China Program Staff

Yawei Liu, Ph.D., Director
Yawei Liu is director of the China Program and has been a member of numerous Carter Center missions to monitor Chinese village, township, and county people's congress deputy elections since 1997. He was associate professor of American history at Georgia Perimeter College until December 2008.  Dr. Liu has written extensively on China's political developments and grassroots democracy, including three edited book series: "Rural Election and Governance in Contemporary China" (Northwestern University Press, Xi'an, 2002 and 2004), "The Political Readers" (China Central Translation Bureau Press, Beijing, 2006), and "Elections & Governance" (Northwestern University Press, Xian, 2009). He is the founder and editor of the China elections and governance website www.chinaelections.org. Dr. Liu is also co-author of the popular Chinese book "Obama: The Man Who Will Change America" (October 2008).

He earned his bachelor's degree in English literature from Xi'an Foreign Languages Institute (1982), master's degree in recent American history from the University of Hawaii (1989), and doctorate in American political and diplomatic history from Emory University (1996).

Read a Q&A with Dr. Liu onPolitical Reform in China.

Sean Ding, Senior Program Associate
Sean Ding is senior program associate to the China Program at The Carter Center. Mr. Ding assists with programming decisions, fundraising, and project management as well as coordinating the Access to Information programming. In addition, he oversees the graphic design of program websites and publications and contributes to both the Chinese and English versions of the China elections and governance website: www.chinaelections.org (Chinese language) and www.chinaelectionsblog.net (English language). Mr. Ding holds a bachelor's degree in Arabic from Beijing Foreign Studies University and obtained a Master of Arts degree in political science from Georgia State University before joining The Carter Center in May 2008.

Marjorie Perry, Program Associate
Marjorie Perry is program associate to the China Program at The Carter Center. She oversees the chinaelections.net website and assists with project design, management, and implementation. Ms. Perry also oversees a team of interns and graduate assistants, writes articles, and does translations for the China Program's websites. Prior to coming to The Carter Center, Ms. Perry had lived in China for two years; one year as an exchange student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and one year as a student in the intensive language program at Xi'an Jiaotong University where she studied Mandarin under a comprehensive scholarship from the Chinese government. Ms. Perry graduated with distinction in 2009 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a bachelor's degree in linguistics and in gender and women's studies. She joined The Carter Center in May 2012.