China and the Global South Cluster

The vision of the the CSCC – China and Global South Cluster (CGSC) is to bridge scholars, policy and business practitioners from China, the West and the Global South to enhance production of cutting edge research and DKU students’ learning experience.

Cluster Leads

Yuan Wang

Yuan Wang is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Duke Kunshan University. Yuan Wang's research interests cover global China, African politics and comparative political economy of development. She is especially interested in African state effectiveness and China's economic and political engagement with Africa. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include China and the world, Sino-African relations, and African politics and development.

Pippa Morgan

Pippa Morgan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke Kunshan University. Her research is motivated by a desire to understand the political economy of South-South economic engagement, with a focus on China's foreign economic relations, Chinese foreign aid, foreign direct investment, and infrastructure contracts. More broadly, she is interested in combining quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how history influences contemporary political economy and international relations, and in how political and sociological factors affect prospects for economic development. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include global governance, political economy of institutions, and China and the Global South.

David Landry

David Landry is an Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Duke Kunshan University. His research focuses on the determinants and impacts of Chinese economic engagement abroad. More specifically, he researches the political and economic determinants of China's development finance and investment flows in the developing world, and how these in turn affect development. At Duke Kunshan, he teaches in the fields of international development and international political economy.

Student Coordinator

Chen Xu

Chen(Irene) Xu is a sophomore student. Her intended major is political economy. She is interested in China's domestic social issues and ways to tackle global challenges.

Ongoing Research Projects

  • Andrea Ghiselli and Pippa Morgan. Blowback: When the Belt and Road Initiative Meets Democratic Institutions
  • Andrea Ghiselli and Pippa Morgan. Regime Type, Issue Area, and Foreign Policy Change through the Lens of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory.
  • Pippa Morgan, Qiaomo Wu and Xinxin Zhang. Regime type and Reopening: An Analysis of the Ending of COVID-19 International Travel Restrictions.
  • Yuan Wang and Hong Zhang. Individual Agency and Structural Constraints in South-South Policy Transfer: China and Ethiopia’s Industrial Park Development.
  • Benard Musembi Kilaka and Yuan Wang. Imagined community: African community agency in Sino-African infrastructure projects.
  • Jiahua Yue and Yuan Wang. Regulating global China.
  • Hangwei Li, Liang Fan, and Yuan Wang. Media coverage analysis of the Chinese-sponsored BRI project in Africa.
  • David Landry and Yuan Wang. Hard infrastructure, soft power.
  • David Landry and Keyi Tang. Have your cake and eat it too: Impatient Chinese state capital in the Global South.
  • David Landry and Gailyn Portelance. More problems more money? Does China lend more to African countries with higher credit risk levels?
  • David Landry. Does governance matter? Comparing the determinants of African countries’ trade with China and the West.
  • David Landry. A torrent or a trickle? The local economic impacts of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor