The Stomach for Uncertainty: Professor Lynette Ong on Studying China from the Inside

I met Professor Lynette Ong in the petite garden in front of The Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. By the end of the Winter semester, all the snow had finally melted, and it was a warm, sunny day. Professor Ong was waiting for me at an iron wrought patio table, next to the bright brick wall of the north wing. She projected confidence and calmness, while also maintaining warmth.

Her confidence is certainly justified - she is truly a legend in her own field. Professor Ong’s achievements are countless: a Distinguished Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Toronto, a leading scholar of Chinese politics and political economy, director of the China Governance Lab at the Munk School, author of three books on China and comparative authoritarian politics, nonresident Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis, and the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Her research has won numerous awards, such as Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Award, the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Political Sociology, the biennial Canadian Political Science Association’s Prize in Comparative Politics, the Human Rights Best Book Awards from APSA, ISA, and ASA, Honorable Mention of the APSA’s Gregory Luebbert Best Book Award, as well as U of T Faculty of Arts & Science Dean’s Research Excellence Award. Meanwhile her Academic publications have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, among many others, and her research has been covered in The Economist, New York Times, New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Globe & Mail, etc.

In this interview, Professor Lynette Ong discusses how her academic journey, personal background, and research on China have shaped her work as a scholar of authoritarian politics, political economy, and comparative politics. It reflects on her teaching, the China Governance Lab, the risks of fieldwork in China, and her future research directions.

Her research has won numerous awards, such as Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Award, the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Political Sociology, the biennial Canadian Political Science Association’s Prize in Comparative Politics, the Human Rights Best Book Awards from APSA, ISA, and ASA, Honorable Mention of the APSA’s Gregory Luebbert Best Book Award, as well as U of T Faculty of Arts & Science Dean’s Research Excellence Award. Meanwhile her Academic publications have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, among many others, and her research has been covered in The Economist, New York Times, New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Globe & Mail, etc.

In this interview, Professor Lynette Ong discusses how her academic journey, personal background, and research on China have shaped her work as a scholar of authoritarian politics, political economy, and comparative politics. It reflects on her teaching, the China Governance Lab, the risks of fieldwork in China, and her future research directions.

My academic journey initially started in Southeast Asia. Although my first two degrees were in economics, I decided to delve deeper into political science. As an ethnic Chinese born in Southeast Asia, I decided at the very beginning of my political career to specialise in my native country's politics. Consequently, when I finished my studies in the early 2000s, I worked in Singapore, in the government sector and private consulting, which only strengthened this conviction.

At that time, China was rising economically, and multiple of my clients expressed strong interest in investing there. However, they firstly wanted to know more about the possibilities available regarding this matter. Hence, I provided assistance by sharing knowledge about China, working between the fields of political science and economics.

After working interdisciplinary for a while, I decided to complete my PhD in China studies at the Australian National University. In the meantime, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard. Moreover, I had occasionally done “visiting fellowships” at Columbia, Peking University, Shanghai, and Fudan University. After successfully finalising my PhD programme, I proceeded with a worldwide job hunt, and the best of the three job offers I received was from the University of Toronto. Upon arriving, I was impressed by how multicultural and hospitable the city is. As I took a cab from the airport down to the hotel near the St. George campus, the city’s little details, such as the multiple Chinese signs I saw, reminded me of home. The weather also fascinated me: although I was told how cold it gets, I didn’t expect it to be that extreme.

Today, my work continues to reflect that movement between different places, disciplines, and audiences. Right now, I would say that I spend around 70% on academic work and 30% on public-oriented work. Media studies also consumes some of my time, even though I'm a bit selective about that. I get invited to public policy or government forums, which allow me to communicate my academic work to a broader policy audience.

As I was growing up in the political settings where there was a strong authoritarian influence - that's a landscape that I've always been interested in and tried to understand. Within that authoritarian system, there are many puzzles to be solved and addressed- I tend to look at the world through that lens. Even when I analyse democracies, I try to pay closer attention to the half-empty side of it. For instance, the democratic backsliding is an authoritarian tendency. So, at the end of the day, I see political science as an institutionalisation of human psychology.

