Tyner, A. H., Abatayo, A. L., Daley, M., [...], Zhang, Yinxian et al. 2026. “Investigating the Replicability of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.” Nature 652: 143–150.
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Queens College, CUNY
Yinxian Zhang
Yinxian — pronounced “Ian” + “shee-ANN”
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). My research sits at the intersection of political sociology and computational social science, with a focus on public opinion, the online public sphere, and state–society relations in China and the Chinese diaspora.
A recurring question driving my work is: how do political regimes shape what ordinary people think, say, and feel? I study these dynamics through large-scale analysis of online political discussions, combining computational and qualitative methods.
Before joining Queens College, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2019.
Research
Political Discourse & Political Legitimacy
I track how popular attitudes toward the state, democracy, and political authority shift in China in the past decades. I proposed the concept of passive political legitimacy, which argues that deteriorating perceptions of Western democracies can help authoritarian regimes survive even as domestic conditions worsen.
Public Opinion & U.S.-China relations
Amid increasing U.S.-China tensions, I examine how geopolitics shapes political perceptions and biases in both countries, and how ideas are circulated and transformed across national and ideological borders.
AI & Politics
My recent work examines political biases in multilingual large language models (LLMs) and their implications for political communication. My ongoing project extends this line of research and investigates how LLMs influence public opinion by constructing different representations of reality.
Computational Social Science
Much of my research combines computational and qualitative methods. Beyond applying these approaches, I also develop new computational and quantitative tools for social-political inquiry.
Keywords public opinion · online public sphere · democracy & democratization · regime legitimacy · state–society relations · political sociology · computational social science · China studies
News & Recent Highlights
- 2026 Awarded the Henry Wasser Award for Outstanding Research — given to ten junior faculty across all disciplines in all CUNY colleges.
- 2026 I joined a large-scale investigation on the replicability of the social and behavioral sciences. The findings were published in Nature 652: 143–150.
- 2025 “Tracking Ideological Changes in an Authoritarian State” published in Sociological Methods & Research.
- 2025 “One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China” (with Di Zhou) published in Sociological Science.
- 2025 Awarded the Asian American/Asian Research Institute Faculty Research Support Award ($10,000).
Publications
A complete list with full citations and links is available in my CV.
† denotes a graduate-student collaborator.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Zhang, Yinxian, and Di Zhou†. 2025. “One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China.” Sociological Science 12: 511–536.
Zhang, Yinxian. 2025. “Tracking Ideological Changes in an Authoritarian State — The Case of Chinese Opinion Leaders.” Sociological Methods & Research. Online First.
Zhou, Di†, and Yinxian Zhang. 2024. “Political Biases and Inconsistencies in Bilingual GPT Models — The Cases of the US and China.” Scientific Reports 14(1): 25048.
Zhang, Yinxian. 2023. “Impactful COVID-19 Discoveries from China Are Neglected in the Media.” Scientometrics 128: 4523–4539.
Zhang, Yinxian. 2022. “Passive Political Legitimacy: Why the Chinese Public Went from Challenging to Supporting the State in the Past Decade.” The China Journal 88(1): 29–54.
Zhang, Yinxian, Jiajun Liu, and Ji-rong Wen. 2018. “Nationalism on Weibo: Toward a Multi-Faceted Understanding of Nationalism.” The China Quarterly 235: 758–783.
★ Awarded the 2018 Gordon White Prize
Invited Contributions
Zhang, Yinxian. 2021. Review of The Art of Political Control in China, by Daniel C. Mattingly. American Journal of Sociology 127(1): 261–263.
Zhang, Yinxian. 2020. “A Turbulent Decade: The Changes in Chinese Popular Attitudes toward Democracy.” Ash Center Occasional Paper Series, Harvard Kennedy School, 1–49.
Ongoing Projects
A few works-in-progress that extend my research on ideology, political communication, and AI.
How to Flip a Liberal: The Decade-Long Transformation of the Ideological Landscape in China and Beyond
Drawing on more than a decade of online discourse data and new interview material, this book traces how political discourses in China and the Chinese diaspora have evolved amid shifting domestic and global conditions. The theoretical ambition is to offer a sociological account of the nature and dynamics of the public sphere under changing state–society relations, with implications for democratic ideals and practices well beyond China.
Parallel Politics: Chinese Diaspora on YouTube and the 2024 U.S. Election
This project analyzes Chinese-language political content on YouTube during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, asking how diasporic communities construct a parallel public sphere that intersects with — but is not reducible to — either Chinese or American mainstream politics.
AI & Political Communication: Filtered Realities in Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs)
Building on my published work showing that the same AI model can embody different political dispositions when prompted in different languages, this line of research examines how LLMs influence political communication and public opinion by constructing filtered representations of reality — and what that means for the quality of public life in the future.
Contact
I welcome inquiries from students and collaborators.
Office
Department of Sociology
Queens College, CUNY
65-30 Kissena Blvd.
Queens, NY 11367