Wu Yongping is a Tenured Professor at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in History from Peking University in 1984 and 1987 respectively, and his PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2001. Between 1996 and 1998, he conducted doctoral research in Taiwan on two occasions, becoming the first doctoral student from mainland China to register at National Taiwan University with a mainland passport. From 2001 to 2002, he carried out postdoctoral research at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and in 2002 he joined Tsinghua University, where he founded the journal Public Administration Review and serves as its Editor-in-Chief. Prior to this, from 1987 to 1993, he worked at Peking University as a Teaching Assistant and Lecturer, and as Assistant Director of the Research Center for the Modernisation Process of the World.

His research covers government and markets, industrial policy, local government and regional economic development, reform of state-owned enterprises, Taiwan’s politics and economy, and cross-Strait relations, with a focus on comparative political economy and the policymaking process. His major publications include the English monograph A Political Explanation of Economic Growth: State Survival, Bureaucratic Politics, and Private Enterprises in the Making of Taiwan’s Economy, 1950–1985 (Harvard University Press, 2005), the edited English volume Rent Seeking in China (Routledge, 2009), and the Chinese volume Rent Seeking and Industrial Development in China (Commercial Press, 2010). In 2005, he was selected for the Ministry of Education’s “New Century Excellent Talents Support Programme”.