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 on Political Reform in China.

Sean Ding, Program Associate
Sean Ding is 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.

Jennifer Smith, Assistant Program Coordinator
Jennifer Smith joined The Carter Center in September 2009 as assistant program coordinator for the China Program. She oversees the Chinaelections.net website and contributes to the China Elections and Governance Review, a quarterly online journal published by the Carter Center's China Program. Ms. Smith also assists with program administration, grant writing, and project design. Before joining The Carter Center, Ms. Smith lived in China for three years, where she obtained a Master of Arts degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies and studied intensive Chinese language at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University. She also interned at the National Committee on United States-China Relations and volunteered for Mercy Corps and The Five Project. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in French literature from Reed College.