Hanzhang Liu

Hanzhang Liu

Assistant Professor, Pitzer College 2018-2019 CSCC Postdoctoral Fellow

Hanzhang Liu was a 2018-2019 CSCC postdoctoral fellow. She is currently an assistant professor of political studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. She studies comparative authoritarian politics and the political economy of development with a focus on China. Specifically, she is interested in authoritarian institutions and their role in mediating the relationship between the ruling elites and ordinary citizens. For her dissertation, she examined how merit-based elite recruitment under authoritarianism serves as an institution of upward mobility to co-opt ordinary citizens and hence help stabilize the regime. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 2018, and a B.A. in political science and economics from Smith College in 2011.