Victor Shih is Associate Professor of Political Science at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. A scholar of political economy of China, Shih holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. He has published widely on the politics of Chinese banking policies, fiscal policies, and exchange rates, and was the first analyst to identify the risk of massive local government debt. He also worked as a principal for The Carlyle Group. Shih is currently engaged in a study of how the coalition-formation strategies of founding leaders had a profound impact on the evolution of the Chinese Communist Party. He is also constructing a large database on biographical information of elites in China.