Isaac Stone Fish is a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York City. He is also a Washington Post Global Opinions contributing columnist, an on-air contributor to CBSN, and a Visiting Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. Previously, he served as Foreign Policy magazine’s Asia Editor, where he managed coverage of the region and wrote about the politics, economics, and international affairs of China, Japan, and the Koreas. Formerly a Beijing correspondent for Newsweek, Stone Fish spent seven years living in China prior to joining Foreign Policy. He is a fluent Mandarin speaker, who has traveled widely in the region and in the country, visiting every Chinese province, autonomous region, and municipality. He is writing a book about China’s influence in America (Knopf, 2020).
Why does China still call itself a democracy? Making this claim allows Beijing to legitimize its own actions—and, in the case of its views on the U.S. missile attacks, the Syrian government’s— as representing the will of the people.