By having worked in a number of countries throughout my academic and non-academic careers, I am humbled by what I see. I am a fairly open-minded person, partly because of having experienced different places, systems, cultures, and their social outcomes - their pros and cons, per se. I am fascinated by how divergent circumstances could bring different parts of the world together, and having experienced multiple cultural systems, enables me to connect the dots a little better.

Academia, in my opinion, is a very insular system. People in academia tend to stick to tradition, and there's nothing wrong with that because the bar of substantiating an argument is very high. However, for someone in academia, my work is extremely interdisciplinary. So, I wouldn't say I am shaped by any particular tradition or school of thought.

My curiosity is my boundary. It's simply a forever learning curve.

Teaching is something that I enjoy. There was a time when I thought I would become a researcher and wouldn't want to teach at all. The idea of communicating to a large audience was not very attractive to me, but people change. Similarly, you had asked me 25 years ago whether I would enjoy talking to the media, and I would definitely have said no. But these days, if you stick a microphone in my face, I wouldn’t have a problem talking to you about almost anything.

Mainly, I teach fourth-year seminars and graduate students, including master's students, on authoritarian politics from a comparative perspective, but I also have experience teaching undergraduate courses on global China and domestic Chinese politics. For example, next year I'll also be teaching an undergraduate course on Chinese politics at Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. This is very exciting, as it is truly a personal challenge; I usually talk at a level where students have a degree of understanding, but this course is meant to address a more general audience.

To keep things interesting, I try to change my syllabus every year. Also, Chinese politics is not stagnant, and it changes quite rapidly, so I try to reject outdated syllabi and introduce new readings.

In that sense, I'm kind of blessed. Although debates about China can be very polarised, luckily, I haven’t seen that much of it in Canada. There's a bit of that, but not much anti-China sentiment. For example, there are plenty of cases that I’ve heard of, in other universities, when young nationalists from China are opposing what we think are well-known facts, such as labour camps in Xinjiang, or violent repressions in Hong Kong. Thankfully, in my career I have not come across many such students. Not more than six in ten years of teaching.

Maybe the reason for that is that my students are self-selective, or the Chinese nationalists are just outnumbered in my class, so they wouldn't speak out. My academic blessing is the ability to have a decent, frank discussion with my students and not have to worry about polarised views or being misquoted.

But overall, there are many professional risks and costs involved in teaching Chinese politics nowadays. You have to accept that whatever you say, there will be powerful authorities who will disagree with you, right? Many people wouldn't want to take the risk. So that is something that I think about quite often.

I would say seeing students do very well. Sometimes I can just see something in a student that tells me that they have got a lot of potential, right? For instance, once in a while, I get emails from students whom I taught some time ago, and I learn that they are now working for the PMO or holding a director position in global affairs. That's very personally rewarding!

In my understanding, the idea of a university research lab is to serve as an incubator that cultivates the next generation of China’s scholars and brings them together. It is incredibly important to pique students’ curiosity throughout the learning process! Within my lab, I place an emphasis on immersing students in all available resources and then allowing them to learn independently.

This year in particular, we are focused on graduate fellows. I personally handpicked six graduate fellows who are master's degree or PhD students, giving them weekly office hours, to individually coach them. Research fellows in the lab conduct book reviews, interview authors of recently published books, and undertake research projects, collecting and presenting their own data. Within the lab, we also have multiple other projects. For example, we’re currently trying to bring in undergraduate students and hold a public policy and global affairs essay contest.

A major part of one of the lab projects is social unrest in China. In fact, it predates the lab; I’ve been working on it for more than 15 years, with more than 100 alumni participants. Some of them have continued their paths in law school, PhD in various disciplines, or working in the government throughout their professional careers. Witnessing my students' successes, I began to see my purpose as a teacher and instructor, offering opportunities to those who would like to pursue careers in politics.

Curiosity. Curiosity and willingness to embrace different mindsets, assumptions about the world and other people. It’s necessary to be willing to be influenced and to work hard, because it's a highly competitive field, you know? If one has these attributes, they would do reasonably well.

