Xiaobo Lü is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. Professor Lü was the founding Director of Columbia Global Centers | East Asia in Beijing in 2008-10. Professor Lü teaches courses on Chinese politics, political economy, and comparative politics. His research interests include post-socialist transition, corruption and good governance, regulatory reforms, and government-business relations. Currently he is working on a book manuscript, From Player to Referee: the Rise of the Regulatory State in China.
Xiaobo Lü is a member of Council on Foreign Relations, Committee of 100, and the National Committee of US-China Relations. He is a regular commentator on China and US-China relations on PBS, CNN, BBC, and NPR and has delivered speeches and briefings to organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Foundation, the Asia Society, World Affairs Council, National Committee for US-China Relations, American Center for International Leadership, Asia Society, the China Institute of America, and the Japan Society.
Professor Lü received his PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994.
Sau-yi Fong is a scholar of late imperial and modern China, as well as a historian of science and technology. Her research focuses on the transimperial histories of industrial technology, maritime knowledge, and military mobilization. She is currently working on a book project that examines late Qing China’s naval rebuilding program to explore the politics of industrial
technological transfer from the West to China in the nineteenth century. Portions of this project are forthcoming as an article in The Journal of Asian Studies.
In addition to her book project, she has written an article investigating the career trajectory of Ding Gongchen (1800-1875), a Muslim maritime merchant and amateur military technologist in mid-nineteenth-century China. This article, published in Late Imperial China 43, no. 2 (December 2022), received honorable mention for the quadrennial Zhu Kezhen Award given by the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine.
Her other publications include an article examining the Guomindang’s student military training program from 1928 to 1937, which appears in Modern China 49, no. 4 (July 2023).
Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the D. Kim Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Esherick-Ye Family Foundation, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. She received her PhD in East Asian History from Columbia University in 2022.