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

He works on how China’s party-state gets private firms to serve the state’s interest without having to compel them, across artificial intelligence, robotics, genomics, and the defense supply chain. His Stanford thesis introduced Proactive Elite Alignment Theory (PEAT), and his current work extends to the measurement of hidden firm-official ties.

His analysis has appeared in Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, The Diplomat, the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief, The Japan Times, and Stanford’s DigiChina.

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