Zheng Yongnian


Zheng Yongnian is a Chinese political scientist and political commentator who has studied and written on many aspects of contemporary China and especially on Chinese politics. Since 2008, he is professor and director of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.

Education and career

Zheng was born in Yuyao, Zhejiang, China in 1962. After completing his secondary education in Yuyao, he moved to Peking University for his undergraduate and master's studies in political science. After his graduation from Peking University in 1988, he worked for two years as assistant professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Peking University. Later, he studied at Princeton University, in the United States between 1990 and 1995 and obtained PhD in political science in 1995.
After a two-year term at Harvard as SSRC-MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security, Zheng moved to the newly founded East Asian Institute in Singapore as a research fellow and later a senior research fellow. In 2005, he was appointed full professor and founding Research Director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. In July 2008, he succeeded Prof. Dali Yang and has since served as director of the , a Singaporean think tank under a statute of the National University of Singapore. Zheng also serves as advisor to independent think tank Longus Research Institute, giving talks and contributing essays to their Longus Review.
Zheng is a co-editor of , and published by World Scientific in Singapore and editor of the China Policy Series published by Routledge.

Academic work

Zheng's academic works are mainly on politics of the People's Republic of China. His earlier works in the United States, including the PhD thesis in Princeton and post-doctoral research at Harvard, dealt with China's central-local relations and state-society interactions in Chinese nationalism. Since late 90s, his research topics have included the impact of globalization and information technology on Chinese politics and government.
In his most recent work, The Chinese Communist Party as Organizational Emperor, Zheng argues that the Chinese Communist Party is not a political party in the usual sense of the word but rather an organizational form of traditional institution of the Emperor, similar to an organizational form of the Machiavellian prince à la Gramsci. According to an interview with Chinese journal Nanfengchuang, his current works in progress include a study on the structure of China's political economy and the nature of the modern Chinese polity as non-nation state.

Political commentary

Since the 2000s, Zheng has been a columnist, writing weekly commentaries on China for Hong Kong Economic Journal and the Lianhe Zaobao. His weekly commentaries featured a broad range of critical issues in contemporary China's political, economic, social and cultural development. In these commentaries he consistently argues for gradual reforms in China's social, economic and political lives. In the recent China Model debate, he takes the stand that while China definitely has a model of its own consistent and continuous with its historical patterns of development, the model needs constant reforms to avoid systemic crisis. As an internationally recognized authority on Chinese politics, he was frequently consulted and quoted by the New York Times on recent developments in China's domestic politics in 2012, an eventful year of the Chinese Communist Party's power transition. Besides being a columnist, he also appeared on TV programs. In the 2006 CCTV documentary The Rise of Great Nations, he was quoted to have expressed the view that the strength of a Great Power lies within its domestic institutions, its external powers merely reflecting an extension of its domestic institutions.

English-language publications