Peace Programs

China Program

Yawei Liu, Ph.D., Director

Yawei Liu is director of the China Program and associate professor of American history at Georgia Perimeter College. Yawei has been a member of numerous Carter Center missions to monitor Chinese village, township, and county people's congress deputy elections since 1997. He has written extensively on China's political developments and grassroots democracy, including two edited books: Rural Election and Governance in Contemporary China (Northwestern University Press, Xi'an, 2002 and 2004) and The Political Readers (China Central Translation Bureau Press, Beijing, 2006). He is the founder and editor of the China elections and governance Web site (www.chinaelections.org). He earned his bachelor's degree in English literature from Xi'an Foreign Languages Institute (1982), master's degree in recent Chinese history from the University of Hawaii (1989), and doctorate in American history from Emory University (1996).

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Heather Saul, Program Associate

Heather Saul joined The Carter Center in October 2007 as the program associate of the China Program. She is the major editor and a contributing writer of the www.chinaelections.net  Web site, the English version of www.chinaelections.org. She also assists with programming decisions and provides support to the China Program's partners in China.

Ms. Saul holds a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from the University of Georgia. She spent nearly half of her undergraduate studies at National Taiwan University studying the Chinese language, culture, and politics. During and after college, Ms. Saul worked for the Humanitad Foundation, an international organization affiliated with the United Nations that focuses on cultural preservation and social sustainability in Asia and Europe. With Humanitad, she worked on projects in Hungary, Romania, Indonesia, China, and Taiwan.