About Me
I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Public and International Affairs at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK).
I earned my Ph.D. in Government and Public Administration from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in July 2023.
Before entering academia, I was deeply engaged in grassroots governance for 5 years. In 2012, I began working as a college village official in Wuhan, where I narrowly avoided injury during clashes with protesters over the demolition of an industrial park. This incident prompted me to question how developing countries integrate sources of instability into formal political institutions. Later, as a civil servant in Guangzhou (2013–2017), I observed how well-institutionalized online petition channels provided partial solutions. These experiences led me to ask a big question: How can a revolutionary regime move from a campaign-style governance to a more institutionalized form of governance?
My research interests lie at the intersection of political communication, citizen-government engagement, and institutional development. Specifically, I am keen to study the impact of online citizen participation and offline street protests on the evolution of political institutions in non-democratic regimes. My five years of hands-on grassroots experience have given me deep insights into the operations of government agencies and the interactions between local governments and ordinary citizens in power-centralized contexts. This continually motivates me to address the real policy issues that civil servants seek to resolve. Thus, the ultimate goal of my theoretical efforts and methodological rigor is to contribute to better public policy that enhances human well-being both in the short term and long term.
My methodological interests include computational social science (including web scraping, text mining, image analysis, and social network analysis), survival analysis (also known as event history analysis), panel data analysis, survey data analysis, and survey experiments. I aspire to make significant contributions to the development and application of computational social sciences, survey methodology, and survival analysis approaches.
You can reach me at hwang698[at]cityu.edu.hk and "https://x.com/wei_shengming" (X/Twitter)