15th annual Conference on China’s Economic Development – Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP)

GWU’s 15th Annual China Conference

April 4, 2023September 5, 2023Past Events, Research Conference, U.S.-China Economic Relations Events, US-China

Friday, April 7, 2023,
9:00 am – 4:15 pm ET
Lindner Family Commons, 1957 E St NW

The Institute for International Economic Policy is pleased to announce the 15th Annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations will take place on Friday, April 7th, 2023 at the Elliott School of International Affairs. This conference is co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the GW Center for International Business Education and Research (GW-CIBER). Breakfast, lunch, and light refreshments will be provided.

Conference Agenda:

8:30-9:00 a.m. – Breakfast and Registration

9:00-9:15 a.m. – Welcome Remarks

IIEP Director Remi Jedwab
Elliott School Dean Alyssa Ayres

9:15-10:00 a.m. – Keynote Address – “The Study of China’s Political Economy: Our Evolving Analytical Agenda”

Harry Harding (UVA, National Chengchi University, and Center for Asia Pacific Resilience and Innovation – CAPRi)

10:00-11:15 a.m. – Panel 1: The State and the Political System in China

Bruce Dickson (GWU)
Meg Rithmire (Harvard)
Yuhua Wang (Harvard)

11:15-11:30 a.m. – Coffee break

11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. – Panel 2: Autocracy, Movement, and Development in Chinese History and Today

Yasheng Huang (MIT)
Suqin Ge (Virginia Tech)

12:30-1:30 p.m. – Lunch

1:30-2:45 p.m. – Panel 3: Trade War and a Race of Industrial Policy

Chad Bown (Peterson Institute)
Lee Branstetter (CMU)
Jennifer Hillman (Georgetown)

2:45-3:00 p.m. – Coffee break

3:00-4:15 p.m. – Panel 4: The Past, Present, and Future of U.S.-China Relations

Harry Harding (UVA, National Chengchi University, and Center for Asia Pacific Resilience and Innovation – CAPRi)
Michael Lampton (JHU)
David Shambaugh (GWU)

4:15 p.m. – Closing Remarks

About the Keynote Speaker

Harry Harding is Yushan Scholar and University Chair Professor in the College of Social Science at National Cheng Chi University in Taiwan and University Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the University of Virginia, where he is also a Faculty Senior Fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. He has previously held visiting or adjunct appointments at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the University of Washington, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Sydney, the University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and National Cheng Chi University.

Harding served as the founding dean of UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy between 2009 and 2014. Before joining the Batten School, he held faculty appointments at Swarthmore College and Stanford University, founded the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and was a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. From 1995 to 2005 he was Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, and from 2005 to 2007 was Director of Research and Analysis at Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory and consulting firm based in New York. He has served on the boards of several educational and non-profit institutions, as well as on the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Science and Technology and the U.S. Defense Policy Board.

Harding is the author of Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy, 1949-1976; China’s Second Revolution: Reform After Mao; A Fragile Relationship: the United States and China Since 1972; and the chapter on the Cultural Revolution in The Cambridge History of China. He is also the editor or co-editor of China’s Foreign Relations in the 1980s; Sino-American Relations, 1945-1955: A Joint Reassessment of a Critical Decade; and The India-China Relationship: What the United States Needs to Know. He is presently writing a book on the history of the US-China relationship from the Clinton Administration to the Trump Administration, with the working title A Broken Engagement: the United States and China from Partners to Competitors.

Harding received his B.A. from Princeton and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford. He is an elected member of the Cosmos Club, The Council on Foreign Relations, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong; and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House).

Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise

December 9, 2022April 11, 2023Past Events, U.S.-China Economic Relations Events, US-China

Friday, December 9th, 2022,
10:30 am – 12:00 pm EST
Zoom

This event will feature the chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California San Diego, Susan Shirk, to discuss her new book, “Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise.“

For decades, China’s rise to power was characterized by its reassurance that this rise would be peaceful. Then, as Susan L. Shirk, shows in this sobering, clear-eyed account of China today, something changed.

For three decades after Mao’s death in 1976, China’s leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. They determined that any threat to their power, and that of the Chinese Communist Party, came not from abroad but from within—a conclusion cemented by the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. To facilitate the country’s inexorable economic ascendence, and to prevent a backlash, they reassured the outside world of China’s peaceful intentions.

Then, as Susan Shirk shows in this illuminating, disturbing, and utterly persuasive new book, something changed. China went from fragile superpower to global heavyweight, threatening Taiwan as well as its neighbors in the South China Sea, tightening its grip on Hong Kong, and openly challenging the United States for preeminence not just economically and technologically but militarily. China began to overreach. Combining her decades of research and experience, Shirk, one of the world’s most respected experts on Chinese politics, argues that we are now fully embroiled in a new cold war.

To explain what happened, Shirk pries open the “black box” of China’s political system and looks at what derailed its peaceful rise. As she shows, the shift toward confrontation began in the mid-2000s under the mild-mannered Hu Jintao, first among equals in a collective leadership. As China’s economy boomed, especially after the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Hu and the other leaders lost restraint, abetting aggression toward the outside world and unchecked domestic social control. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he capitalized on widespread official corruption and open splits in the leadership to make the case for more concentrated power at the top. In the decade following, and to the present day—the eve of the 20th CCP Congress when he intends to claim a third term—he has accumulated greater power than any leader since Mao. Those who implement Xi’s directives compete to outdo one another, provoking an even greater global backlash and stoking jingoism within China on a scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution.

