Victoria Tin-bor Hui

Biography

Victoria Tin-bor Hui is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in comparative politics and international relations, with a focus on historical sociology, state–society relations, contentious politics, Chinese politics, Hong Kong, and global struggles for freedom. Her work bridges historical inquiry, contemporary political analysis, and sustained engagement with democracy defenders confronting repression.

Professor Hui was a first-generation college student who began her academic journey studying Journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She later participated in an exchange program at Georgetown University before earning her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University. Before graduate school, she worked in Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement. These formative experiences continue to shape her commitment to combining rigorous scholarship with public engagement and policy relevance.

Her first major research agenda examines the historical construction and transformation of "China" through war, conquest, and state formation. Her award-winning book, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005), challenged conventional wisdom by arguing that the unification of the Warring States was not a natural or inevitable process, but the outcome of domination strategies within a vibrant multistate system. Her subsequent work has explored Chinese state formation, historical international relations, imperial expansion, state–society relations, and the historical foundations of political order. Selected publications include "Getting Asia Right: De-essentializing China's Hegemony in Historical Asia," "How Tilly's Warfare Paradigm Is Revolutionizing the Study of Chinese State-Making," "What Rose and Fell in Imperial China? State Strength, the Civil Service Examination, and Inventiveness," "Genocide, Extermination, and Mass Killing in Chinese History," "Cultural Diversity and Coercive Cultural Homogenization in Chinese History," "Toward a Dynamic Theory of International Politics," and "The Emergence and Demise of Nascent Constitutional Rights: Comparing Ancient China and Early Modern Europe."

More recently, Professor Hui's research has expanded to the dynamics of authoritarian adaptation, resistance, and repression, particularly in Hong Kong. Since the Umbrella Movement in 2014—and especially following the 2019 anti-extradition protests—she has analyzed how Beijing dismantled Hong Kong's freedoms through legal, administrative, and coercive means (https://victoriatbhui.wordpress.com/). Once the world's only case of "freedom without democracy," Hong Kong has seen its remaining freedoms systematically eroded to foreclose the possibility of democracy.

Professor Hui’s engagement extends beyond academic publication. She regularly briefs policymakers, journalists, and civil society organizations on developments in Hong Kong and China, has testified before U.S. congressional bodies, and has contributed commentary to international media. In 2021–22, she served as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow embedded with the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. Since 2022, she has been a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Democracy.

At Notre Dame, Professor Hui promotes China literacy and critical thinking among future leaders, emphasizing the unintended and counterproductive consequences of both state policies and bottom-up activism. Her courses—including Contention in China, The China Challenge, Global Struggles for Democracy, and Democracy Defenders in Exile—extend this approach by developing students’ autocracy literacy, the capacity to diagnose how authoritarian regimes operate, suppress coordination, and adapt to opposition, and analytical fluency, the ability to construct, defend, and revise arguments under real-world constraints.

These courses are structured around iterative writing, oral briefings, and direct engagement with democracy defenders (https://sites.google.com/nd.edu/democracydefendersinexile). Students are required not only to understand theoretical frameworks, but to apply them in real time: defining goals, diagnosing political systems, deriving strategy from structural conditions, and responding to counterarguments. They engage with activists, policymakers, and journalists, translating lived experience into analytical insight and testing their arguments in high-stakes, interactive settings. Through this design, Professor Hui cultivates a high-performance learning environment in which students move beyond passive learning to producing original arguments grounded in both theory and practice.