The subject of political science mainly relies on the construction ofthe Department of Political Science. The Department of Political Science was established in September 2021 at the same time as the School of Government. The department can be traced back to the “Institute of Contemporary Chinese Politics” established in 1999, with a history of more than 20 years of discipline construction. The Institute of Contemporary Chinese Politics is the first university think tank dedicated to studying the theory and practice of contemporary Chinese political development in Guangdong Province. In 2003, it was selected as the first key research base of humanities and social sciences in Guangdong Province. In 2016, it was merged into the Institute of City Governance of Shenzhen University (renamed as the Institute of Global Mega-City Governance in 2022). It was approved to set up a first-level master program in political science in 2010, a second-level doctoral program in political communication in 2018, and a micro-major “City Management” in 2023.

At present, the first-level master program in political science and the second-level doctoral program in political communication have become the support for the construction of the first-level discipline of political science in Shenzhen University. Among them, the doctoral program has set up one research direction: “Political Communication”, and the master program has set up four stable research directions: “Political Theory”, “Chinese Politics”, “Comparative Politics” and “Urban Politics”. After more than ten years of development, it has cultivated a large number of high-level composite talents who are qualified for practical work, professional research, and education.

The department currently has 16 full-time faculty members, including 4 professors, 5 associate professors, 7 lecturers or assistant professors, 4 full-time researchers and 3 postdoctoral fellows. A number of teachers have been awarded the titles of “National Candidates for the New Century Hundred, Thousand and Ten Thousand Talents Project” and training members of colleges and universities in Guangdong Province in the “Thousand-Hundred-Ten Talents Project”. The school has strong faculty strength, reasonable age structure and sufficient development momentum.

Relying on the location advantage of being adjacent to Hong Kong and Macau and at the forefront of reform and opening up, the department attaches importance to basic theories and basic cultivation, and also lays stress on the forefront of research questions and empirical research methods, focusing on the pre-emerging practical problems and cutting-edge theoretical issues of great theoretical significance. It has formed research characteristics and advantages in the fields of Party politics, contemporary Chinese politics, urban politics, politics of special economic zones, politics of Southeast Asia, and politics of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and has achieved outstanding results. The “Research Report on Contemporary Chinese Politics”, the “Translation Collection of Political Science and Public Administration”, the “Empirical Research Series on Chinese Local Governance and Political Development”, and the “Translation Collection of Foreign Classic Works of Urban Politics” have been successively released, which have gained wide visibility and influence in political circles at home and abroad.