Weifeng Zhong

Weifeng Zhong was born in Shaoguan, China and serves as a Senior Advisor for AFPI’s Office for Fiscal and Regulatory Analysis. He has over a decade of experience applying data analytics and artificial intelligence to policy questions. He’s a co-creator of the Policy Change Index, an open-source project that uses AI to analyze and predict governments’ actions based on their words. In a matter of five years, the PCI project grew from a two-programmer “playground” to a suite of software tools that have informed US and allied government agencies, the private sector and the academia about the behavior of authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. Zhong received his Ph.D. in managerial economics and strategy at Northwestern University and, before joining AFPI, was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. His work has been featured in media outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, NPR, Foreign Affairs, and Lawfare. He’s also a frequent interview guest on BBC, C-SPAN, and Fox Business, among others. He’s the proud husband of a public-school teacher and dad of a boy who strongly believes in free will. In his free time, he enjoys making fractal artwork with Python.