Fellowship awarded to Political Science PhD student Zhu Zhang

Zhu Zhang, Political Science PhD student, Tulane University

Zhu Zhang, who is a fifth-year student in the Ph.D. program in Political Development in the Department of Political Science, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship by the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. CDDRL fellowships are highly competitive, with only 3-5 being awarded each year to applicants from Stanford and from other institutions. Non-Stanford recipients in the past have come from universities like Harvard, UC Berkeley, Princeton, and Oxford. The fellowship can be used either for dissertation completion or as a one-year postdoctoral position. Zhu Zhang will spend 2019-2020 at Stanford finalizing her doctoral dissertation entitled “Wealth without Power: The Rise of Chinese Private Business Elites and Their Relationship with the Communist Party.” The dissertation aims to elucidate the political orientation of Chinese billionaires and is based on intensive fieldwork and on large-N quantitative analysis of original data. Zhu Zhang commenced her Ph.D. studies at Tulane in 2014, after obtaining a BA in History from Shanghai Normal University in 2008 and an MA in International Affairs from Pennsylvania State University in 2011.