Chia-Lin KAO is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research interests include the political communication of authoritarian governments and diaspora politics, with a regional focus on China and post-Soviet regions.

She employs mixed quantitative and qualitative approaches, particularly text-as-data methods, to assess national narrative variations and their impacts in China and post-Soviet countries.

She completed her International Master’s in Central and Eastern European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies under the Erasmus Mundus program, with a thesis on the relationships between external crises and national narrative shifts, using the cases of the Great Patriotic War and the Sino-Japanese War.

In her free time, she enjoys learning new languages. She is fluent in Mandarin and English, proficient in Russian and French, and is currently learning Haitian Creole.