Zerui Zhou is a third-year BSc Politics and International Relations student at University College London. His academic interests focus on authoritarian politics, particularly state–society relations approached through the lens of political sociology, and on political theory, with an emphasis on political legitimacy, freedom of expression, and the historically grounded philosophical traditions that inform China’s distinctive political model. At the Digital Speech Lab, he assists in a project mapping and analysing the current state of speech regulation in China.