Charles Sun is a China Brief Analyst at the Jamestown Foundation, focused on Chinese technology firms, military-civil fusion, export controls, and economic statecraft. He is also a Sinovation Fellow at the Yale School of Management. Previously, he was a Global Affiliate Visiting Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University (2019 to 2020). His work spans academic research on state-business relations in authoritarian China and policy analysis of China’s technology and defense sectors. Both draw on Chinese-language primary sources, including CCDI announcements, stock exchange distress filings, procurement records, corporate annual reports, bond prospectuses, PLA Daily theoretical articles, and local government implementation plans.
Research Interests
His research organizes around three lines of inquiry.
The first line concerns state-business relations in authoritarian China. His Stanford thesis compared six Chinese technology firms in e-commerce, AI, ride-hailing, social media, and cryptocurrency, and examined how private firms anticipate and adapt to political signals and regulatory uncertainty. His current work measures concealed firm-official ties and decomposes political patronage into separately observable components of protection and extraction.
The second line concerns Chinese military institutions and the elite politics that govern them. One strand traces the mechanisms (standardization committees, procurement chains, supply networks) through which Chinese private technology firms are drawn into the defense-industrial base. A second strand studies the PLA’s theoretical writing on AI-enabled warfare, including how the concept of intelligentized dominance developed within the PLA’s broader tradition of domain-control concepts. A third strand examines factional dynamics and promotion patterns inside the PLA's senior ranks, applying the network-and-patronage approach he uses in his work on civilian elites.
The third line concerns U.S.-China strategic interaction, with particular attention to how Beijing’s policy research community interprets American political and strategic texts, and to the second-order effects that emerge when adversary analytical frameworks become mutually legible.
Current Projects
Ongoing work includes the measurement of hidden firm-official connections in authoritarian regimes using crisis-based identification strategies, the institutionalization of the PLA's intelligentized warfare concepts in Chinese defense policy, and Beijing’s controls on outbound investment and exit.
Background
He is pursuing a Master of National Security Policy at the RAND School of Public Policy (expected June 2027). He holds an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, where Professor Andrew G. Walder supervised his thesis, an M.A. in Economics and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a B.A. in Economics from Renmin University of China. Previously, he worked in fixed-income research and portfolio management at China Securities, Bank of Communications Schroder Fund Management, and Changjiang Securities in Beijing and Shanghai from 2011 to 2019. At Bank of Communications Schroder he received the Golden Bull Award (2015), the highest honor in China’s mutual fund industry.