Congratulations to Dr Wenting He
Professor Wesley Widmaier, Dr Wenting He and A/Prof Amy King celebrating the Bell School’s PhD graduands, February 2026.
Congratulations to our research team member, Dr Wenting He, who successfully defended her PhD in International, Political and Strategic Studies at the Australian National University in November 2025, and graduated from the program in February 2026. Wenting’s PhD thesis, entitled The Rhetorical Sources of China’s Financial Policy Interests: Discursive Contestation, Economic Crisis, and Policy Changes (1988–2020), was supervised by Prof. Wesley Widmaier, A/Prof. Amy King, the late Prof. Susan Sell, and Prof. Luke Glanville.
Dr He’s doctoral research examines the political economy of China’s financial reform. The project explores how Chinese party leaders, bureaucratic elites, and economists have navigated major economic crises since the late 1980s, and how debates over crisis lessons and understandings of market mechanisms have shaped China’s slow and fragmented path of financial reform. The thesis also unpacks China’s indigenous understanding of state-market relations. By tracing the evolution of Chinese economic thought, it shows how historically grounded ideas have delineated the boundaries within which contemporary financial debates take place in China.
In 2026, Wenting will take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta’s China Institute, where she will continue her research on economic crises, China’s political economy, development finance, and geoeconomics.
More information about Wenting’s research can be found on her website.
