Jessica Batke is a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) and a Senior Fellow at ChinaFile, where she researches China’s internet censorship system and its wider impacts on the world. She is also a Senior European Fellow at Cybersecurity for Democracy and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS).
From 2017 to 2025, Batke was a writer and editor at ChinaFile, most recently as ChinaFile’s Senior Editor for Investigations. She covered China's Foreign NGO Law, domestic surveillance, internet censorship, and the Party-state’s approaches to governance. She served as a Research Analyst in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 2009 to 2017, where she focused on domestic social issues, including developments in Tibet and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. In 2016, she was a Visiting Academic Fellow at MERICS in Berlin.
Batke holds a B.A. in Linguistics from Pitzer College and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University.
