Zoom ID: 916 5461 7686, Passcode: 1014

Thursday October 14, 8:30 PM – 10:00 PM China / Thursday October 14, 8:30 AM – 10:00 AM EST

Speaker: Dr. Melanie Manion, Vor Broker Family Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Duke University

Abstract

Institutions of political selection define whose preferences matter for the important question of who wields political power—and this substantially determines the characteristics of public officials and the quality of governance. Scholarship on political selection in China has greatly flourished in recent years, but the research contours of it have shrunk. The study of political selection in China has become practically synonymous with the study of promotion of provincial party bosses who are modeled as participants in institutionalized yardstick competition with peers for career advancement as top economic performers. The dominant challenge to this economic tournament model views career advancement—and Chinese politics more generally—as not strongly institutionalized. Instead, it proposes that patronage connections in the political elite largely determine who gets ahead. In this talk, I rethink foundations and findings in this scholarship. I propose an alternative perspective, taking advantage of a rich, fieldwork-based, largely qualitative literature on how political selection and related processes in China actually work.

Bio

Dr. Melanie MANION is the Vor Broker Family Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She was the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at Duke Kunshan University from 2018 to 2021. She studied philosophy and political economy at Peking University in the late 1970s, was trained in Far Eastern studies at McGill University and 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.