Shuyuan Shen
Political scientist · Los Angeles
Shuyuan Shen
Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Loyola Marymount University
I study how media, propaganda, and political communication shape public opinion and state behavior, with a regional focus on China and a methodological focus on computational and experimental research.
Research agenda
My research bridges comparative politics and international relations to explain how information travels through authoritarian political systems—and what happens when domestic communication becomes global politics.
Political communication
Propaganda, censorship, persuasion, and the political consequences of how governments communicate.
Chinese politics
Domestic governance and China’s global political and economic engagement.
Computational social science
Text-as-data, causal inference, meta-analysis, and survey and field experiments.
Recent work
Research across media, markets, and governance
Serve the People
Public goods information and the communicative strategies of local governments in China.
Money Backfires
How Chinese investment fuels anti-China protests abroad.
Killing Protests with Kindness
Anti-China protests and China’s public diplomacy.
2026 Kathleen L. Burkholder Prize Best Dissertation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign