China and the World Program's Podcast

Taiwan is where the uneasy peace between the United States and China will be tested--and possibly broken. Beijing believes that "reunification" is inevitable. American military strength has preserved peace and stability for decades, but its advantages are eroding. Beijing has found critical gaps in U.S. strategy and is working to squeeze, isolate, and coerce Taiwan into submission without firing a shot. If deterrence fails, the consequences of a Taiwan crisis would be catastrophic--plunging the global economy into chaos, shattering U.S. alliances, and allowing China to dominate the region and reshape the world order.

The transformative socioeconomic changes China has experienced since Deng Xiaoping launched "reform and opening" in 1979 have turned an impoverished society into a global superpower. But instead of a freer and more open society fully integrated into the existing liberal international order, economic modernization under one-party rule has only revived totalitarian rule and triggered an escalating geopolitical conflict with the U.S. Although this tragic and potentially catastrophic outcome is not inevitable, Deng's strategy to save the Chinese Communist Party with capitalist tools made the return of strongman rule under Xi Jinping and reversal of reform an accident waiting to happen. - Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. In 2019 he was the inaugural Library of Congress Chair on U.S.-China Relations. Prior to joining Claremont McKenna College in 2009, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as its director of the China Program from 2003 to 2008. He was an opinion columnist for Bloomberg (2023-2024) and the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (1994); China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (2006); China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016); The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China (2024); and The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (2025). Minxin received his Ph.D. in government at Harvard and taught at Princeton University (1992-1997). He is the recipient of the National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Robert McNamara Fellowship of the World Bank. His op-eds and columns have appeared in the New York Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, FT, Nikkei Asian Review, Project Syndicate, the Economist, Bloomberg, and other publications.

"Chinese Encounters With America," published by Columbia University Press, tells the stories of twelve women and men whose experiences with the United States not only transformed their own lives but also influenced China’s quest to become a modern global nation. Their professions range from diplomacy, business, and science to music, sports, and civil society. Their lives show how Chinese citizens have interpreted and engaged with America, especially since the opening of relations in the 1970s. At a time when Chinese and American relations are dominated by competition and conflict, this book speaks to the value of shared interests and values.

Abstract: Why do nations actively publicize previously overlooked disputes, and why does domestic mobilization sometimes fail to lead to aggressive policy? The Art of State Persuasion explores China’s strategic use of state propaganda during crises, revealing why certain disputes are amplified while others are downplayed. This variation depends on the alignment, or lack thereof, between Chinese state policy and public opinion. When public sentiment is more moderate than the government’s foreign policy objectives, a “mobilization campaign” is initiated. Conversely, when public opinion is more hawkish, a “pacification campaign” is deployed to mollify public sentiment. Bio: Frances Yaping Wang is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Colgate University. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the Singapore Management University, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s International Security Center, a Minerva-United State Institute of Peace Scholar, a predoctoral fellow at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies of the George Washington University, and a senior editor at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received her PhD from the University of Virginia.

Abstract--In July 1930, the Kuomintang party school, the Central Political Institute (zhongyang zhengzhi xuexiao), established a new Diplomacy Department and welcomed its first cohort of ten students into a program designed to train young party members for careers in the Nationalist government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Over the course of the next decade, more than 130 young men and women were admitted to this highly selective department where they studied a curriculum that had been specifically designed to produce a new generation of Chinese foreign policy experts, combining rigorous language training with novel theories of international politics. This talk argues that the 130 graduates from this program were at the heart of a movement to transform Chinese foreign policymaking that began in the 1930s but continued throughout World War II and the Cold War, profoundly shaping how both Beijing and Taipei pursue their global agendas to the present day. Nearly half of the Diplomacy Department alumni stayed in Mainland China after 1949, working for the new communist state’s foreign policy apparatus, and this network of Kuomintang-trained diplomats exercised considerable influence on both sides of the Taiwan Strait throughout the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. In this presentation, Anatol Klass will introduce this cohort: their education, their careers, and the manner in which they helped bring about a strategic reorientation and a structural transformation in Chinese diplomacy during the middle decades of the twentieth century.