China Archives - Public Seminar

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

Implications for the United States, China, and the global order

May 21, 2025 • by William Milberg

I have spent decades giving boring lectures on tariffs to graduate students. Suddenly, every other newspaper article is on tariffs. We have to credit President Trump with tapping into the popular disgruntlement with globalization beginning in 2016, leading to a rethinking of the structure of global economic governance and a ...

US Tariffs and Trump’s Neopatrimonial Mercantilism

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

Literature

Poet Paisley Rekdal Summons the Lost Voices of Chinese Railroad Workers

Poetry on the landscape of race, past and present

September 24, 2024 • by Aditi Bhattacharjee

The transcontinental railroad—one of the great engineering feats of US history—was laid thanks to the labor of Chinese immigrants: between 1865 and 1869, some 12,000 Chinese workers constructed the western line. Yet very little evidence remains in the words of the workers themselves. “This is not to say there are ...

Poet Paisley Rekdal Summons the Lost Voices of Chinese Railroad Workers

East Asia & Pacific

“Village NBA” in China

When sports fandom meets rural governance

September 9, 2024 • by Gil Hizi

The driver of bus number 25 knew where I was heading the moment I stepped inside. Although he met few foreigners during his three years on this line (as he later told me), he assumed that I could only be heading to the “NBA village” of Taipan in the Guizhou ...

Politics

The New Silk Road

China’s Belt and Road Initiative provokes divided narratives in Kenya

March 18, 2024 • by Keren Zhu

Despite initial optimism, the Chinese-financed Kenyan Standard Gauge Railway project's uneven distribution of benefits and unintended consequences unveil a complex interplay between global ambitions, local politics, and community dynamics in the Belt and Road Initiative....

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. ...

Migration

The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self

Mass migrations, language, and the future of identity

November 9, 2022 • by Ken Hu

How can language create such a convoluted way of experiencing the everyday world? We can explore this phenomenon with two linked concepts: the speech act and the discourse community. ...

Europe & Central Asia

Part 2: My Convictions

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 12, 2022 • by James Carroll

Having faulted American policies myself—emphatically so from Clinton forward, when I took on that role of Boston Globe op-ed pundit—I nevertheless refused now to place blame for Putin’s war on America’s drive to protect, in the left-wing argot, its “global hegemony.”...

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

East Asia & Pacific

China’s Return to Global Dominance

What it means for America — and for the future of democracy around the world

April 1, 2021 • by John Keane

_____ When future historians look back on our discordant times, they will surely report an epochal shift of global importance: a transition from failed attempts to restore America’s greatness to China’s return, after two centuries of subjugation, to world pre-eminence. The writing is already on the wall, but strange prejudices, bitter ...