Davide Giacomo Zoppolato

Davide Giacomo Zoppolato is a Hong Yen Chang Center Fellow at Columbia Law School and was previously a Global China Fellow at NYU Shanghai. His research brings together Chinese law, political geography, and the geopolitics of Global China. His current legal work focuses on corporate law and securities regulation in the United States, mainland China, and Hong Kong. He also traces how institutional capital moves through public pension funds, asset managers, equity and bond markets, and offshore corporate structures into Chinese firms and onward into overseas projects and assets in the Global South.

His doctoral research at West Virginia University examined the discursive and material dimensions of China’s global rise through the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork across Pakistan, it traced how Chinese and Pakistani actors co-produce development through diplomatic and digital narratives, infrastructure, contractual arrangements, and security regimes, and how these interactions generate differentiated geographies of development, security, and contestation.

Across these projects, Zoppolato combines legal analysis and fieldwork with computational social science and spatial methods. He collects, builds, and analyzes large-scale corporate, financial, legal, and textual datasets using Python and PostgreSQL; applies NLP, large language models, and network analysis to documents and corporate relationships; and uses GIS and interactive mapping to trace capital, infrastructure, and institutions across jurisdictions and space.

His research has appeared in Geopolitics, Eurasian Geography and Economics, the Asian Journal of Law and Society and Territory, Politics, Governance.