Lynette Ong appointed Distinguished Professor in Chinese Politics

September 10, 2024

Congratulations to Lynette Ong who has received the University’s Distinguished Professor Award, designed to advance and recognize individuals with highly distinguished accomplishments and those who display exceptional promise. The award will be held for a five-year term from July1, 2024 to June 30, 2029 with the title of Distinguished Professor in Chinese Politics.

Lynette H. Ong is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, jointly appointed to the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She is also a Faculty Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. As an internationally renowned China scholar for her expertise in authoritarianism, contentious politics, and political economy, she has appointments as a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis, and the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Her research has won multiple international accolades from various disciplinary associations. She is a recipient of the competitive Faculty of Arts & Science Dean’s Research Excellence Award. In addition to China, she also has research expertise in Southeast Asia. She joined the U of T in 2007, and was promoted to a full professor in 2022.

She is the author of three books: Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions Between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012).

Outsourcing Repression has received seven international awards, including four Best Book Awards from the American Political Science Association (APSA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), and the International Studies Association (ISA) – the prestigious ASA’s Distinguished Contribution to Political Sociology, Honorable Mention of the APSA’s Gregory Luebbert Award in the Comparative Politics Section, and the Human Rights Best Books from the three disciplinary associations. These accolades recognize the book’s distinct theoretical contribution to the field of social science, and its empirical importance to the studies of China and authoritarianism.

Her academic publications have also appeared in leading disciplinary and area studies journals including Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Comparative Politics, China Quarterly and China Journal. Her research has attracted funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Connaught Fund, the Association of Asian Studies, and the Chiang-Ching Kuo Foundation. She has held the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Columbia University, Peking, Fudan, and Renmin University in China, as well as the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD from the Australian National University.

She is also an internationally recognized public intellectual on Chinese politics and political economy. She has been invited to deliver expert testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission at the US Congress, and the Canadian House of Commons’ Parliamentary Committees on numerous occasions.

Her research and its policy implications have been featured in The Economist, New York Times Editorial Board Opinion, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, New Yorker Magazine, Wall Street Journal, PBS News Hour (with Judy Woodruff), CNN International, BBC World, Globe and Mail, and TVO (with Steve Paikin). She has held various administrative positions at the U of T, including Director of Munk School China Initiative, Acting Director of the Contemporary Asian Studies Program (2012-14), and Director of East Asia Seminar Series (2012-2015; 2017-2020) at the Asian Institute. Under the China Lab she directs, she leads a dedicated team of student researchers in the Social Unrest in China dataset project. The project findings have appeared in her book publications, journal articles, including the Journal of Democracy.

She is currently working on two new projects – on the politics of real estate, and outsourcing of digital repression in China. Collaborating with colleagues and graduate students in data collection, these projects will culminate in the publication of two books, multiple academic journal articles, and public-facing scholarship.

Since 2012, Professor Ong has led a team of student researchers (undergrads supervised by MA and PhD students) to build an original and unique protest dataset in China: SocialUnrestInChina.org. The dataset has become one of the cornerstones of the empirical evidence in Outsourcing Repression, and the key empirical data in a number of journal articles she has published. The team usually consists of six to ten students a year; with somewhere between 80 to 100 student data coders and analysts well-versed in Chinese politics Prof Ong has trained over 11 years.

Since 2007, Prof. Ong has supervised/advised 11 undergraduate students’ theses, 18 Masters students’ theses, and 9 PhD students (some in progress). Former students are now faculty at the University of Minnesota, UCLA Taiwan Studies, Fudan University (Shanghai), Shandong University, and the Central Party School (Beijing).