Advisory committee

Meet our advisory committee:

Kent Jennings

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara | Professor Emeritus and Research Scientist Emeritus, University of Michigan

Kent Jennings is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan. His specialties include political socialisation, public opinion and political participation, and gender and politics. He has conducted research in the United States and collaborated with others on projects in Western Europe and China. He is the author or co-author of Community Influentials, The Image of the Federal Service, The Political Character of Adolescence, Governing American Schools, Generations and Politics, Parties in Transition, and Continuities in Political Action. Jennings is a past president of the International Society of Political Psychology and of the American Political Science Association.

Pierre Landry

Professor of Government and Public Administration, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Pierre F. Landry is a Professor in the department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a political scientist working in the area of comparative politics. Prof. Landry’s research interests focus on Asian and Chinese politics, comparative local government, quantitative comparative analysis and survey research. His expertise is in local governance,  urbanization and development, authoritarian regimes,  East Asia and China. He has also been working on research projects in Vietnam (Public Administration Performance Index (PAPI) as well as  in Tunisia, Malawi, Zambia and Kenya, in collaboration with the Program on Governance and Local Development at the University of Gothenburg. Prof. Landry’s studied economics and law at Sciences Po Paris, received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Michigan, and is an alumnus of the University of Virginia (MA in Foreign Affairs) and the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University program at the Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing. He is the author of Decentralized Authoritarianism in China: The Communist Party’s Control of Local Elites in the Post-Mao Era (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Landry is also the co-investigator of the Barometer on China’s Development (BOCD) at the Universities Service Centre for China Studies (Chinese University of Hong Kong) and also serves on the international advisory committee of the Centre.

Melanie Manion

Vor Broker Family Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Duke University

Melania Manion is the Vor Broker Family Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She studied philosophy and political economy at Peking University in the late 1970s, was trained in Far Eastern studies at McGill University and the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and earned her doctorate in political science at the University of Michigan.

Her research focuses on contemporary authoritarianism, with empirical work on bureaucracy, corruption, information, and representation in China. Her most recent book, Information for Autocrats (Cambridge University Press, 2015), studies representation in Chinese local congresses, analyzing data from an original survey of some 5,000 local congressmen and women and their constituents. Previous publications include Retirement of Revolutionaries in China (Princeton University Press, 1993), Corruption by Design (Harvard University Press, 2004), and Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies (edited with Allen Carlson, Mary Gallagher, and Kenneth Lieberthal, Cambridge University Press, 2010). Her articles have appeared in journals including American Political Science ReviewComparative Political Studies, and China Quarterly.

Wenfang Tang

Head & Chair Professor of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Wenfang Tang is Head and Chair Professor of Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His current research focuses on public opinion, mass politics, and political culture in contemporary China. He has authored and co-authored several books published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Stanford University Press, and many articles in academic journals including American Journal of Political SciencePolitical Research Quarterly, Political Communication, Journal of Public PolicyChina QuarterlyJournal of Contemporary China, among others. His book Populist Authoritarianism: Chinese Political Culture and Regime Sustainability (Oxford University Press, 2016) won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award. 

Yuhua Wang

Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government, Harvard University

Yuhua Wang is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government (untenured) at Harvard University. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Peking University (Beijing, China) and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. His research has focused on the emergence and constraints of state institutions, with a regional focus on China. Yanhua is the author of Tying the Autocrat’s Hands: The Rise of the Rule of Law in China (Cambridge University Press, 2015). I am currently working on a new book “The Rise and Fall of the Chinese State, 618-1911” (under contract at Princeton University Press) to examine the long-term state development in China.

Joss Wright

Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford | Co-Director of the Oxford EPSRC Cybersecurity Doctoral Training Centre | Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade | Alan Turing Fellow

Dr. Joss Wright is Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Co-Director of the Oxford EPSRC Cybersecurity Doctoral Training Centre, Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade, and an Alan Turing Fellow. His work focuses on computational approaches to social science questions, with a particular focus on technologies that exert, resist, or subvert control over information. He has advised the European Commission and a number of European Union research projects on the social, legal and ethical impact of security technologies, as well as the UK Office of National Statistics on privacy issues in the design of the UK census. He has also published articles on privacy, social media and online activism for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, amongst others.