Xi Jinping Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective

Or, why should ordinary citizens trust unelected experts anymore?

May 8, 2025 • by Mark Frazier, James Miller, Kim Lane Scheppele and Julia Sonnevend

Good evening, my name is Jim Miller. I am a professor of politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research, and I have organized, and will be moderating tonight’s panel with the ungainly title, on bureaucracy and its discontents. To discuss the tensions created by professing democracy as ...

The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective

Our Next Guantánamo

Immigrants might become the next target for state-sponsored terrors

May 2, 2023 • by Joseph Margulies

We create Guantánamos in those fevered moments when imagined needs enflame ancient hatreds and modern fears, telling ourselves they will keep us safe and forgetting that they never have before. ...

Politics

How China Sees Russia’s War in Ukraine

It’s all about America

April 4, 2022 • by Mark Frazier

Many ordinary Chinese citizens, as well as foreign policy elites, have concluded that America is China’s number one national security threat. From their standpoint, any country that confronts the United States deserves at least tacit support....

Politics

Did Putin Dupe Xi?

Plus: “Catastrophic hunger,” Ketanji Brown Jackson’s path to the Supreme Court, the Putinization of US Evangelicals, and an 11-point plan that will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck

March 21, 2022 • by Heather Cox Richardson

This week, President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping spoke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, speaking personally for the first time since last November. In early February, before the invasion, Xi and Russian president Vladimir Putin met and issued a 5000-word statement pledging limitless “friendship.” But it ...

Capitalism

China’s Thirty-Year War between State and Capital Has Taken a Decisive Turn

If the financial complexities and implications of the Evergrande case could be boiled down to a tabloid headline, it would read: “XI TO BUILDER: DROP DEAD.”

September 28, 2021 • by Mark Frazier

As part of its recent campaign to regulate capital and to rein in capitalists, Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has set their sights on the China Evergrande Group. Last week, Asian and global markets sank quickly on the news that Evergrande was unable to ...

China’s Thirty-Year War between State and Capital Has Taken a Decisive Turn

Politics

Why Don’t We Call It Treason?

John Bolton confirms what Senate Republicans already knew

June 24, 2020 • by John Stoehr

I don’t like John Bolton any more than you do. He’s a crank. He’s a snob. He’s a warmonger. One thing you can’t question, though, is his loyalty. No matter how wrongheaded, how dangerous, how much he prefers airstrikes to diplomacy, you can’t doubt his dedication to the United States. ...

Democracy

The Empire Strikes Back

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement faces an uncertain future

May 28, 2020 • by Mark Frazier

On May 22, 2020, the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing announced it would debate a new national policy for Hong Kong, a draft piece of legislation with an imposingly long and misleadingly soporific title: “Decision of the National People’s Congress on Establishing and Completing the Hong Kong Special Administrative ...

Democracy

Does academic freedom matter to conservative intellectuals?

Budapest Blues

November 21, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

It’s a dark time for liberals. The leaders of the world’s three most powerful countries—China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the U.S.’s own Donald J. Trump—are all authoritarians of one kind or another. Each, in his own way, wraps himself in the mantle of “the people,” and targets independent ...

Does academic freedom matter to conservative intellectuals?

Law’s Relation to Political Power in China: A Backward Transition

China’s continuing struggle over the rule of law is far from over.

July 31, 2019 • by Jerome A. Cohen

Attempting to assess the state of law and government in any nation is hazardous, since reality is usually messy and contradictory, and surely this is the situation in contemporary China. We must be fully aware that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) -- an increasingly oppressive Marxist-Leninist dictatorship -- denies ...