Friday, December 9th, 2022,
10:30 am – 12:00 pm EST
Zoom
This event will feature the chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California San Diego, Susan Shirk, to discuss her new book, “Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise.“
For decades, China’s rise to power was characterized by its reassurance that this rise would be peaceful. Then, as Susan L. Shirk, shows in this sobering, clear-eyed account of China today, something changed.
For three decades after Mao’s death in 1976, China’s leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. They determined that any threat to their power, and that of the Chinese Communist Party, came not from abroad but from within—a conclusion cemented by the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. To facilitate the country’s inexorable economic ascendence, and to prevent a backlash, they reassured the outside world of China’s peaceful intentions.
Then, as Susan Shirk shows in this illuminating, disturbing, and utterly persuasive new book, something changed. China went from fragile superpower to global heavyweight, threatening Taiwan as well as its neighbors in the South China Sea, tightening its grip on Hong Kong, and openly challenging the United States for preeminence not just economically and technologically but militarily. China began to overreach. Combining her decades of research and experience, Shirk, one of the world’s most respected experts on Chinese politics, argues that we are now fully embroiled in a new cold war.
To explain what happened, Shirk pries open the “black box” of China’s political system and looks at what derailed its peaceful rise. As she shows, the shift toward confrontation began in the mid-2000s under the mild-mannered Hu Jintao, first among equals in a collective leadership. As China’s economy boomed, especially after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Hu and the other leaders lost restraint, abetting aggression toward the outside world and unchecked domestic social control. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he capitalized on widespread official corruption and open splits in the leadership to make the case for more concentrated power at the top. In the decade following, and to the present day—the eve of the 20th CCP Congress when he intends to claim a third term—he has accumulated greater power than any leader since Mao. Those who implement Xi’s directives compete to outdo one another, provoking an even greater global backlash and stoking jingoism within China on a scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution.
Here is a devastatingly lucid portrait of China today. Shirk’s extensive interviews and meticulous analysis reveal the dynamics driving overreach. To counter it, she argues, the worst mistake the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, can make is to overreact. Understanding the domestic roots of China’s actions will enable us to avoid the mistakes that could lead to war.
Speaker:
Susan Shirk is a research professor and chair of the 21st Century China Center. She is one of the most influential experts working on U.S.-China relations and Chinese politics. She is also director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).
Susan Shirk first visited China in 1971 and has been teaching, researching and engaging China diplomatically ever since. From 1997-2000, Dr. Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia.
Dr. Huang has testified before U.S. congressional committees many times and regularly is consulted by major media outlets, the private sector, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations on global health issues and China. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a board member of the Institute of Global Health (Georgia). In 2012, InsideJersey listed him as one of the “20 Brainiest People in New Jersey.” He previously was a research associate at the National Asia Research Program, a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, an associate fellow at the Asia Society, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University. He obtained his BA and MA from Fudan University and his PhD from the University of Chicago.
Jason Miklian, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development and Environment, University of Oslo. Miklian has published over 60 academic and policy works on issues of conflict and crisis, based on extensive fieldwork in Bangladesh, Colombia, India, and the Congo. He serves on the United Nations Expert Panel on Business and Human Rights, has won several awards for his academic publications, and serves as an expert resource for various government knowledge banks in the US, UK, EU and Norway. Miklian has also written for or been cited in an expert capacity by the New York Times, BBC, The Economist, Washington Post, Financial Times, France 24, The Guardian, The Hindu (India) and NPR.
Scott Carney is an investigative journalist and anthropologist, as well as the author of the New York Times bestseller What Doesn’t Kill Us. He spent six years living in South Asia as a contributing editor for WIRED and writer for Mother Jones, NPR, Discover Magazine, Fast Company, Men’s Journal, and many other publications. His other books include The Red Market, The Enlightenment Trap and The Wedge. He is the founder of Foxtopus Ink, a Denver-based media company.
is is a political scientist specializing in Indian foreign policy, India-China relations, and Asian regional and maritime security. She is Research Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the 
is a John O. Rankin Associate Professor of International Affairs and Director of the Elliott School’s 
Kevin Rudd is a former Prime Minister of Australia and current President and CEO of the Asia Society. He became President and CEO of Asia Society in January 2021 and has been president of the Asia Society Policy Institute since January 2015. He served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012, before returning as Prime Minister in 2013. He is also a leading international authority on China. He began his career as a China scholar, serving as an Australian diplomat in Beijing before entering Australian politics.
David Shambaugh is an internationally recognized authority and award-winning author on contemporary China and the international relations of Asia. He currently is the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science & International Affairs, and the founding Director of the China Policy Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He was also a formerly a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at The Brookings Institution and Director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Stephen Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs. Professor Kaplan’s research and teaching interests focus on the frontiers of international and comparative political economy, where he specializes in the political economy of global finance and development, the rise of China in the Western Hemisphere, and Latin American politics.
Professor Carol Wise, Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California (USC), has written widely on trade integration, exchange rate crises, institutional reform, and the political economy of market restructuring in the Latin American region. Wise is author of the book, Dragonomics: How Latin America is Maximizing (or Missing Out) on China’s International Development Strategy (Yale University Press, 2020), which received USC’s Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award in 2021 and the Luciano Tomassini 2021 Award-Honorable Mention for the Best Book on International Relations from the Latin American Studies Association. Professor Wise’s most recent journal articles include: “Playing both Sides of the Pacific: Latin America’s Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with China,” Pacific Affairs (2016); “Conceptualizing China-Latin America Relations in the 21 st Century” (with Victoria Chonn Ching), The Pacific Review (2017); and, “International Trade Norms in the Age of Covid-19” (with Nicolas Albertoni), Fudan Humanities and Social Science Journal (2020). Professor Wise has held Fulbright Grants to Canada, Mexico, and Peru. She is a member of the core social science faculty at Renmin University’s annual International Summer Program, Beijing. In 2019, Wise was the Fulbright-Masaryk University Distinguished Chair in the Czech Republic. Her latest research compares the political economy of development in Latin America and Central/Eastern Europe.
Roselyn Hsueh is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she codirects the Certificate in Political Economy. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Global Scholar Award for research in India, Mexico, and Russia. Her next book, Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. She is the author of China’s Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell, 2011), and scholarly articles and book chapters. BBC World News, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, and other media outlets have featured her research. She has testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and consulted for The Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dr. Hsueh has served as a Global Order Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, member of the Georgetown Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues, and Residential Research Faculty Fellow at U.C. Berkeley. She also lectured as a Visiting Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. She held the Hayward R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Southern California and conducted international fieldwork in China, Japan, and Taiwan as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and David L. Boren National Security Fellow. She earned her B.A. and doctorate in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
