Summer in China: Five Schools, One Question
Summer is not over yet, but Jinhai Wang, Research Assistant at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development and PhD student, has already attended five summer schools at leading Chinese universities — and shares his reflections.
The programs covered AI in business, computational political science, Chinese state formation, Global South development, and government–market economics. Despite their disciplinary diversity, they all revolved around a common question: how should we understand the changing relationships between the state, markets, organizations, and society amid technological transformation and shifts in the international order?
Wang's research focuses on state–business relations, information production in capital markets, and the political economy of information. The summer schools, he says, gave him a fresh perspective on his own work and showed how different disciplines approach the same questions.
The first program, "AI for Business" at the University of Science and Technology of China, presented two dimensions of AI research: AI as a socioeconomic phenomenon and AI as a research instrument.
Computational methods, Wang notes, make political processes more observable through textual, spatial, and network data. The key challenge, however, is turning that data into credible social-scientific evidence.
From technology, the focus shifted to institutions. A course at Fudan University's Department of History examined China's transition from the Qing Empire to the modern nation-state (ca. 1750–1950). The historical perspective guards against analytical pitfalls: central–local relations, regional disparities, and political language are shaped by long-term institutional trajectories. Without historical context, one may mistake contingency for a universal pattern.
Another angle came from Fudan's program on community governance and de-dependent development in the Global South, which situated development within the broader context of international political economy.
The final program — the workshop on government and market economics at Nanjing Audit University — approached government as an actor with its own objectives, incentives, and constraints.
Five schools did not yield a single answer, but in Wang's view they helped build an intellectual framework. History explains the origins of institutions; political economy examines the distribution of power and resources; organizational theory shows how institutions operate in practice; computational methods expand our capacity to observe and test.
Jinhai Wang puts it this way: "The real value of summer schools is the opportunity to step outside one's own disciplinary boundaries. Developing a clear sense of what makes a question scientifically significant matters far more than accumulating new terminology. And scientific rigor ultimately outweighs the pursuit of the latest methods".
