Yan Gu

Yan Gu’s research focuses on how China’s extensive information control shapes public opinion and boosts China’s authoritarian resilience. Using web scraping, network analysis, online experiment and other computational social science methods, her dissertation collects large-scale, real-world behavior data to trace the subtle causal effects of the state’s control over the Internet, academia and the press.

Before joining the JSIS Ph.D. program, Yan earned an M.A. in sociology from Peking University and worked for Tencent News and the Changjiang Daily. During her doctoral studies, she also was a part-time writer for the Dedao app, where she introduced books and research on comparative and authoritarian politics to millions of Chinese users on the app. Her experience in media and the tech industry inspired her research on public opinion in China.

Publications

• Book Review: Alvarez, R. Michael. Computational Social Science: Discovery and Prediction. The Midsouth Political Science Review, Volume 18, 2017, pp. 81-84 (link:  http://uca.edu/politicalscience/files/2017/12/MPSR-Vol-18-2017-Gu.pdf )
• Book Review: Guobin Yang, ed., China’s Contested Internet. Journal of Chinese Political Science, 22(4), 2017, pp. 703-704. (link: https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/guobin-yang-ed-china-s-contested-internet/15139574)
• “Why Do Chinese Netizens Love Donald Trump?” The Diplomat. March 25, 2017. (link: https://thediplomat.com/2017/03/why-do-chinese-netizens-love-donald-trump/)

Grants & Fellowships

• Top Scholar Fellowship, University of Washington, 2014 – 2015.
• Dissertation Fellowship, The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, 2018-2019.