Charles Sun is a China-focused policy analyst and a Yale Sinovation Fellow at the Yale School of Management.

His research examines how authoritarian states govern private economic elites, with particular attention to anticipatory compliance in China's technology sector and to the measurement of hidden firm-official ties. He is the author of Proactive Elite Alignment Theory (PEAT), a framework developed during his Stanford research for analyzing when and why private tech elites realign with state priorities before formal rules or penalties.

His analysis has appeared in War on the Rocks, The Diplomat, the Jamestown Foundation's China Brief, and Stanford's DigiChina.

He holds master's degrees from Stanford University and Columbia University.