Jean Oi

Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She directs the China Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and is the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University. In March 2022, she was elected Vice President of the Association for Asian Studies, serving as its President from March 2023 to March 2024.

A Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan, Oi first taught at Lehigh University and later in the Department of Government at Harvard University before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997.

Oi’s work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on China’s political economy and institutions in the process of reform. Central-local relations in China are the core of her research. Employing a political economy perspective, she has “followed the money”—first grain, then taxes, and most recently local government debt as a window into politics.

Delving into China’s authoritarian resilience, she co-edited a volume on how adaptive governance by local-level institutions has met the challenges and demands from an increasingly complex society that strain resources and the political system as the economy has grown exponentially. More recently, she co-edited a volume that highlights the challenges China now faces after reaping record-breaking growth over the last 40 years by only tweaking the institutions that it inherited from the Mao period. Instead of tackling the most politically difficult part of the reform process, leaders appear to be “going back to the future,” relying on a playbook not seen since the Mao period.

Currently, she is researching how local governments are coping after the collapse of land finance and the overhang from huge local government debt after COVID. Moving beyond her earlier work, Oi also is engaged in a project that takes an institutional and micro-level approach to identify the key players and their interests as local governments seek to go global with the Belt and Road Initiative.