Ning is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University. He previously studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Nankai University.
His research lies in historical political economy, with a particular focus on state formation in early China. Drawing on Rites and War (祀與戎), a quantitative historical dataset covering the Eastern Zhou period (770–221 BCE), his doctoral dissertation examines the dynamic evolution of the bureaucratic state and the emergence of principal-agent relations.
Extending his broader interest in state theory to the modern era, he also studies state building and elite politics in contemporary China, and is currently assembling a nationwide database of Chinese municipal officials.
Across both strands of research, he draws on the computational social science toolkit, including causal identification, GIS, and machine learning, to advance historical and social scientific inquiry.