- Zheng Fu+, Chuncheng Liu. “Mediated Recognition: AI-Legibility, Capital, and the Social Structure of Algorithmic Preference.” ( Under Review )

- Zheng Fu+, Chuncheng Liu. “Power in the Loop: Algorithmic Governance and Legitimacy under Authoritarianism.” ( Manuscript in preparation )

- Zheng Fu. “AI and the New Digital Divide: Understanding Non-Use in Vulnerable Communities.” (Data in Progress)

Book Manuscript in preparation

My project problematizes the distinction between “fact” and “misinformation” and explores how the line between misinformation and fact is constructed. My preliminary qualitative research shows that the most conspiratorial or sensational content is often ignored by both professional and lay fact-checkers. However, crowd-sourced fact-checking surfaces fringe but popular conspiratorial posts more effectively. I hypothesize that professional fact-checkers focus on mainstream content, while crowd-sourced fact-checking draws from a pool of fact-checkers with more omnivorous media-consuming habits, making them more likely to encounter fringe misinformation. This work complements my broader research agenda by examining how algorithmically mediated information ecosystems shape public discourse.

- Zheng Fu+, Gil Eyal. “The Work of Legitimacy in China: The Implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract Law in a Chinese City” ( Manuscript in preparation )

- Zheng Fu. “Missing Binds: How Absent Ties Unleash Migrant Worker Activism Under an Authoritarian Regime” (Accepted at Sociological Forum )

Migrant workers are considered less militant in collective action than locals, partly because they lack social ties in the receiving community. However, in China’s Pearl River Delta, I find the opposite. Comparing five cases of labor protest from 2014 to 2016 drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and labor activists’ records, I show that migrant peasant workers are less exposed to the local state’s demobilization efforts than local peasant workers because the former have fewer and less heterogeneous social ties in the receiving community. In particular, they have fewer social ties with members of the community affiliated with or reliant on the local state. I describe these paths between would-be protesters, intermediaries, and the local state as “conduits of power,” exposing would-be protesters to soft state repression. Migrant peasant workers’ limited networks reduce the conduits of power in their network, leading to a “missing binds” effect. This paper offers three key insights: First, in totalizing regimes, specific community ties can hinder labor protests, adding nuance to social movement unionism. Second, migrant workers’ insulated network positions in autocracies can aid collective resistance. Third, migration is a crucial factor driving labor protests in China, with ongoing demographic changes potentially impacting future labor militancy.

- Gil Eyal, Zheng Fu.2025.“The Work of Legitimacy” Annual Review of Law and Social Science

What makes a law or regulation legitimate? This article develops a sociological approach that locates legitimacy not outside the law but in the work performed by a network of actors that cuts across the boundaries of the state. Drawing on Weber, Habermas, and Szelenyi, we suggest that legitimacy should be understood as the element that increases the probability of compliance with legal commands. We argue that this element cannot be a psychological “belief in legitimacy” but should be understood as work performed by the staff to construct and repair the discursive mechanisms that make legal commands defensible. We then draw on Actor-Network Theory to analyze this work as translation and offer two empirical examples: labor legislation in China and vaccine mandates in the United States. Throughout, we compare our approach with different lines of research in the law and society literature, noting where our conclusions converge and where they represent potential revisions to this literature.

- Andreas Wimmer, Bart Bonikowski, Charles Crabtree, Zheng Fu, Matt Golder and Kiyoteru Tsutsui. 2024. “Geo-political rivalry and anti-immigrant sentiment: A conjoint experiment in 22 countries”American Political Science Review

Introducing an international relations perspective into the literature on anti-immigrant attitudes, we hypothesize that immigrants from rival countries will be shunned and immigrants from allied countries preferred, especially by respondents who identify more strongly with the nation. We fielded a forced-choice conjoint experiment in 22 countries, whereby respondents chose between applicants for permanent resident status with randomized attributes. We identified rival and allied countries of origin for each surveyed country, with one such pair sharing a similar racial and cultural make-up as the majority of respondents, and one pair being more dissimilar. We find that discrimination against immigrants from rival states is so pronounced that it results in a net preference for racially and culturally dissimilar immigrants. Since we fielded the surveys amidst the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are able to leverage exogenous changes in the intensity of one rivalry, providing further evidence for the proposed mechanism.