Madison Committee on Foreign Relations

4 June 2009

Melanie Manion

Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science, UW Madison

Speaking at this MCFR event on June 4 is very significant to our speaker because it is the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests, which Professor Manion experienced personally. She has been a keen observer of developing democracy ever since, and is an expert on political reform in China . She will have just given testimony in Washington on current developments there.

Melanie Manion is professor of public affairs and political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Prior to her current appointment, she was an associate professor of political science at the University of Rochester , where she taught for ten years. She studied philosophy and political economy at Peking University in 1978–80; her research on Chinese politics and policy has taken her regularly to mainland China since the mid-1980s. Her previous work analyzes Chinese bureaucratic politics, grassroots electoral democratization, and the political economy of good governance.

She is particularly interested in political institutions, both formal and informal, especially the impact of institutions on representation. Her current project investigates representation by asking how newly assertive local Chinese congresses navigate their agency relationships with the communist party and ordinary constituents.

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