Julian B. Gewirtz

Julian Gewirtz served in multiple roles over four years in the Biden administration, including leading the White House team responsible for coordinating U.S. policy on China as Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council, counseling senior White House leadership on the full range of national security and foreign policy matters as Senior Advisor to the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor, and managing a global team of diplomats and analysts as Deputy China Coordinator at the State Department. The Washington Post recently named him one of "50 people shaping our society in 2025."

He is the author of several books, most recently Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s, which was named a best book of the year by Foreign Affairs and BBC History, and a collection of poems, Your Face My Flag. He was previously the senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a lecturer in history at Harvard and Columbia, and a special advisor at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration. He received his doctoral degree in modern Chinese history from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his undergraduate degree from Harvard College.

Chinese Dreams and the African Renaissance

A China in Africa Podcast

Leaders in both China and Africa have articulated new visions for their respective regions that project a strong sense of confidence, renewal, and a break from once-dominant Western ideologies. In both cases, argues East is Read blogger Mothusi Turner, Chinese and Africans are using these new slogans to define themselves as something other than victims of their colonial pasts.

Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951-1979

A comprehensive history of how the conflicts and balances of power in the Maoist revolutionary campaigns from 1951 to 1979 complicated and diversified the meanings of films, this book offers a discursive study of the development of early PRC cinema. Wang closely investigates how film artists, Communist Party authorities, cultural bureaucrats, critics, and audiences negotiated, competed, and struggled with each other for the power to decide how to use films and how their extensively different, agonistic, and antagonistic power strategies created an ever-changing discursive network of meaning in cinema. —Palgrave Macmillan

Power Play: China’s Ultra High Voltage Technology and Global Standards

As a matter of government policy and corporate strategy, China has been intensifying its effort to set indigenous standards for homegrown ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission technology. The country also aims to contribute to UHV standards internationally. Indeed, this process of standard setting, influenced by both economics and politics, will have ramifications far beyond China’s borders. The potential internationalization of China’s domestic UHV standards will almost certainly affect the global market share for both Chinese manufacturers and dominant multinational companies.This paper explores China’s UHV standardization process and the myriad challenges it faces, from a technical, economic, and political standpoint. But beyond simply detailing China’s strategy in pushing out its own UHV technology to the domestic and international markets, the paper discusses how China’s ambition for its indigenous technology could ultimately pose a considerable challenge to global competitors who hope to sell comparable products. The paper concludes by outlining several potential scenarios for how China’s UHV standardization process, and its relationship to global standard setting, may ultimately evolve.

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Paulson Institute