This event is co-sponsored by the Hoover Project on China’s Global Sharp Power. 

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Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China over 70 years ago, five paramount leaders have shaped the fates and fortunes of the nation and the ruling Chinese Communist Party: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Drawing on his recent book, China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now, in this lecture Professor David Shambaugh will explore the differing backgrounds, contrasting leadership styles, and impact of each paramount leader.

Speaker

David Shambaugh is the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science & International Affairs, and Director of the China Policy Program, Elliott School of International Affairs, at George Washington University. Professor Shambaugh joined the George Washington faculty after serving as Reader in Chinese Politics at the University of London’s SOAS and as editor of The China Quarterly. As an author, Professor Shambaugh has published 35 books, including most recently International Relations of Asia (3rd ed., 2022), China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now (2021), Where Great Powers Meet: America & China in Southeast Asia (2021), and China & the World (2020).

Chair

Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the Department of Political Science and a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She directs the China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and is the Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University.

Discussant 

Glenn Tiffert is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China. He co-chairs the Hoover project on China’s Global Sharp Power and works closely with government and civil society partners to document and build resilience against authoritarian interference with democratic institutions. Most recently, he co-authored and edited Global Engagement: Rethinking Risk in the Research Enterprise (2020).

This event is co-sponsored by the German Historical Institute, Pacific Office Berkeley and the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. 

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faced a major predicament. Since the new leadership did not allow a free exchange of opinions, the problem was how to obtain reliable information and prevent the circulation of rumors and “fake news.” To deal with this “dictator’s dilemma,” the CCP developed a two-pronged approach. Besides public news items that catered to the mobilizational aspects of party policies, it established secret feedback channels, the so-called neican, or internal reference, bulletins. These were strictly tasked with separating facts from opinion to provide the leadership with an objective account of developments in China and abroad. Over time, a distinct system for the controlled circulation of intelligence, an “information order,” took shape. In this talk, Leese will outline some general features of this information order and comment on whether it was able to circumvent the problem of information bias in authoritarian systems.

Speaker

Daniel Leese is professor of Chinese history and politics at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He is, among others, the author of Mao cult. Rhetoric and Ritual during China’s Cultural Revolution (CUP 2011) and Mao’s Long Shadow: How China dealt with its Past (in German), which won the ICAS Best Book Award and was shortlisted for the German Non-Fiction Award. He currently works on a new project that traces what the party leadership knew about domestic and international affairs through secret communication channels.

The 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is scheduled to begin on October 16, 2022. Its outcomes will determine the country’s trajectory for years to come. Join APARC’s China Program for an expert panel covering the Congresses’ context, coverage, and policy implications for the future. This panel discussion will provide expert analyses of what was expected, what was unexpected, how the policies announced may play out over the coming years, and some lesser-covered policy changes that may herald implications for China and the world.

Speakers 

 

Jude Blanchette holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Previously, he was engagement director at The Conference Board’s China Center for Economics and Business in Beijing, where he researched China’s political environment with a focus on the workings of the Communist Party of China and its impact on foreign companies and investors. Prior to working at The Conference Board, Blanchette was the assistant director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. 

 

Emily Feng is NPR’s Beijing correspondent. Feng joined NPR in 2019. She roves around China, through its big cities and small villages, reporting on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of Beijing. Feng contributes to NPR’s news magazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms. Emily is the recipient of the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award for excellence in coverage of the Asia-Pacific region. 

 

Qingguo Jia is professor of the School of International Studies of Peking University. Currently, he is a Payne Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1988. He is a member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. He is vice president of the China American Studies Association，vice president of the China Association for International Studies, and vice president of the China Japanese Studies Association. He has published extensively on US-China relations, relations between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan and Chinese foreign policy.

 

Alice L. Miller is a historian and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2001 to 2018, she was editor and contributor to Hoover’s China Leadership Monitor. 

America’s preeminence in higher education is relatively new, and there is no reason to assume that U.S. schools will continue to lead the world a century from now. Will China challenge its position in the twenty-first? The modern university was born in Germany. In the twentieth century, the United States leapfrogged Germany to become the global leader in higher education. Today, American institutions dominate nearly every major ranking of global universities. However, America’s supremacy in higher education is under great stress, particularly at its public universities. At the same time Chinese universities are on the ascent. Thirty years ago, Chinese institutions were reopening after the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution; today they are some of the most innovative educational centers in the world. Will China threaten American primacy?

Please join us for the China Program’s Author Series.

The book is available for purchase here. 

Speaker

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is a University Distinguished Service Professor. Professor Kirby serves as Chairman of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. At Harvard he has served as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Chairman of the History Department, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His current projects include case studies of trend-setting Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States. His recent books include Can China Lead? (Harvard Business Review Press) and China and Europe on the New Silk Road (Oxford University Press). His latest book, Empires of Ideas: Creating Modern Universities from Germany to America to China (Harvard University Press), is now available.

