Meet Juan Qian

Welcome. My name is Jingyuan “Juan” Qian, and I am a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at University of Wisconsin-Madison. My major fields are comparative politics and methodology.

My substantive research interests include political violence and repression, bureaucratic politics, and statebuilding in an authoritarian setting. At this moment, my research agenda centers around one major question: how rising autocrats induce and retain the compliance of their subordinates during their power consolidation? I use both formal models and data-driven empirical research to answer this question.

My dissertation project, titled “Statebuilding by Campaign,” explores the role of Mao’s mass-mobilized political campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s on the bureaucratic norms and regime consolidation of the Chinese party-state. I have been collecting and using a wide variety of archival data to understand how Mao’s mass campaigns impacted the regime’s ability to penetrate and control the bureaucracy and the broader society. Gratefully, my dissertation research has been supported by NSF-APSA Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and APSA Hsueh International Fellowship Fund.

Please find my CV and a short bio here.