Jiangnan Zhu is a professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration of the University of Hong Kong. She specializes in comparative politics with a research focus on corruption and anticorruption, elite politics, and public opinion in China. She has published in many leading journals, including the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Public Administrative Review, Governance, Policy Studies Journal, Lancet, etc., and multiple book chapters in several books. Her forthcoming book will be published by Cambridge University Press.
She is the editor of the Journal of Chinese Political Science and an editorial board member of Public Administration and Asian Review of Political Economy. She frequently serves as a reviewer of renowned journals, major research grants, and award committee member. She has won several internal and external awards, prizes, and research grants.
Professor Zhu received her PhD in Political Science and Master of Mathematical Models of Social Sciences from Northwestern University and her Bachelor’s Degrees in International Relations and Economics from Peking University.
Professor Zhu specializes in comparative politics, with a particular research focus on corruption, which remains a significant barrier to socio-economic development and state capacity-building worldwide. Her approach to studying corruption goes beyond the traditional state-centered perspective, which predominantly views corruption as a deviation from formal institutions. Instead, she uses corruption as a lens to uncover the underlying logic of opaque authoritarian politics and previously overlooked mechanisms in political economy and public behaviors.
For instance, she is among the first to draw scholarly attention to the formation of “public perception of corruption,” which often diverges from individuals’ actual experiences of corruption but plays a crucial role in defining the level of governmental corruption. She has also explored the paradox of high corruption levels alongside rapid economic growth in China, offering insights into the longstanding debate on the relationship between corruption and economic development. This counterintuitive case has enriched the discourse on corruption and economic growth.
She has also initiated a series of studies on the politics of anticorruption in authoritarian regimes. She has linked research on anticorruption to informational politics and elite politics in China, addressing several intriguing puzzles relevant to both academia and society, such as the politicization of anticorruption campaigns and societal responses to large-scale corruption crackdowns.
