Wendy Leutert

Wendy Leutert (吕丽云) is the GLP-Ming Z. Mei Chair of Chinese Economics and Trade at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research and teaching interests include political economy, comparative politics, and international relations, with a regional focus on China and East Asia. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. 

Her current projects focus on the reform and global expansion of China’s state-owned enterprises and the leaders of these firms. Other areas of my research include leadership in China's public sector, the politics of Chinese economic reform, corporate governance in state-owned enterprises, and Chinese companies’ overseas expansion.

Her research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Education through the Fulbright-Hays and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Programs, the Ford Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Chinese Scholarship Council, among others.

Previously she was an An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia-Harvard China and the World Program at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University (2018-2019), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Contemporary China, University of Pennsylvania. She also worked for International Crisis Group in Beijing. She has an MA in International Relations from Tsinghua University and a BA in Political Science and Philosophy from Wellesley College.

Wendy also studies the political mobility of the heads of China’s largest and most strategically important state-owned enterprises, using an original dataset of these officials’ biographical information and company attributes that she developed beginning in 2013. Other areas of her research include the politics and process of China’s early reform and opening, corporate governance in state-owned enterprises, and bilateral investment treaties.