Charles Sun is a China-focused policy analyst and a Yale Sinovation Fellow at the Yale School of Management. He was previously a Global Affiliate Visiting Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University, where he completed research under Professor Andrew G. Walder. His work sits between two registers: peer-reviewed political economy of authoritarian state-business relations, and policy-facing analysis of China's technology and defense sectors. Both build on a common empirical base: Chinese-language primary sources that most English-language analysts cannot access, 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. This is the line where his core academic contributions sit. His Stanford thesis introduced Proactive Elite Alignment Theory (PEAT), a framework that explains when and why private tech elites realign with Party-state priorities before formal rules or penalties. His current work extends the question to the measurement of hidden firm-official ties that leave no public paper trail, and to the decomposition of political patronage into separately observable components of protection and extraction.
The second line concerns China's military-civilian technology integration. This work traces the institutional mechanisms, the standardization committees, the procurement chains, the supply networks, through which Chinese private technology firms are drawn into the defense-industrial base. It extends to the PLA's own theoretical discourse on AI-enabled warfare, including the conceptual genealogy of intelligentized dominance (制智权) within the PLA's broader tradition of domain-control concepts.
The third line concerns U.S.-China strategic interaction, with particular attention to how Beijing's policy research community reads 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 the continued application of PEAT to anticipatory compliance patterns in the post-crackdown Chinese technology sector.
Background
Charles holds a master's degree in East Asian Studies from Stanford University, where his thesis on PEAT was advised by Professor Andrew G. Walder, and a master's degree from Columbia University. Before entering policy research, he spent a decade in Beijing's capital markets, working across fixed income and asset management in Chinese securities firms and fund houses. That work is the empirical foundation of his current research: watching Chinese firms reallocate capital in real time in response to state policy signals taught him how to read the signals before they crystallize into formal rules.