Matt Ferchen

Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow

Yale University Law School, Paul Tsai China Center

  • PhD, Cornell University

  • MA, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

  • BA, University of Puget Sound

I am a Senior Research Scholar and Senior Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. My research focus is on Chinese economic statecraft and economic influence, including broader questions of economic security.

My research background and interests are a blend of comparative and international political economy together with a focus on country and region-specific politics and economics. My longstanding academic interest has been in the political economy of development in Asia, especially China, and Latin America. I was originally exposed to those topics and regions as an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound, where I studied comparative politics and international economics (and in the newly created International Political Economy (IPE) program). I then went on to study Chinese and Latin American political economy at Johns Hopkins SAIS before eventually focusing on the governance of China’s informal economy for my PhD thesis at Cornell. In the case of my original research on China, this meant a focus on China’s street-level governance of the informal economy, including the state’s often-quixotic efforts to maintain a balance between development and stability via the infamous chengguan.

After joining the International Relations (IR) Department at Tsinghua University, and then becoming a scholar with the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, both in Beijing, I began to focus more on China’s foreign economic relations with developing countries. In my teaching and research I focused on the political economy of China’s burgeoning trade, investment and financial ties with Latin America and Southeast Asia, including countries like Venezuela and Myanmar. As part of that research, I also explored how Chinese officials, business people and scholars were attempting to evaluate and manage political risk in countries experiencing economic or political crisis. Through that research, I maintained a focus on how China’s domestic political economy was crucial to understanding many aspects of its foreign policy.