2021 Samuel “Sandy” R. Berger Memorial Fellows

Jing Yang

Jing Yang is a PhD candidate of the School of International Studies of Peking University. Her research focus on nationalism and illegal refugee issues in Latin American, especially the central American refugee problem and US Hispanic immigration policy. She received her master’s degree from Beijing Foreign Studies University and bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University. She won the National Scholarship for Postgraduate Students in 2019. She has been to the Autonomous University of Barcelona for exchange in 2015, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2018 through the UNAM-BFSU Intercollegiate exchange program，participating the Latin American Studies Program of UNAM. She participated in public opinion research work of Mexican mainstream media’s reports on Xi Jinping’s governance thoughts and Latin American media’s reports on China’s two sessions. She once worked as an intern at Xinhua News Agency and the Development Research Center of the State Council, during this period, she participated in the research on the International cooperation mechanism of Belt and Road initiative, China’s development assistance project to Venezuela, and the national major social science fund project “Research on the Concept and Mechanism of G20 Countries’ International Communication” (Project approval No.: 16ZDA216) and other topics. She has published papers in journals such as International Communication and External Communication, and some editorials in the Paper, Latin America Newsletter and other media.

Xin Wang

I am more than fortunate to have been granted the Berger Scholarship. My name is Xin Wang, from Baotou, Inner Mongolia, and I am currently a PhD student at the School of International Relations, Beijing University, where my supervisor is Professor Wang Dong. The main focus of my research is American Government and Politics. During my undergraduate studies, I was the President of the school’s Model United Nations Association, where I was introduced to the subject of international relations and developed a keen interest in it. Despite that I became a high school teacher after my undergraduate studies, my love for the subject and my determination to become an academic has led me to return to school after six years of work to continue my studies. My current research interests are mainly in the politics of identity in the United States, where “people are not necessarily born politically, but politics is always in their identity”. I believe that this issue is both the crux of the dilemma facing American society today and the hope for a breakthrough. At the same time, my long experience of living in Inner Mongolia, a region inhabited by ethnic minorities, has made me very concerned about issues of identity and identification. I hope that through this research I will be able to exercise my problem-solving and thinking skills, thus to propose practical solutions. The Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger Memorial Fellowship School of International Studies will be the starting point of my research career and a testament to it as well, and I will be encouraged by it to continue my academic passion. I will be encouraged to maintain my academic enthusiasm, to discover and investigate more interesting questions, and to grow into a qualified scholar.