Peng Zongchao, convener from East Asia, is Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Public Policy Institute in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University in Beijing, People’s Republic of China. He has his PhD in political science from Peking University with an award-winning thesis on ‘A Comparative Study of Direct Election Systems for National People’s Representation’. He came to Tsinghua as a postdoctoral fellow in the Development Research Academy for the 21st Century (1999-2001), focusing his study on the newly established public hearings system in China. In 2006-7 he was a visiting scholar in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Since 1999 he is a council member of the Public Policy Branch of the Chinese Public Administration Society. His research covers crisis management, public administration, public policy, comparative politics, political development, government reforms, and elections systems. He has undertaken over 20 research programmes on these subjects and has published more than 10 books (singly and jointly) and over 40 articles.