance, particularly in terms of managing a different and diverse system.

Wu Fengshi (PhD, University of Maryland, College Park) is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  While at the Harvard-Yenching Institute as a Visiting Scholar for the academic year 2008-09, Dr. Wu worked on a project titled “Persuading and Engaging the State: Political Relevance of International Non-Government Organizations in China.” Her research interests include environmental politics, civil society and transnational social forces.