Meiheng Lyu is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on comparative post-communist politics, democratic transition, and questions of backsliding and resilience in Eastern Europe. Her previous training is in Romanian language and East European studies, and her ongoing fieldwork is based in Romania, where she has spent a total of 17 months as an academic visitor at the University of Bucharest and Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. Her current project examines how the communist past continues to shape democratization in Eastern Europe.