I am Cao Le Quynh Anh, an incoming Master's student in China Studies (Law and Society) at the Yenching Academy of Peking University, beginning in Fall 2026. I graduated with the highest honors (summa cum laude) from Lawrence University (WI, USA) in June 2026, where I earned a B.A. in International Relations with a minor in East Asian Studies.

Initially trained in the subfield of International Relations, my interests later shifted toward comparative politics, especially contentious politics and state-society relations in one-party authoritarian regimes. My undergraduate honors thesis, which examined the rise of a new wave of virulent ultranationalism online as a form of delegated repression in contemporary Vietnam, was also awarded summa cum laude. Furthermore, intrigued by the need to rethink Vietnamese governance, I have devoted particular attention to Vietnamese political thought and intellectual history, especially reformist movements in modern Vietnamese history and the lessons they offer for Vietnam's current reforms.

Positioning myself as a scholar-practitioner, I have also spent two years producing a feature-length documentary on the legacy of the Vietnam War and how transgenerational trauma is passed down and reproduced across three generations of the Vietnamese diaspora in Orange County (California), marking the first documentary about Vietnamese refugees in the United States produced by young people from Socialist Vietnam.

After receiving my primary education in Western academia, I now seek to take off Western sunglasses and come to China in pursuit of a critical question: What can we learn from China to reform Vietnam? Several groups of Vietnamese scholar and activist, owing to Vietnam's historical ties with France and the United States and to a Sinophobia-inflected nationalism, have fervently turned to Western models while neglecting the Chinese experience. Recognizing both the current crises facing Western democracy and the incompatibility of certain democratic models with Vietnamese society, I seek to take a different path by studying "China Model"—a global power with historical and institutional parallels to Vietnam—to understand its experiments in political reform and its efforts toward institutional adaptability, and then draw upon those lessons to address Vietnam's central question.

I aim to be part of a new generation of Vietnamese scholars who can advance a more rigorous and fair-minded Sino-Vietnamese comparative politics, one that transcends the “China threat” paradigm, instead using China’s experience as a critical lens for examining both Vietnam’s development and the limits of Western modernity.