Dr Ting Luo PhD, SFHEA

PhD in Government, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2014

PgCert in Higher Education, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2012

MSc in Public Policy and Administration, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007

B.A. in Political Science, Nankai University, 2006

Membership of professional bodies: 

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2024

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2012

Ting’s research focuses on digital governance and policy, particularly on how digital development shape politics and governance. Although her empirical work centres on China, she situates these findings within a broader comparative framework to draw insights relevant to global contexts. Her methodological approach is diverse, integrating both traditional social science techniques, such as surveys and experiments, and advanced computational social science methods, including machine learning and quantitative text analysis. Ting’s work has received funding support from esteemed institutions, including the European Research Council, the British Academy, UKRI and the National Institute for Health Research.

Prior to joining the University of Birmingham, Ting was a senior lecturer in Political Communication at Manchester Metropolitan University, a post-doctoral fellow at the Hertie School in Berlin and Leiden University in the Netherlands.  She holds a PhD in government and a Master of Science in public policy and administration from LSE. 

Government and Politics of AI (module leader)

AI & Sustainable Development (module leader)

Research Projects 

2021-2023: PI, Fandom Culture and Rhetoric Online: The Self-motivated Nationalism in Authoritarian Regimes, BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grants, £9,886.

This project explores the relationship between fandom and the state in authoritarian regimes where power distribution is highly imbalanced, and political participation is constrained within the political boundaries set by the state. Little has been written about the political agency of fan communities, yet there is ample evidence of fan communities becoming politically mobilized and engaged. This project takes the fan groups in China as an example and investigates how their agencies—as a group and as individuals—shape their interaction with the state. We specifically examine their actions and nationalist activities during the Covid-19 pandemic, a time of heightened nationalist discourse in response to an external threat. This study sheds new lights on contemporary modes of political participation and the role of digital technology in shaping state-society relationships in authoritarian regimes. 

2020-2021: Co-I, COVID-19: Understanding Chinese Government Containment Measures and Their Societal Impacts, UKRI & NIHR, £334,000, PI: Jane Duckett.

The Chinese authorities have implemented a wide range of often stringent measures to tackle the Covid-19 epidemic. This project examines those measures and their societal impacts, providing insights that can assist other governments in developing responses to the pandemic that are effective, ethical, and humanitarian. 

2014-2019: Post-doctoral Fellow, Authoritarianism 2.0: The Internet, Political Discussion, and Authoritarian Rule in China, ERC, €1,500,000, PI: Daniela Stockmann.

Relying on both conventional social science methods and digital methods, the project explores why social media mobilise people to voice opinions and to act both online and offline in the context of authoritarian China. The focus is on how Chinese citizens use the Internet. Central to this project is the first nationally representative survey on Internet use in China, conducted in 2018 using GPS sampling (for more information, please refer to chinainternetsurvey.net), along with a forthcoming book by Cambridge University Press. This research challenges the prevailing democracy-centered perspective in the study of digital governance in authoritarian regimes. The book introduces a novel digital governance model–popular corporatism–to comprehensively understand China's approach to digital governance. As one reviewer noted, "It is a timely contribution to the fast-growing scholarship on Chinese politics and governance in the Big Data era."