Greetings! I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at George Washington University, supported by the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Initiative. I research how China’s use of AI is reshaping politics and governance, both domestically and around the world. My work has been published in the Journal of Chinese Political Science and The China Journal.

My dissertation book project, Artificial Intelligence and the Principal-Agent Problem in Autocracy: Digitalizing China’s Government Operations, challenges the conventional wisdom that the adoption of cutting-edge information technologies inherently strengthens central control in autocratic systems. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork and large-scale administrative data, I show that in China’s AI procurement and digitalization of governmental operations, the central government still is dependent on its local agents. Instead of diminishing principal-agent problems, China’s government adoption of AI has amplified pre-existing information asymmetries and aggravated entrenched agency issues in central-local relations, resulting in greater de facto decentralization.

Rather than one singular, centralized “Digital Leviathan” emerging in Beijing exerting control over the entire nation, we are now observing a multitude of localized “Digital Leviathans” distributed across different regions of China. My research thus advances a narrative that AI has the potential to act as a decentralizing agent: Even within a regime widely depicted as the archetype of “digital authoritarianism,” local actors and periphery agencies can still wield significant influence when conditions permit.

I have received grants or fellowship awards from Johns Hopkins SAIS Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, Institute for Humane Studies, China Times Cultural Foundation, Stanford Center for Computational Social Science, Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Stanford Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford Center at Peking University, Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford School of Humanities & Sciences, and Stanford King Center on Global Development.

I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in East Asian Studies, both from Stanford University. I earned my B.A. in International Political Economy from Peking University. You can reach me at jason.luo@gwu.edu.