Chin-Huat Wong is Professor and Deputy Head (Strategy) for the SDSN’s Kuala Lumpur Office at Sunway University. Trained in economics and organisational psychology before pursuing comparative politics at University of Essex, UK, he focuses on SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) but also supports works on SDG5 (Gender Equality), SDG (No Poverty), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). Working primarily on Malaysia now, he specialises in electoral system, party system, parliamentary democracy, and identity politics.
Since 2020 when Malaysia had to grapple with a hung parliament, he has advocated many new ideas to stabilise politics, including Confidence and Supply Agreement, equal constituency allocation for elected representatives, recall, fixed term parliament, and public finance of political parties, some of which are already implemented or gaining support.
In 2021, he and his SDSN colleague Chang-Xi Wo also co-authored the White Paper on Top-Up Women-Only Additional Seats (TWOAS) for the Penang State, an innovative 3-in-1 design to introduce gender quota, proportionality and non-constituency seats. He is a founding member of the Coalition for Clean and Fair Election (Bersih) in 2006 and continues to serve as a resource person. In 2018-2020, He was also the cluster head for electoral system and constituency delimitation in the Electoral Reform Committee (ERC) under Prime Minister’s Department.
Wong’s political commentaries in English, Malay and Chinese are featured in international and Malaysian media including South China Morning Post, Al-Jazeera, Project Syndicate and New York Times.