Shawn has 15 years of experience working to strengthen civil society and social movements in China and the Asia-Pacific. In 2018, he founded Social Innovations Advisory, Ltd., a consultancy dedicated to building a resilient civil society in China and the global South. SIA partners with other organizations to design strategies and tools to sustain civil society and strengthen its capacity to hold government and corporate actors accountable. Shawn is also a Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute, a Research Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a Contributor to Rights CoLab, an active member of Innovation for Change-East Asia, and a long-time consultant for the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. He was previously Deputy Director of China Labour Bulletin in Hong Kong, and director of the English-language operations for China Development Brief, China’s only bilingual platform covering civil society and philanthropy. Shawn received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University and has written and published extensively on China’s political economy, corruption and civil society and since 2009 has maintained a blog on NGOs in China.