Isaac Stone Fish is the founder and CEO of Strategy Risks. Founded in 2021, Strategy Risks helps clients manage geopolitical risks, with a focus on China. Stone Fish is the author of America Second: How America’s Elites are Making China Stronger (Knopf), a book about American political and business leadership’s deep ties to China, and how this impacts the United States.

Stone Fish also serves as a contributor to CBSN, an adjunct at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs, a Visiting Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a columnist on China risk at Barron’s. He is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Truman National Security Project Fellow, and a Senior Advisor to the Korea Society. He previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on United States-China Relations, and the German Marshall Fund, and as the Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

A fluent Mandarin speaker and formerly a Beijing correspondent for Newsweek, Stone Fish spent seven years living in China, and has visited every province, municipality, and special administrative region. He is an experienced speaker on United States-China business, economics, and politics, and his views on international affairs are widely quoted on CBS, CNN, NPR, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other major news media. He lives in New York City.

Last Updated: March 18, 2024

Media

06.03.19

Six Questions and Four Articles About Tiananmen Square

Isaac Stone Fish
Why can’t we banish history from our memories? The author Ling Zhijun titled his 2008 exploration of Mao Zedong’s disastrous people’s communes “History No Longer Lingers,” and it sometimes feels counterintuitive that we cannot forget past tragedies...

Conversation

10.12.18

Is America Overreacting to the Threat of Chinese Influence?

Isaac Stone Fish, Taisu Zhang & more
American civil and political discourse has seen a growing number of reports about worrying Chinese governmental influence in the United States. Most recently, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence decried the “malign influence” of China in the United...

Conversation

11.14.17

Was the Trump-Xi Summit in Beijing a Hit or a Miss?

Isaac Stone Fish, Zha Daojiong & more
On November 8 and 9, Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping and Donald Trump held their first Beijing-based summit, a year after Trump’s surprise victory and just weeks after the predictable announcement Xi would serve a second term. During the visit...

Conversation

03.09.17

Is THAAD the Start of a U.S.-China Arms Race?

Isaac Stone Fish, Graham Webster & more
In late February, U.S. President Donald Trump called for adding $54 billion to the U.S. military budget—an increase of roughly 10 percent. And in early March, despite outcry from Beijing, the United States began deploying the Terminal High-Altitude...

Conversation

02.10.17

Did Xi Just Outmaneuver Trump?

M. Taylor Fravel, Isaac Stone Fish & more
On the evening of February 9, U.S. President Donald Trump had what the White House described in a terse readout as a “lengthy” and “cordial” telephone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping. That alone is newsworthy, as the...

Conversation

01.18.17

U.S.-China Flashpoints in the Age of Trump

Zha Daojiong, Isaac Stone Fish & more
Over the past year, Donald Trump has vowed to “utterly destroy” ISIS, considered lifting sanctions on Russia, promised to cancel the Paris climate agreement and “dismantle” the Iran nuclear deal. But many of his most inflammatory statements are...

Conversation

12.21.16

Did Oslo Kowtow to Beijing?

Isaac Stone Fish, Stein Ringen & more
In 2010, the Oslo-appointed Nobel Peace Prize committee bestowed the honor on imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Furious with the selection of Liu, a human rights advocate, who is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence on spurious...

Features

11.11.16

Watching A Chinese Professor Watching American Democracy

Isaac Stone Fish
On the morning of Election Day, I joined He Haibo, a legal scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing, as he spent several hours observing a polling station in the upscale Graham and Parks public elementary school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “If I...

Sinica Podcast

11.11.16

How Will Donald Trump’s Victory Impact China and U.S.-China Relations?

Kaiser Kuo & Isaac Stone Fish from Sinica Podcast
The U.S. election is over, and Donald Trump’s pundit-defying victory over Hillary Clinton has stunned and surprised people all over the world. In China—where activity on Weibo and WeChat indicated strong support for Trump among netizens both in...

Media

11.07.16

Why Chinese Elites Endorse Hillary Clinton

Isaac Stone Fish
The United States, China’s largest trading partner but also its greatest geopolitical rival, faces an election that threatens domestic instability. A Donald Trump victory would confirm to many Chinese the inherent weakness of American democracy. A...

Conversation

09.13.16

Can China’s Best Newspaper Survive?

Isaac Stone Fish, David Schlesinger & more
On September 9, the South China Morning Post’s Chinese-language website went dark with little explanation, leading to concerns that censorship might next spread to the newspaper’s English-language coverage. Can Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, who has...

Viewpoint

05.24.16

“It’s Time for Us To Set a New Political Agenda for Hong Kong”

Jonathan Landreth, Susan Jakes & more
Last month, midway through a whirlwind tour of United States universities, Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong took a break for a crab cake and mac-and-cheese lunch at a Manhattan brasserie. Wong, 19, came to international prominence during the...

Recommended Links

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Washington Post
04.12.17

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.

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Guardian
01.25.17

There is no indication that the U.S. president wants a war. But, if he did get into one, it would be to direct attention away from his incompetence.

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01.20.17

Xi Jinping tries to charm the capitalist elite

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02.12.14

Will China win its 65-year war with Taiwan—without firing a shot?

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12.12.13

The Chinese government’s crackdown on Bloomberg and “the paper of record” reaches a head.

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01.23.13

Rare Cultural Revolution Era photos from the Land of Snows.

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10.18.12

Since withdrawing from the Republican primaries in January, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman has tried to stay engaged with China, where he served as Barack Obama's ambassador from 2009-2011. But China hasn't always wanted to engage with Huntsman: In an interview with Foreign Policy in mid-October in...

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