The Future of China Studies in the U.S.

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Sheena Greitens, Rebecca E. Karl & more on August 27, 2020

As an extraordinarily fraught school year begins, the study of China on U.S. campuses (or their new virtual equivalents), as well as China’s role in university life more broadly, has recently become a subject of scrutiny and debate. What is the future of China studies in the United States given this changing environment? How are recent politics in China and in China’s relations with the U.S. likely to alter the mechanics and substance of China studies in the United States? What kinds of changes, if any, should China scholars in the United States consider making in their research and teaching methods? And how might these changes affect the direction of the field as a whole?

When China Reporters Can’t Report from China

By Matt DeButts on August 27, 2020

Shortly after midnight on March 18, a phone call awoke Steven Lee Myers in his Beijing apartment. The call was followed by a flurry of messages: WhatsApp, text, email. Friends and colleagues were asking him questions: What is going on? What does this mean? What are we going to do? Myers had been appointed The New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief just three months prior. Now, dazed and half-asleep, he was learning that the Chinese government would require American journalists with soon-to-expire press credentials at three American newspapers—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post—to hand in their press credentials and prepare for deportation from the country. The organizations had 10 days to comply.

Matt DeButts

on August 26, 2020

Matt DeButts is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and Journalism M.A. student at Stanford University. He lived in Beijing from 2014 to 2019, where he worked as a special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times and a contributing editor to the Economist Intelligence Unit. His writing has been published in Sixth Tone, SupChina, Foreign Policy, and Vox. He is based in Palo Alto, California.

How To Teach China This Fall

By Dimitar D. Gueorguiev, Xiaobo Lü & more on August 20, 2020

The coming academic year presents unique challenges for university instructors teaching content related to China. The shift to online education, the souring of U.S.-China relations, and new national security legislation coming from Beijing have brought new sensitivities and new risks to our classrooms.

Kerry Ratigan

on August 19, 2020

Kerry Ratigan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. From 2018 to 2020, she was also the Pre-tenure Fellow for China–Latin America–U.S. Affairs at the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Her research focuses on Chinese politics, social policy, decentralization, and state-society relations, including extensive work on health policy adoption and implementation in rural China. Her book manuscript, Let Some Get Healthy First, examines how local politics shape social policy provision in China. She has published research in World Development, The China Quarterly, International Political Science Review, Journal of Chinese Governance, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, and Journal of Asian Public Policy. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Dimitar D. Gueorguiev

on August 19, 2020

Dimitar D. Gueorguiev is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Gueorguiev’s co-authored book, China’s Governance Puzzle (Cambridge University Press, 2017), deals with reforming authoritarian governance through transparency and public inclusion. In a forthcoming book, Retrofitting Leninism (Oxford University Press), Gueorguiev explores the refinement of authoritarian control through organization and technology. Gueorguiev received his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego in 2014.

Meg Rithmire

on August 19, 2020

Meg Rithmire is F. Warren MacFarlan Associate Professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, and her primary expertise is in the comparative political economy of development with a focus on China and Asia. Her book, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, and her work has also been published in The China Quarterly, World Politics, Politics & Society, and elsewhere.

Xiaobo Lü

on August 19, 2020

Xiaobo Lü is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His research centers on distributive politics of fiscal policies in authoritarian regimes, with a focus on China. He is particularly interested in the politics of fiscal extraction and its implications on state building and Party building.

What Now?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Jerome A. Cohen, Scott Kennedy & more on August 5, 2020

The past several months have been a particularly volatile period in U.S.-China relations. After last month’s closures of the Chinese consulate in Houston and the American consulate in Chengdu, we asked contributions to give us their assessments of recent U.S. policy toward China and where they think relations between the two countries are going and ought to go.

Tong Yi

on August 4, 2020

Tong Yi is a former dissident who spent several years in Chinese labor camps. She now lives in California.