Alison Sile Chen is a Ph.D. student in the Political Science department at the University of California, San Diego, studying authoritarian surveillance. Before coming to the U.S. to pursue an academic career, Chen was a journalist and columnist focusing on social movements and political repression in China. Most of her work is published under the pen name Zhao Sile (赵思乐). She is the winner of two Society of Asian Publishers Awards, the highest honor for covering Asia. Chen also received the Hong Kong Human Rights Press Award six times between 2011 and 2017.
Chen’s first book, Her Battles, was selected as one of the Ten Best Chinese Books in 2017 by Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly). She was a Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018, where she conducted research on the effect of China’s political restriction on Taiwanese civil society. She has served as an advisor for many organizations within the community of Chinese youth activists. Chen now studies comparative politics and social movements concerning China.
