Professional Bio

Xiaohang Sun is a graduate student of comparative politics and international relations at Penn State. He studies corporate political activities and state-business relations. He is particularly interested in how firms manage political risks in the face of weak market institutions and why they behave differently. Looking at the bigger picture, he also seeks to understand how modes of state-business interaction vary across localities and evolve over time. These questions are motivated by a general interest in the political agency of economic actors.

Before joining Penn State, he earned dual bachelor’s degrees in international politics and economics from Shandong University, China, in 2024. He then pursued a master’s degree in international relations at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His undergraduate and master’s theses examine, respectively, Chinese outward FDI and FDI in China, analyzing how multinational corporations factor politics into their investment decisions.