Angela Huyue Zhang

Angela Huyue Zhang is a Professor of Law at the USC Gould School of Law, where she joined the faculty in 2024 after nearly a decade in Hong Kong and prior appointments at NYU School of Law and King's College London. She is widely recognized as one of the leading English-language authorities on Chinese antitrust and technology regulation, and her work sits at the intersection of comparative competition law, platform governance, and the political economy of the Chinese state. Before entering academia she practiced for six years as a bankruptcy lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York and as an antitrust attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in Brussels, and that practice background remains visible in the granular, institution-focused way she writes about enforcement.

Zhang's academic reputation rests on two Oxford University Press books. The first, "Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism: How the Rise of China Challenges Global Regulation" (2021), argued that the extraterritorial reach of China's Anti-Monopoly Law had quietly become a structural constraint on global mergers, and it was named one of ProMarket's Best Political Economy Books of 2021. The second, "High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy" (2024), introduced her "dynamic pyramid" model of Chinese regulation and used the 2020 to 2022 tech crackdown (Ant Group, Alibaba, Didi, the platform labor rules) as a running case study; it received the 2026 Douglass North Best Book Award. Earlier long-form articles that helped make her name include "Bureaucratic Politics and China's Anti-Monopoly Law" (Cornell International Law Journal, 2014), "The Faceless Court" (University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, 2016), and "Agility over Stability: China's Great Reversal in Regulating the Platform Economy" (Harvard International Law Journal, 2022), the last of which is her most-cited article on Google Scholar.

Her current work has pivoted toward artificial intelligence. "The Promise and Perils of China's Regulation of Artificial Intelligence" (Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 2025) is now among her most-cited pieces, and she has a set of forthcoming articles including "Strategic Restraint in China's Extraterritorial Legal Statecraft" in AJIL Unbound and "The Sixth Layer: The Legal Infrastructure for Physical Artificial Intelligence in China" in the Berkeley Journal of International Law. She writes regularly as a Project Syndicate columnist and has appeared in The Economist, Bloomberg, the BBC, NPR's Planet Money, Nature, and Financial Times commentary on the U.S. to China tech rivalry, export controls, and AI governance, and she has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos and Dalian, VivaTech in Paris, and the LSE Ballpark and Sinica podcasts.

Zhang holds an LLB from Peking University (2004) and an LLM (2006), JD (2008), and JSD (2011) from the University of Chicago Law School, where her doctoral dissertation was supervised by former Judge Richard A. Posner. She is a four-time recipient of the Concurrences Antitrust Writing Award, won the 2023 CSAMSE Best Paper Award (First Prize), and received the University of Hong Kong's Outstanding Young Researcher Award in 2022. At HKU she directed the Philip K. H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law before her move to USC.