John D. Montgomery Postdoctoral Fellowship

2025-2026 John D. Montgomery Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Yang Li Allen is the 2025-26 Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Pacific Basin Research Center, Soka University of America. Yang earned her PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research, The New School (New York, NY), with a major in Comparative Politics and a minor in Global Politics/International Relations. Her dissertation, titled “The Politics of Toilets: A Study of China’s Toilet Revolution 2015-2020,” explored why and how the Chinese government provided public toilets as a form of public good provision. Previously, Yang received two MA degrees: one in Political Science from George Mason University (Fairfax, VA) and another in Area Studies, focusing on China and East Asia, from Yonsei University (Seoul, South Korea). She has received several fellowships and grants from organizations such as The New School, India China Institute, and Confucius Institute (Hanban). Additionally, Yang has five years of experience teaching undergraduate social science and humanities courses. She is also currently a part-time faculty member at the Political Science department at Cerritos College.

Dr. Yang Li Allen’s doctoral dissertation questioned why and how the Chinese government provides public toilets as a public good provision, using Shanghai as a case study. The methodological approach was through policy analysis and content analysis, in which Yang scraped official governmental websites in China. Ultimately, she created a dataset of 4,682 posts related to China’s governance of public toilets from 2015 to 2020. This dataset was a collection of scraped available materials from China’s governmental websites, which were existing electronic documents, such as public posts, policies, and official announcements. The data sources were categorized into three levels: the national level, the Shanghai municipal level (equivalent to the provincial level), and the county level (the district level of government in the context of Shanghai).

In responding to the question of why China launched the Toilet Revolution, Yang adopted a text-as-data approach by closely examining policy documents and public announcements from three levels of government in China. This initial dataset of 4,682 data entries showed the connectedness of toilets to relevant policy areas and governmental directives. This relationship to sociopolitical arenas, such as civic involvement, gender equality, poverty elimination, social inclusion, transportation, etc., highlighted the policy areas in which toilets were mentioned. Through preliminary text-as-data analyses, Yang identified three major findings. First, there was a growing political interest among Chinese governmental institutions, such as governments at various levels, administrations, and agencies. Second, with this increasing political perception within and beyond the governmental structure, the governing bodies started to use toilets as a political tool to steer administrative powers and allocate institutional resources. Third, the governance of public toilets involved various social and economic developments, political discourses, and even the top political images of China’s leadership, namely, General Secretary Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.

To understand how China governed toilets, Yang examined the governing process and procedures involved in China’s Toilet Revolution. Specifically, she narrowed the analysis to a smaller dataset scale, probing 321 official policy documents. These documents were selected from the 1,398 files previously identified as policy documents in the dataset, but with relevance to the issues on toilets as measured by the textual intensity and prevalence of the researched topic’s coverage in each document. Four major themes emerged from the 321 policies: tourism, public service, public health, and rural governance.

Overall, Yang argues that China’s Toilet Revolution was a created policy space through which to actively accommodate other governmental objectives, sociopolitical policy implementations, and grand policy goals, such as economic development, poverty elimination, and improvement of the CCP’s political image. Meanwhile, the shifting political emphasis on toilet-related works became an example of the top-level design type of governance under Xi’s leadership, illustrating performative governance among intra-governmental interactions and with public communications. Despite the top-down style of governance, the social policy implementation processes and procedures revealed the institutional variance and governmental discrepancies that existed at different levels of government.

Currently, Yang is converting her dissertation into a book manuscript. Her academic interests relate to the divides between rural and urban China, such as comparisons of governance, policies, and experiences in the countryside and cities. She is also interested in China and the broader East Asia region, such as South Korea, Singapore, and Japan. Yang has been continually working in this region through conferences, events, and other institutional connections. As a researcher, Yang believes in the power of interdisciplinary approaches through both quantitative and qualitative research designs.