Zheng Yongnian

Zheng Yongnian (Chinese: 郑永年 ) is a Chinese political scientist and political commentator who has studied and written on many aspects of contemporary China and especially on Chinese politics. Since 2008, he is professor and director of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.

Since the 2000s, Zheng has been a columnist, writing weekly commentaries on China for Hong Kong Economic Journal (until 2004) and the Lianhe Zaobao (since 2002). His weekly commentaries featured a broad range of critical issues in contemporary China's political, economic, social and cultural development. In these commentaries he consistently argues for gradual reforms in China's social, economic and political lives. In the recent China Model debate, he takes the stand that while China definitely has a model of its own consistent and continuous with its historical patterns of development, the model needs constant reforms to avoid systemic crisis. As an internationally recognized authority on Chinese politics, he was frequently consulted and quoted by the New York Times on recent developments in China's domestic politics in 2012, an eventful year of the Chinese Communist Party's power transition. Besides being a columnist, he also appeared on TV programs. In the 2006 CCTV documentary The Rise of Great Nations, he was quoted to have expressed the view that the strength of a Great Power lies within its domestic institutions, its external powers merely reflecting an extension of its domestic institutions.

After a two-year term at Harvard as SSRC-MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security, Zheng moved to the newly founded East Asian Institute in Singapore as a research fellow (1997-2002) and later a senior research fellow (2002-2005). In 2005, he was appointed full professor and founding Research Director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. In July 2008, he succeeded Prof. Dali Yang and has since served as director of the East Asian Institute, a Singaporean think tank under a statute of the National University of Singapore. Zheng also serves as advisor to independent think tank Longus Research Institute, giving talks and contributing essays to their Longus Review.

Zheng was born in Yuyao, Zhejiang, China in 1962. After completing his secondary education in Yuyao, he moved to Peking University for his undergraduate and master's studies in political science. After his graduation from Peking University in 1988, he worked for two years as assistant professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Peking University. Later, he studied at Princeton University, in the United States between 1990 and 1995 and obtained PhD in political science in 1995.