In general, I tend to like authors who are also wavering around a number of disciplines. For instance, I was very interested in James Scott's work, which can never be defined by any single discipline - something that resonates with me, as it does with a lot of people.

Moreover, I admire some of those thinkers who are torn between political science and sociology, such as Theda Skocpol.

I would say go read The New York Times. They have excellent China coverage.

You gotta have the stomach for uncertainty - there’s no better way to phrase it. It’s essential to have perseverance, strength, and patience. It would help if you’re a risk taker, as a certain degree of risk in this field is almost unavoidable. In order to be successful, you have to put yourself out there and venture to do things that others wouldn't do. Another important factor is conviction; without it, you can easily sell yourself out.

With this book, I went through various stages of life. At some point, I was even depressed, partly because it took so long, due to it being a very difficult project. I started it in 2012, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, I couldn't travel, so not much progress was made. I told myself I had to complete it; if I didn't finish during COVID, I probably never would.

There were other periods, such as the end of 2016, when I seriously doubted whether I could bring all my data together; I've collected so much data in the course of it, that I didn’t know how to utilise some of it. Making the data coherent was a colossal challenge.

Therefore, I travelled to eight different cities throughout the first eight-year period in order to tell a coherent story. Some data points were very demanding, as they pulled me in different directions. Hence, I let it drag on for too long.

The other big challenge is how challenging it is to do physical field research in China. At the beginning of the project, it was the end of Hu Jintao's period (from 2002 to 2012) and the beginning of Xi Jinping’s governance. Xi Jinping’s first term was actually quite okay. It was not until from around 2016, the start of his second term, that a number of laws on security, espionage, and regulations about academic work were passed. Consequently, people in academia grew increasingly concerned, as being in the field became dangerous. At some point, it seemed as if I posed a danger to myself and to my host. Nonetheless, I was halfway through the project, so I just couldn’t quit.

Between 2012 and 2020, when I finished the book, I had taken two sabbaticals in China: the first in Beijing in 2012, and the second in Shanghai and Beijing in 2016. Being in a position to be based in the country and travel around from there, getting a sense of the current situation.

Given the type of research that I work on, it would be surprising if I didn't ever feel that way. China field research can sometimes put us on the edge of personal risks. My public policy work on China has also occasionally put me in situations where I get questioned by both the pro-China and the anti-China camps.

However, I'm not particularly bothered by it. It all goes back to conviction: if you have conviction in what you say, especially for public consumption, it serves as the core that moves you forward with your priorities. I must say, those who see public statements as something to be shaped to fit certain criteria or outcomes will feel very uneasy when they are challenged.

Due to the restrictions imposed by the field research in China, I'm moving in the digital direction. Although I am still travelling to and from China and writing about politics within China, I also develop outside projects. So even though I'm primarily a specialist in comparative politics, my work is shifting heavily toward international relations. As a result, those interested in China’s public policy wish to understand the international relations side of things, which leads me to incorporate it into my writing.

China studies tends to be a little isolated, because there are so many fields and subfields. China is big and it's different, so it's often seen as an outlier. The traffic has usually run one way: China scholars draw on the comparative politics literature, but comparativists rarely draw on ours. I think it should run both ways.

So I hope to break that isolation. There's plenty of conversation to be had between China and other countries, and I want to facilitate partnerships between those who write about authoritarian politics in general and those who specialise solely in China.

Professor Lynette Ong is Distinguished Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Toronto, with appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, where she directs the China Governance Lab. Her first two degrees were in economics, and she worked in government and private consulting in Singapore before completing her PhD in China studies at the Australian National University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and visiting fellowships at Columbia, Peking, and Fudan universities. She is also a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Asia Society's Center for China Analysis and at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. Her research spans authoritarian politics, contentious politics, and the political economy of development, and she is the author of four books, including Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), which has won seven best book awards. Her work has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, The China Quarterly, and Foreign Affairs, and has been covered in The Economist, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and the Globe and Mail.