Welcome! I am Renhao Ye, a Master of Chinese Economic and Political Affairs (MCEPA) student in School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. I also work as a Graduate Student Researcher at UC San Diego 21st Century China Center (21CCC) and UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). My primary research interests lie in state building, elite politics, and state-business relations under authoritarian regimes, with a regional focus on China and Southeast Asia.

My research addresses the questions of power sharing among political actors, and how their interactions, in turn, shape state capacity. I focus on why and how state-owned enterprises (SOEs) identify, address, and coordinate the distribution issues of infrastructure construction and public service provision across different regions, as well as the political and economic consequences of the unevenness distribution of policy resources. My work has appeared in outlets such as Comparative Politics and Studies in Comparative International Development. I also collect and maintain a hydropower project dataset (1949–2025), a provincial SOE leader biographical dataset (2012–2025), and is developing a natural disaster dataset (typhoon).

I received my Master’s Degree in Political Science, Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science (major) and Economics (minor) from Peking University.