Dr. Ruiheng Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arabic Language and Cultures, and a Research Fellow in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Peking University, China. His research focuses on the great power competition, the Kurdish question and sectarian politics in modern Iraq. He is the author of The Kurdish Question in Iraq (1958-2003) (Beijng: China Social Science Press, 2024), and “The Failed Ba‘thification of Iraqi Kurdistan: The Ideological and Organizational Strategies of the Ba‘th Party in Northern Iraq, 1968-2003,” (The Middle East Journal 75, no. 3, 2021). During 2019-2020, he was a visiting scholar at the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies of Stanford University.