Ying Ma (馬穎) is a writer, policy expert, and communications professional. Ms. Ma is the author of Chinese Girl in the Ghetto, a memoir about getting to know freedom from post-Mao China to inner-city Oakland, California; a member of the Board of Advisors for the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, an organization that prepares young women for effective leadership and promotes leading conservative women; the host of the “China vs. USA” podcast; and a contributor to Fox News Opinion, NBC News THINK, the Washington Examiner, and The National Interest.

Ms. Ma has extensive experience working on political campaigns. In 2021, she served as the communications director for the Elder for Governor campaign in the special recall election in California. In 2020, she was the communications director of the NO on Prop 16 Campaign, which defeated an attempt to reinstate race-based affirmative action in California by a resounding 57 to 43 percent margin.

In the 2016 presidential election, Ms. Ma served as deputy director of the Committee for American Sovereignty, a super PAC formed to support the candidacy of Donald Trump for president. During the 2016 GOP primaries, she served as deputy policy director and deputy communications director for the Ben Carson presidential campaign.

Previously, Ms. Ma was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, a premier conservative think tank; practiced law at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, a preeminent global law firm headquartered in New York; managed corporate communications at Sina.com, the first Mainland China-based Internet company to list on the Nasdaq Stock Market; worked on the first professional staff of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional commission; and served public affairs clients in the Hong Kong office of Burson-Marsteller, a leading public relations firm.

From 2007 to 2012, Ms. Ma was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In 1998, Ms. Ma served on the staff of an American delegation whose leaders were appointed by former President Bill Clinton and invited by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin to visit China and discuss religious freedom. In 1996, Ms. Ma was the Bay Area Outreach Coordinator for Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that ended public racial and gender preferences in California.

Ms. Ma has written widely about politics, conservatism, China, and international affairs. Her articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal Asia, the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, Forbes.com, and other publications. She was previously a columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s China blog. She has been featured on the Fox News Channel, the Fox Business Network, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, Bloomberg, and elsewhere. She is also a former radio show host for Radio Television Hong Kong, the city’s public broadcast station.

Ms. Ma received a B.A. in Government, magna cum laude, from Cornell University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. In college, she served as president of The Cornell Review, a bi-weekly conservative newspaper. In law school, she was president of the Stanford Chapter of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, an organization dedicated to conservative and libertarian legal principles.