Meet the 2023 Global China Fellows
The Boston University Global Development Policy (GDP) Center is pleased to present the 2023 cohort of Global China Research Fellows. These six outstanding scholars from across a multitude of universities, including Boston University, Ohio State University and the University of Cape Town, have or will have completed doctoral degrees in an array of disciplines.
The Global China Research Fellows Program sponsors and supports pre- and post-doctoral fellows from around the world to engage in policy-oriented research and commentary on China’s role in shaping global affairs, as part of the Global China Initiative (GCI). Fellows also contribute to GCI research projects, public research seminars and policy engagement.
Starting in September 2023, the Global China Fellows will spend nine months in Boston participating in a variety of research projects, spanning topics from coal plant retirement, Chinese overseas development finance, the global debt crisis, renewable energy and more.
Below, meet the 2023 Global China Research Fellows:
Adjekai is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. Her research considers the role of Chinese investment in power generation infrastructure projects in sub-Saharan Africa. She focuses on the price and investment outcomes of these projects and the factors underlying their outcomes.
As an admitted attorney of the High Court of South Africa, specializing in corporate and commercial law, Adjekai has experience in several aspects of commercial legal practice including energy law litigation, banking and finance transactions, contracts and corporate transactions. She previously worked at two of South Africa’s big five commercial law firms. She will be joining as a Global China Pre-doctoral Research Fellow for the 2023/2024 academic year.
Zara is a current Pre-Doctoral Global China Research Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science department at Boston University. Her research explores the causes of growing political, diplomatic and economic links between Latin America and the Caribbean and China. Her dissertation analyzes the region’s foreign policies for navigating US-China competition, with particular attention to the role of domestic politics and discourse. Zara’s work contributes to literature on the role and agency of smaller states in the international system, specifically in the context of great power competition.
Prior to graduate school, she researched economic development policies for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago, Chile and studied global development in Uruguay and Argentina. Zara earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in International Affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Jyhjong Hwang is a current Global China Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow, where she has led research for the Chinese Loans to Africa Database for the 2021-2023 research cycles. Hwang is also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science Department at the Ohio State University, specializing in international relations, international development and Chinese loans in Africa. Her current research includes the interaction between African political institutions, political time horizons and foreign sovereign loans and Chinese arms transfers to Africa.
Hwang was a 2019 SAIS-CARI Fellow at the China Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, conducting interviews and fieldwork in Zambia on Chinese military aircraft sales. She was the Senior Research Assistant at SAIS-CARI from 2015-2018 and a former Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia from 2010-2012. She holds an M.A. in International Development and International Economics from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University.
Niccolò Manych is a current Global China Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. In his interdisciplinary dissertation at the Technical University Berlin (TUB), Niccolò examined the political economy of coal transitions. In parallel, Niccolò worked at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC Berlin). His studies highlight the benefits of timely coal phase-outs, the importance of policies to foster and manage coal transitions and the apparent dichotomy between country-specific phase-outs and cross-country policy learning.
Niccolò has published on the political economy of coal and finance flows for coal-fired power plants. He conducted country case studies, comparative studies and global analyses with different methods, including traditional content analyses of interviews, computational text analyses with machine learning and systematic literature reviews. He holds an M.Sc. and a B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from TUB, specializing in Energy and Resource Management.
Ishana Ratan is a current Global China Pre-doctoral Research Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at UC Berkeley. She is also an Assistant Director at the Berkeley APEC Study Center and a member of the Energy and Environment Policy Lab. Her research centers upon the international political economy of renewable energy investment, with a focus on solar deployment in the Global South. Her dissertation explores how domestic supply chain linkages facilitate long-term investment growth under policy uncertainty.
Prior to pursuing graduate studies, she worked as an international trade paralegal, which inspired her interest in trade, technology and strategic competition in the global marketplace.
Keyi Tang is a current Global China Post-doctoral Research Fellow and will soon defend her Ph.D. dissertation at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where she studies the distributive politics of development finance, with intensive fieldwork in China, the US, Zambia, Ethiopia and Ghana.
Her research focuses on international organization service delivery in Africa, impact evaluation of infrastructure projects, development and public finance, energy and resource policy, as well as governance and corruption. Her work has been published by Energy Policy and Review of International Political Economy. Keyi graduated from Nanjing University with a B.A. in English in 2016 and obtained an M.A. in International Studies from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in 2019.
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