National Committee on U.S.-China Relations

China is deepening its ties with Latin American countries through free trade agreements and investments in Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects. At the same time, China’s recent plans to build an intelligence outpost in Cuba has alarmed the United States, but other Latin American neighbors do not necessarily share this sentiment. What is the historical relationship between China and Cu...

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the population of foreigners and international students in China has decreased dramatically. How has the drop in international students impacted education in China? Jeremiah Jenne visits the United States from Beijing for the first time since before Beijing’s COVID lockdowns and discusses the importance of people-to-people exchange in 2023.   About the speaker: https:/...

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just for apps and algorithms. AI’s ability to sort through massive data sets has the potential to completely revolutionize the field of biotechnology, opening the door for real-world breakthroughs like climate change-resistant seeds or cures for genetic diseases. While scientists and firms from the United States and China are actively collaborating to explore thi...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has the potential to revolutionize the way the world works and communicates. AI also plays an outsized role in technological competition between the United States and China, in what some call the “AI race.” What is China’s current stage in the AI race as compared to the United States, and what challenges and risks lie ahead in adopting AI technology? Jeffrey...

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s June 2023 visit to China was a bid to normalize bilateral relations and re-establish regular channels of communication between the U.S. and China. Southeast Asian countries—which share close ties to both superpowers—are paying particularly close attention to whether the visit signals a turn in U.S.-China relations. Dr. Kanti Bajpai, vice dean and professor...

Canada’s role in the context of U.S.-China strategic competition is significant, given its historical relationships with both countries. While Canada normalized relations with China in 1970 and sought to strengthen the Canada-China relationship over the decades, its recent Indo-Pacific Strategy takes a much firmer stance than seen in the past, referring to China as a "disruptive power" that disreg...

From June 18-19, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit China for meetings with high level officials in a bid to stabilize U.S.-China relations and re-establish regular diplomatic communications. After a similar trip was canceled earlier in 2023 due to the unauthorized entry of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon into American airspace, all eyes will be on the U.S.-China diplomatic rela...

May was Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, a chance to celebrate the history, diversity, and contributions of the over 25 million members of the AAPI community in the United States. But rising U.S.-China tensions have also come with consequences for the community, particularly Chinese Americans, who have reported increased discrimination and feelings of exclusion in the las...

Admiral John C. Aquilino, 26th Commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, was the keynote speaker at our Annual Members Program on Tuesday, May 23, 2023. His comments, conversation with National Committee President Stephen Orlins, and Q&A focused on Sino-American military policy in the context of the overall bilateral relationship. 0:00-3:47 Introduction 3:47-30:48 Admiral Aquilino’s rem...

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March 2023, a large majority of American adults (83 percent) continue to have negative views of China, and the share who have very unfavorable views (44 percent) has increased by four percentage points since last year. Around four-in-ten Americans also now describe China as an enemy of the United States, rather than as a competitor or a partne...

Conflicts over specific rules lie at the heart of China’s maritime disputes, which are about much more than sovereignty over islands and rocks in the South and East China Seas. Rather, the main contests concern the strategic maritime space associated with those islands. To consolidate control over these vital areas, China’s leaders have begun to implement “China’s law of the sea”: building domesti...

Both China and the United States face serious climate-related challenges. For Earth Month, Ma Jun, founding director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, discusses how each country can learn from each other's successes to create better domestic policy. About the speaker: https://www.ncuscr.org/video/united-states-china-clean-energy/ Learn more about IPE and China's climate mitigat...

Segment 1: China's nonprofit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) was founded in 2006 to address severe air and water pollution in China and to help safeguard the global environment. It developed the Blue Map, China's first public environmental database and mobile app that tracks air, water, soil, and ocean quality data, as well as the performance of hundreds of thousands of major e...

Is China ahead of the United States in developing green technology? Amid the tensions of great power competition and climate change, what can the U.S. and China learn from each other when it comes to protecting the environment? In this special edition Earth Day podcast, we pulled the best content from our 2023 Earth Month interview series to answer the most urgent questions on the U.S.-China clima...

The unauthorized entry of a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon into American airspace has provided a unique opportunity to examine the ability of Washington and Beijing to handle diplomatic crises. The incident leaves us wondering how the United States can better understand Chinese bureaucratic structure and decision-making and thus more effectively modulate its responses to unforeseen events....

Reporting on China is challenging and important. Assignment China tells the stories of some of the American journalists who have covered China from the time of the civil war of the 1940s through the COVID-19 pandemic. Former China correspondent Mike Chinoy assembles personal accounts from eminent journalists who share their stories of reporting on historic moments such as President Richard Nixon’s...

On March 5, 2023, China set a GDP growth target of around five percent for 2023, which is lower than expected. What are the major challenges and risks for China’s economic growth in 2023 and beyond? Where do the strengths in China’s economy lie? Both the promise of continued export and consumption growth and the threat of rising debt and property sector instability raise critical questions. How wi...

Over the past few years, we have marked the 50th anniversaries of official visits to China by then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon. Historians have scrutinized the records of their conversations with Chinese leaders, but less attention has been given to people-to-people exchange that began with “ping-pong diplomacy.” Based on archival sources in China and the...

In Dictatorship and Information, Martin K. Dimitrov offers an approach to understanding possible solutions to the dictator’s dilemma (the balance between authoritarian governments’ use of information communication technology for economic development and the need to control the democratizing influences of this technology), which arises from the difficulty of calibrating repression and concessions d...

Ever since a balloon flew from China over the United States in February, concerns about surveillance have been at the forefront of U.S.-China relations. But the two countries have a long history of spying on each other. In this short explainer, John Delury contextualizes the current tensions and assesses just how worried Americans should be about Chinese espionage.

With Chinese President Xi Jinping’s political authority unmatched, his sense of mission to restore what he believes is China’s natural position as a great power drives the nation’s foreign policy. When China was weak, it was subordinated to others. Now China is strong, and wants others to fall in line, at least on the issues involving what it regards as core national interests. In The Dragon Roars...

Since its advent in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, blockchain technology has taken the economic world by storm. Open-source blockchain transactions have increased the speed of, and trust in, cross-border financial transactions. Many in the United States see the technology as a new and improved medium to raise and exchange capital. In China, the technology, though much more tightly regulate...

In the year since Russia invaded Ukraine, U.S.-China relations have continued to deteriorate; one factor is Beijing’s continued support of Moscow’s position and rhetoric. What does Beijing gain from its tacit backing of Russia? How successful have the U.S.-led sanctions been at stemming Russia’s war effort? As China reopens its economy and looks to rebuild its international business and diplomatic...

Summer 2022 was hot! On June 25, the temperature in Hebei province reached 111.6°, breaking an all-time record. A few weeks later, the temperature in Shanghai hit 105.6°, the highest ever recorded there. On July 19, weather stations in the United Kingdom recorded temperatures above 104° for the first time in history; in the United States, at least 43 locations broke or tied their records for the h...

Agents of Subversion reconstructs the story of a botched mission into Manchuria, placing it in the context of a wider CIA campaign against China. In the winter of 1952, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. One of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner in China for the next twenty years. The U.S. government kept the pu...