Lucie Lu (陆璐)

I am Assistant Professor at the department of International Studies and Global Affairs at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, Texas.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, and the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program at Columbia University.

Policy-wise, I was a non-residential Project Fellow at the Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations and in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), where I provided academically-informed, policy-relevant analysis on US-China relations.

I received my Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2023. My dissertation received a Best Dissertation Award from the department.

Research interests: Chinese foreign aid, global governance, human rights, political communication and public opinion.

I study how China uses economic and narrative strategies to shape global norms in areas ranging from human rights to renewable energy. Using large-scale text analysis and original datasets, my work shows how rising power influence is negotiated and constrained by recipient countries and local actors.

Google Scholar | Research| CV | Email: lucielu.uiuc@gmail.com

I study the international political economy of China’s global governance, focusing on how its outward influence intersects with diverse political responses from both elites within international organizations and domestic stakeholders, including firms and citizens, whose agency shapes the host countries’ developmental pathways. My research examines how rising powers like China use economic statecraft to reconfigure global orders and norms, spanning both the evolution of established liberal norms like human rights, and the emergence of new issue areas, including renewable energy transition and technology competition.

My work situates China’s global influence in the context of three defining challenges in contemporary world politics: de-globalization, de-democratization, and the reorientation of U.S. leadership. Across multiple issue areas, including human rights, energy transition, and information technology, I focus on how political challenges are reframed to align with shifting domestic interests, how rising powers and non-state actors negotiate and contest new rules, and how these evolving norms take shape and materialize in global governance. Collectively, my work shows that the interests of middle powers and local actors (e.g. firms) must be systematically analyzed to understand variation in their elite and public response to Chinese economic influence.

A central finding of my research is that China’s influence is rarely exercised through direct coercion. Instead, it operates through narrative construction that resonates with recipient countries’ orientations and responds to their economic demands. I construct original datasets to systematically demonstrate how narratives are framed and how local policies shift in response to China’s engagement. I further show that China’s influence in shaping international norms faces notable constraints. In areas like human rights, receptivity is contingent on alignment with pre-existing normative values, whereas in those seen as relatively value-neutral, China’s technological advantages lower barriers to adoption and facilitate the diffusion of associated norms and influence.

In addition, I study China’s aid-giving and media strategies for image building and public diplomacy. My work examines how state-run media engage foreign news on social media, how Chinese ambassadors communicate strategy with local audiences, and how overseas energy development projects shape local receptivity to Chinese economic influence.

Methodologically, I primarily use text-as-data approaches. I apply machine learning and large language models to identify patterns, framing strategies, and shifts in both unstructured social media data and structured corpora, including UN scripts, policy documents and news articles. I prioritize original data collection to uncover new empirical patterns.

My research has received generous support by the Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, the Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois, and APSA Political Communication Section. My articles have appeared on International Affairs, Journal of International Development, PS: Political Science & Politics and Encyclopedia of Political Communication.