He received his Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University in 2004. Professor Hung researches and publishes on contentious politics, globalization, nationalism, and social theory. His current projects include one that expounds how the Confucianist legacy shaped China’s trajectories of state formation and popular protests from the eighteenth century to the present, in contrast to the Western trajectories. Another project examines the dynamics and limits of the current economic ascendancy of China, as well as its impact on global capitalism. A third project traces China’s changing conception of nationhood in light of Beijing’s contentious interaction with Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan since 1949. Besides these major projects, he also published about the orientalist origins of classical social theories, globalization of epidemics, China’s environmental movements, among others.