Discussant

Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Previously, he served as chair of the Department of Sociology, and as director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

The Henan bank protest, the Evergrande crisis, and the ongoing local government debt issue in China all point to one thing: there’s something wrong with the country’s banking system. Beijing needs to better regulate the numerous small banks that are now intimately intertwined with much of China's economic challenges. 

They’re working on it, but there’s no easy solution.

Adam Y. Liu will tell us the origins of the dilemma, the increasing role of small banks in China and local development, and what tradeoffs China will likely have to make to prevent a run-away banking crisis.

Speaker

Adam Y. Liu is assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His main research interests include Chinese politics and political economy. He is currently working on a book project that explores how central-local politics drove the formation, expansion, and operation of what he calls a "state-owned market" in China's banking sector. The project is based on his dissertation, which won the 2020 BRICS Economic Research Award. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral associate with the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at Yale University. 

Following the launch of his new book, America's Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition, Wyne joins the China Program’s Author Series to discuss how the United States must avoid complacency and consternation in appraising China and Russia. Rather than attempting the unfeasible—countering their current and future initiatives and forestalling subsequent provocations—Wyne argues that Washington should formulate a more practical, creative, and sustainable foreign policy that can advance U.S. national interests regardless of what steps Beijing and Moscow take, and that recent competitive missteps give the U.S. space to undertake this task.

For more information about America's Great-Power Opportunity or to purchase a copy, please click here.

Speaker

Ali Wyne is a Senior Analyst at the Eurasia Group’s Global Macro Geopolitics practice and Author of the brand-new book America’s Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition.

2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award Recipient Emily Feng, NPR's Beijing Correspondent, to Headline Award Panel Discussion

Journalists expelled, local staff harassed, reporting trips heavily surveilled, and a country locked down by Covid controls: all this means correspondents have far less access to information in China, at the very moment understanding China has become so crucial to our economy and geopolitics. Fewer correspondents are left in China — and fewer want to go. Reporting on China will have to change — leveraging remote reporting, digital journalism, and multimedia — but such changes may also distort how we view China.

Join APARC as we honor journalist Emily Feng, NPR’s Beijing Correspondent and winner of the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award. In her award keynote address, Feng will address the challenges reporting from and on China and how international media can respond to them.

The keynote will be followed by a conversation with Feng and two experts: Louisa Lim, an award-winning journalist, Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne teaching audio journalism and podcasting, and a member of the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award, and Jennifer Pan, professor of communication and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session moderated by Stanford sociologist and China expert Xueguang Zhou.

Follow us on Twitter and use the hashtag #SJA22 to join the conversation.

Questions about this event? Contact Sallie Lin.

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Speakers

Emily Feng is NPR's Beijing correspondent. Feng joined NPR in 2019. She roves around China, through its big cities and small villages, reporting on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of Beijing. Feng contributes to NPR's news magazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms.

Previously, Feng served as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. Based in Beijing, she covered a broad range of topics, including human rights and technology. She also began extensively reporting on the region of Xinjiang during this period, becoming the first foreign reporter to uncover that China was separating Uyghur children from their parents and sending them to state-run orphanages, and discovering that China was introducing forced labor in Xinjiang's detention camps.

Feng's reporting has also let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands, and write about girl bands and art. She's filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine; the top of a mosque in Qinghai; and from inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in. Prior to her recognition by the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award, her human rights coverage was shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018 and won two Human Rights Press awards. Her radio coverage of    the coronavirus epidemic in China was recognized by the National Headliners Award. She spearheaded coverage that has won two Gracie Awards. She was also named a Livingston Award finalist in 2021.

Feng graduated cum laude from Duke University with a dual B.A. degree from Duke's Sanford School in Asian and Middle Eastern studies and in public policy.

Louisa Lim is an award-winning journalist who reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC. Her first book, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism. She co-hosts The Little Red Podcast, an award-winning podcast on China. She works as a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, teaching audio journalism and podcasting, and has a PhD in journalism studies. Her latest book, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, was released in April 2022 from Penguin Random House. 

Jennifer Pan is a professor of communication and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Her research focuses on political communication and authoritarian politics. Pan uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to answer questions about how autocrats perpetuate their rule, how political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age, and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result.

Her book, Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers (Oxford, 2020) shows how China's pursuit of political order transformed the country’s main social assistance program, Dibao, for repressive purposes. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Science. 

She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government.

Moderator

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Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. His main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships. 

One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He works with students and colleagues to conduct participatory observations of government behaviors in the areas of environmental regulation enforcement, in policy implementation, in bureaucratic bargaining, and in incentive designs. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Zhou’s new book, The Logic of Governance in China (Cambridge University Press, 2022) develops a unified theoretical framework to explain how China's centralized political system maintains governance and how this process produces recognizable policy cycles that are obstacles to bureaucratic rationalization, professionalism, and rule of law. 

Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the People's University of China. Zhou received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.