China Studies

Perhaps the historic event of our time, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare every country's particular health care vulnerabilities and regulatory deficiencies, more starkly than in any other circumstances. In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses with  Yanzhong Huang , a preeminent expert on China and global health, the historical background to and deeper meaning of China's response to the COVID-19...

Western media presence in China has been vastly reduced since February 2020, the consequence both of political tensions and the Covid-19 pandemic. As the Chinese government finally begins to dismantle its "zero-Covid" policy in December 2022, the prospect of Western journalists returning to on-the-ground reporting from China appears more promising than it has in years. In this episode, Neysun Mahb...

While the Chinese government's actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong lately have been the subject of particular scrutiny from U.S. policymakers, systematic attention to China's human rights practices, more broadly, has been a consistent feature of U.S. policy towards China in recent decades, through successive Democratic and Republican administrations. In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses with A...

In recent years, and especially under the administration of Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has "securitized" all manner of relationships between its citizens and outsiders. An important marker of this trend, which continues to generate intense concern, was the 2016 passage of the Overseas NGO Law, a new legal framework for managing the domestic Chinese operations of nonprofit and educational i...

No foreign policy topic currently garners more attention in the United States than its relationship with China, especially in light of China's rise over the past few decades as an economic, technological, military, and strategic power and rival.  In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses with Yan Xuetong , one of China's leading experts on international relations, how China's rise, and its ever m...

One of the hallmarks of Xi Jinping's tenure as China's leader, since 2012, has been the notable strengthening of the state's coercive architecture, through which it endeavors to control Chinese society.  In particular, Xi Jinping's administration has substantially restructured the legal and institutional frameworks underpinning China's domestic security, while also tightening central discipline ov...

Whatever the likelihood or implications of a potential truce in the US-China trade war, it seems clear that the overall relationship between the two countries has lately entered into a new, more harder-edged phase, defined by competition and perhaps even conflict in multiple areas: economic, technological, ideological, strategic, and conceivably military as well.  In the United States, heated deba...

Dramatic protests in Hong Kong over the past four months, initially over a now-withdrawn draft law that would permit extraditions to mainland China, have brought to worldwide attention broader fears amongst Hong Kong residents that their city is losing its distinctive legal and political characteristics, that were supposedly to be preserved under Chinese rule, according to the principle of "One Co...

Dramatic protests in Hong Kong this month, over a draft law that would permit extraditions to mainland China, underscore broader fears amongst Hong Kong residents that their city is losing its distinctive legal and political characteristics, that were supposedly to be preserved under Chinese rule, according to the principle of "One Country, Two Systems".  A critical juncture in Hong Kong's fascina...

Today, the reality and consequences of China's rise have come to dominate news headlines the world over.  Along with China's growing wealth and power have come new tensions, with the United States and other countries, that further require better understanding of China's story, in all its different facets.  Given the stakes, there may never have been a more important time for us to think about how ...

Despite little foreshadowing before he took office, President Xi Jinping has emerged as perhaps the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.  This was reinforced in March 2018 when China's National People's Congress voted overwhelmingly to abolish presidential term limits, as had been stipulated under the 1982 PRC Constitution, a feature which had been understood to be critical to the new po...

As Chinese economic growth slows to its lowest rate in 30 years, there is rising concern (including among some Chinese scholars and officials) about the long-term viability of China's distinctive form of state-led capitalism, sometimes characterized in terms of a "China Model".  Nevertheless, the Chinese government still appears committed to the approach marked by heavy state intervention in the e...

How do autocratic regimes secure political obedience, and implement unpopular policies, without always resorting to outright coercive tactics?  In a provocative new book, Yale University political scientist Dan Mattingly argues that, in China, state power exercised through local governments relies on local civil society groups—like temple organizations or lineage associations—to quietly infiltrate...

At least since China's 1994 fiscal and tax reforms, land-backed development has served as the greatest source of revenue for Chinese local governments—potentially almost 1 trillion US dollars in total this year—as well as a powerful engine both for rapid industrialization and for social discontent.  This circumstance reflects how the state allocation of land-use rights, in China, remains a vestige...

Economic reform since the late 1970s, as well as the dynamics of globalization unleashed in full by China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, have significantly complicated the relationship between the Chinese Party-state and Chinese workers.  Some of this complexity was made apparent in the 1990s, after millions of workers were laid off from state owned enterprises, and then it was...

Over the past 16 years, there has emerged in China a community of self-identified "rights defense" ( weiquan) lawyers, akin to "cause lawyers" in the United States, who select cases and frame legal advocacy with a goal of achieving wider societal impact.  Once celebrated in official discourse, these lawyers have increasingly come under scrutiny and pressure by the Chinese Party-state, that has int...

Chairman Mao famously proclaimed that "women hold up half the sky," and there are many ways in which women's status, rights, and opportunities have improved under CCP rule.  That said, patriarchal ideas about the role of women have continued to find robust expression in China, in different and evolving ways, since 1949 and through the reform & opening period.  In this episode, Brown University soc...

The Chinese government is currently in the process of dismantling the family planning policies which it introduced in the 1970s, and developed alongside its program of reform & opening over the past 40 years—which are most famously associated with the one-child limit for most Chinese families, that was finally converted into a universal two-child limit starting in 2016.  In so doing, the governmen...

What explains Taiwan's outsized presence in our news headlines, especially over the first two years of the Trump administration?  What can be learned from its raucous process of democratization over the past thirty years?  How will it continue to forge its unexpected identity, against the backdrop of China's ever-deepening shadow?  In this episode, Davidson College political scientist Shelley Rigg...

The following is a live recording of the 2019 Annual Public Lecture at Penn's CSCC delivered by Susan Shirk , and introduced by the Center's Director, Avery Goldstein. The event took place on January 31, 2019.  Music credit: " Salt " by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at  http://poppyackroyd.com   Special thanks to Justin Melnick and Christopher Passanante

Amidst various commentaries on the 10th anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, this past summer, a prominent theme has been the sense of possibility for civil society in China that was initially generated by the outpouring of social volunteerism, unprecedented in Chinese history, which followed the disaster.  That earlier optimism about civil society appears less robust in China today, within an o...

Current headlines about how authoritarian regimes have come to harness and even weaponize the internet may obscure how this technology, at one time, was more typically understood to be a democratizing force, across a range of different contexts. In the early days of Chinese cyberspace, for example, popular expression on various internet forums seemed to herald a new stage in political activism, th...

Launched by China in June 2015, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank ("AIIB") currently has eighty-six members and, with $100 billion in capital, has lent around $4 billion to infrastructure projects throughout Asia. The AIIB's very creation is an important marker in China's economic and strategic rise over the past forty years, from a poor country that was entirely outside of the Bretton Wood...

As the nuclear standoff between North Korea and the United States dominates global headlines, the relationship between North Korea and China, though little understood, has attracted ever greater interest. In this episode, the Harvard Kennedy School's  John Park , a leading expert on security issues relating to Northeast Asia, discusses with Neysun Mahboubi the complex relationship between North Ko...

China's economy is currently the world's second largest, by GDP, and is generally expected to overtake the U.S. economy within the next decade. In this episode, the Paulson Institute's Damien Ma , a leading expert on Chinese economic trends, discusses with Neysun Mahboubi the key features defining China's economy today, and some likely forecasts for the near future, with particular attention to th...