Ben Hillman is a Senior Lecturer in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He studies political development in Asia with a focus on China. Hillman is especially interested in the role of informal institutions in public policy making, and in policies and mechanisms for promoting political inclusion and protecting minority rights. His forthcoming book will be published in Chinese, Shangrila Inside Out: Ethnic Diversity and Development (Yunnan People’s Publishing House). He has recently co-edited (with Gray Tuttle) Ethnic Conflict and Protest in Tibet and Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West (Columbia University Press, 2016), and previously authored Patronage and Power: Local State Networks and Party-State Resilience in Rural China (Stanford University Press, 2014).