Profile
Keywords: Government and politics, Canadian politics and government, Political science, International relations, Public policy, South Asian literatures, Statistics, n.e.c., Political areas studies, Public sector and government management
I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of British Columbia. I am also non-resident scholar at the 21st Century China Centre at UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. Previously, I was a Princeton-Harvard China and the World Fellow at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, a POSCO Visiting Scholar at the East-West Center in Honolulu, and an inaugural Wang Gungwu Fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
My research lies at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics. Some of my previous and ongoing works have explored the impact of domestic politics on the process and content of foreign economic and security policies and how global supply chains reshape politics of trade and investment. Using China as the primary case of inquiry and employing a variety of methods, including interviews, archival research, survey experiment, and large-N analysis, my research aims to shed light on China’s multifaceted global engagements and impacts as well as the domestic drivers behind them.
My recent books include Token Forces: How Tiny Troop Deployments became Ubiquitous in UN Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press 2022), Fragmenting Globalization: The Politics of Preferential Trade Liberalization in China and the United States (University of Michigan Press 2021), and How China Sees the World: Insights from China’s International Relations Scholars (Palgrave 2019). My articles have appeared in general political science journals such as Journal of Politics and Political Science Research and Methods , internatio na l relations journals such as International Affairs and International Studies Quarterly, area studies journals such as Asian Survey , China Quarterly , and Pacific Affairs, as well as interdisciplinary journals such as Business and Politics, Regulation and Governance, and Studies in Comparative International Development. My research has received grants and awards from such organizations as the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation of the United States, the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, the Association of Chinese Political Studies, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation.
Outputs Show only Author
Title
Category
Date
Authors
Projects
Digital Platforms, Identity, and Integration among Chinese Canadians Chinese Canadians, accounting for 5% of Canada’s population, are one of the country’s largest racialized groups. Many are first-generation immigrants who arrive with distinct media habits shaped by China’s Great Firewall, which restricts access to global platforms like Facebook and X/Twitter. Instead, they rely on Chinese-origin platforms such as WeChat, with its 1.3 billion monthly active users. Upon migrating to Canada, Chinese immigrants must navigate dual media ecosystems—one rooted in Chinese narratives and another shaped by Canadian and global perspectives—raising critical questions about their identity, integration, and political attitudes. This paper will examine these dynamics using data from a nationally representative survey of Chinese Canadians. It explores how reliance on Chinese-origin platforms reinforces transnational ties and shapes perceptions of integration, compared to the influence of global platforms in fostering belonging and civic engagement. Additionally, the study investigates how dual-platform use mediates hybrid identities and geopolitical attitudes in the context of growing Canada-China tensions. By interrogating the interplay between digital communication tools and immigrant adaptation, this research contributes to scholarship on migration, transnationalism, and digital media, offering insights into the complexities of integration in multicultural democracies.TRS4 3.1.3 University of British Columbia Conference 2025-09-11 TRS4 3.1.3 Digital Media, Identity, and Belonging Among Chinese Canadians Chinese Canadians, who make up roughly 5% of Canada’s population, represent one of the country’s largest racialized communities. Many are first-generation immigrants who arrive with established digital communication habits, often shaped by Chinese-language platforms such as WeChat. Upon resettlement, they encounter a new media environment that includes Canadian and international platforms, presenting both opportunities and tensions in navigating identity, belonging, and civic life. This paper draws on a nationally representative survey of Chinese Canadians to explore how differential media usage patterns affect political attitudes, civic engagement, and transnational connections. It examines how reliance on Chinese-language platforms helps sustain cultural ties and diasporic networks, while engagement with international platforms may foster a greater sense of inclusion in Canadian society. The study also investigates how exposure to multiple information ecosystems influences perceptions of international affairs and geopolitical developments, especially in light of evolving Canada–China relations. By analyzing the intersection of digital media practices, identity formation, and integration experiences, the paper contributes to broader discussions on diaspora politics, transnationalism, and the evolving role of global media in shaping political subjectivities across borders.TRS4 3.1.3 University of British Columbia Conference 2025-10-15 TRS4 3.1.3 Support for the use of military force to prevent secession: the case of Scottish independence University of British Columbia Publication 2025-07-29 Jaroslav Tir, Shane Singh,
Li, X. Contextual semantics graph attention network model for entity resolution Entity resolution technology is the process of distinguishing whether data from different knowledge bases refer to the same entity in the real world. Existing research takes entity pairs as input and makes judgments based on the characteristics of entity pairs. However, there is insufficient utilization of contextual semantics, as existing methods fail to effectively model the token-attribute associations within data sources and cross-attribute semantic hierarchical relationships, which weakens the discriminative power of key attributes. What' more, they exhibit failure in handling polysemous ambiguities, as conventional graph neural network adopts rigid node representations that cannot dynamically adjust word meanings according to attribute-specific contexts. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Contextual Semantics Graph Attention Network (CSGAT), which extracts contextual information at token and attribute levels to generate semantically fused embeddings. The advantages of CSGAT are: 1) Leveraging the Transformer self-attention mechanism to extract feature vectors of words, model sequence relationships, and calculate the degree of relevance with other words; 2) Employing the attention mechanism on contextual information at the attribute level to extract semantic embeddings to enrich attribute embeddings, forming more discriminative attribute embeddings; 3) Utilizing the graph attention network to generate residual vectors for final entity resolution decisions. Experimental on Amazon-Google and BeerAdvo-RateBeer datasets show that, as compared with the competing methods, CSGAT can achieve significant improved performance on F1-score with fine Precision and Recall. Code is available at https://github.com/xhtech2024/csgat . University of British Columbia Publication 2025-07-25 Li, X. , Shuai Fan, Junping Yao, He Sun
Propaganda and Blame Attribution during Economic Downturns: Evidence from China University of British Columbia Publication 2025-03-20 Digital Platforms, Identity, and Integration Among Chinese Canadians Chinese Canadians, accounting for 5% of Canada’s population, are one of the country’s largest racialized groups. Many are first-generation immigrants who arrive with distinct media habits shaped by China’s Great Firewall, which restricts access to global platforms like Facebook and X/Twitter. Instead, they rely on Chinese-origin platforms such as WeChat, with its 1.3 billion monthly active users. Upon migrating to Canada, Chinese immigrants must navigate dual media ecosystems—one rooted in Chinese narratives and another shaped by Canadian and global perspectives—raising critical questions about their identity and integration. This paper examines these dynamics using data from an original survey of Chinese Canadians. By interrogating the interplay between digital communication tools and immigrant integration, this research contributes to scholarship on migration, transnationalism, and digital media, offering insights into
the complexities of integration in multicultural democracies.TRS4 3.1.3 University of British Columbia Conference 2025-09-13 TRS4 3.1.3 Crossing the Great Firewall: Digital Communication Tools and the Chinese Diaspora in Canada TRS4 3.1.3 University of British Columbia Event 2025-10-15 TRS4 3.1.3
YouTube