Here is a devastatingly lucid portrait of China today. Shirk’s extensive interviews and meticulous analysis reveal the dynamics driving overreach. To counter it, she argues, the worst mistake the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, can make is to overreact. Understanding the domestic roots of China’s actions will enable us to avoid the mistakes that could lead to war.

Speaker:

Susan Shirk is a research professor and chair of the 21st Century China Center. She is one of the most influential experts working on U.S.-China relations and Chinese politics. She is also director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).

Susan Shirk first visited China in 1971 and has been teaching, researching and engaging China diplomatically ever since. From 1997-2000, Dr. Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia.

Dr. Huang has testified before U.S. congressional committees many times and regularly is consulted by major media outlets, the private sector, and governmental and nongovernmental organizations on global health issues and China. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a board member of the Institute of Global Health (Georgia). In 2012, InsideJersey listed him as one of the “20 Brainiest People in New Jersey.” He previously was a research associate at the National Asia Research Program, a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, an associate fellow at the Asia Society, a visiting senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University. He obtained his BA and MA from Fudan University and his PhD from the University of Chicago.

The End of Growth and the Return of Ideology: Economics, Sustainability, and Technology in Xi Jinping’s China

November 4, 2022November 28, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Global Economic Governance Events, Past Events, U.S.-China Economic Relations Events

Friday, 4th November, 2022

The Institute for International Economic Policy was pleased to invite you to the first event in the 15th annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations. This conference is co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the GW Center for International Business Education and Research (GW-CIBER).

This inaugural event featured the Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, Scott M. Moore, to discuss “The End of Growth and the Return of Ideology: Economics, Sustainability, and Technology in Xi Jinping’s China.“ John Helveston (GWU) provided discussant remarks, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Barbara Stallings moderated the event.

If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. Thanks to decades of breakneck growth and development, Chinese officials, businesses, and institutions now play a critical role in every major global issue, from climate change to biotechnology. But China’s recent 20th Party Congress shows that Xi Jinping’s China is charting a very different path toward addressing these issues, all in the context of slowing growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

This talk drew on a recently-published book, China’s Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China’s Rise and the World’s Future, to re-envision China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. This reframing is essential both because none of these increasingly pressing, shared global challenges can be tackled without China, and because they are reshaping China’s economy and its foreign policy, with major implications for the world at large. At the same time, sustainability and technology issues present opportunities for intensified economic, geopolitical, and ideological competition—a reality that Beijing recognizes.

Drawing on the book, this talk explains that the danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs to tackle shared challenges in the decades ahead. In some areas, like clean technology development, competition can be good for the planet. But in others, it could be catastrophic: only cooperation can lower the risks of artificial intelligence and other disruptive new technologies.

With a particular focus on climate change, this talk addressed China’s role in providing global public goods and addressing global challenges, against a backdrop of growing economic, geopolitical, and ideological rivalry with other powers.

Speakers:

Scott M. Moore is a political scientist, university administrator, and former policymaker whose career focuses on China, sustainability, and emerging technology. As Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Moore works with faculty members from across the University to design, implement, and highlight innovative, high-impact global research initiatives in areas including sustainability and emerging technology. Dr. Moore directs Penn Global’s four research and engagement fund programs, including those designed to support faculty-led projects in China, India, and Africa as well as its At-Risk Scholars Program. In addition, Dr. Moore conducts research as an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and The Water Center at Penn, and teaches in the Department of Political Science.

Discussant:

John Helveston is interested in understanding the factors that shape technological change, with a particular focus on transitioning to more sustainable and energy-saving technologies. Within this broader category, he studies consumer preferences and market demand for new technologies as well as relationships between innovation, industry structure, and technology policy. He has explored these themes in the context of China’s rapidly developing electric vehicle industry. He applies an interdisciplinary approach to research, with expertise in discrete choice modeling and conjoint analysis as well as interview-based case studies.

Moderator:

Barbara Stallings is a William R. Rhodes Research Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and editor of Studies in Comparative International Development. She is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington University. Before arriving at Brown in 2002, she was director of the Economic Development Division of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago, Chile (1993–2002), and professor of political economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1977–1993). She has doctorates in economics (University of Cambridge) and in political science (Stanford University) and is a specialist in development economics, with an emphasis on development strategies and international finance. In addition, she works on issues of economic relations between Asia and Latin America and comparisons between the two regions. Her recent books are Innovation and Inclusion in Latin America: Strategies to Avoid the Middle Income Trap (2016) and Promoting Development: The Political Economy of East Asian Foreign Aid (2017). Her most recent book, Dependency in the Twenty-First Century?: The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations (2020), was selected as one of Foreign Affairs’ best books of 2020. She has taught at various universities in China and elsewhere in Asia; currently she is a distinguished visiting professor at the Schwarzman Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.