Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

Critical Issues Confronting China featuring Keith Bradsher - An Industrial Surge Amidst China’s Slowdown
2024-04-10 12:00 - 13:15 (America/New_York) | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Keith Bradsher, Beijing Bureau Chief, The New York Times

China’s economy is slowing, dragged down by real estate troubles, but its industrial sector has never been stronger. That poses dilemmas for trade partners in sectors from steel to solar panels to electric cars.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Eyck Freymann and Hugo Bromley - Avalanche Decoupling: Economic Contingency Planning for Taiwan Crisis
2024-09-25 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speakers:Eyck Freymann, Hoover Fellow, Stanford UniversityHugo Bromley, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Centre for Geopolitics, University of CambridgeMore information coming soon.

Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, where he studies the geopolitics of climate change and strategic deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Trained as an economic historian and China specialist, he is also the Indo-Pacific Director at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

Freymann’s first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World, is assigned on undergraduate and graduate syllabi at Harvard, Cambridge, Columbia, Peking University, and elsewhere. His writings on other current affairs topics have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, War on the Rocks, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and other venues.

Before Hoover, Freymann held concurrent postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program. He earned his doctorate in China Studies from Balliol College, University of Oxford; two masters degrees in China Studies from Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, where he was a Henry Scholar; and a bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.

Hugo Bromley is a historian of English manufacturing and British political economy and geopolitics, focusing on the early eighteenth century. His recently submitted PhD, completed at Cambridge, looked at how textile manufacturers and their employees shaped the formation of Britain after 1688, and the role of the British state in the global economy immediately before the Industrial Revolution. At the Centre for Geopolitics, he will coordinate the forthcoming project on the applied history of the UK Union, as well as continuing his own research. He has also been appointed as an affiliated postdoctoral research associate at Robinson College.

Hugo previously worked for the Centre as a Research Assistant on the Baltic Geopolitics Programme, which he will continue to support. He also hosted a short podcast series on the Geopolitics of Finance, which is available online at On Geopolitics. He completed his undergraduate studies at the LSE and his MPhil at here at Cambridge. Away from academia, he has worked as a researcher at the International Financial Law Review and as a reporter at IFLR Practice Insight.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Oriana Skylar Mastro — The Future of Great Power Competition: Will China’s Strategy Succeed?
2024-10-02 16:30 - 17:45 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Oriana Skylar Mastro, Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford University; Non-resident Scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Moderator: Andrew S. Erickson, Professor of Strategy, China Maritime Studies Institute, U.S. Naval War College; Fairbank Center Visiting Scholar

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a nonresident scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Mastro continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Director of Reserve China Global Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 and 2022 (FGO). She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring David Zweig — China’s Battle for Talent and Technology
2024-10-16 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: David Zweig, Professor Emeritus, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Distinguished Visiting Professor of Taipei School of Economics and Political Science, National Tsinghua University, Taiwan; Vice President, Center for China and Globalization (Beijing)

In the mid-1990s, China’s hope for a “reverse brain drain” of overseas scientists, academics, and entrepreneurs stalled. So, in 2001, Jiang Zemin introduced China’s ‘Diaspora Option,’ to encourage PRC-born Chinese living abroad to “serve the country” without “returning to the country.” Through a multipronged array of programs organized by government ministries and the CCP, these former citizens have transferred their knowledge back home, some to repay or strengthen their former homeland, others from self-interest.

In 2018, the Trump Administration declared war on China’s efforts to access this information through the “China Initiative.” Hundreds of Chinese were investigated, their research was disrupted, and more than 100 were fired. Yet almost none were found guilty of espionage or theft of intellectual property.

This seminar documents China’s “over-the-top” effort to gain the help of these talented Chinese, as well as the US government’s harsh effort to disrupt the transfer of US technology to China. It tells the stories of unknown victims of that campaign. It also highlights the harm this war has brought to Sino-American scientific collaboration.

David Zweig (Ph.D., The University of Michigan, 1983) is Professor Emeritus, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Taipei School of Economics and Political Science, National Tsinghua University, Taiwan, and Vice-President of the Center for China and Globalization (Beijing). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard in 1984-85, and received the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship, Research Grants Council, Hong Kong, 2013-14. For 15 years, he directed the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at HKUST.

He has surveyed hundreds of Chinese who returned home and many who remain abroad. In 2012, he briefed Li Yuanchao, Director of the Organization Department of the CCP, about why his 1000 Talents Plan was struggling. He was an expert witness in the defense of two Chinese professors under the Trump Administration’s “China Initiative.”

He has authored or edited ten books, including Internationalizing China and China’s Brain Drain to the U.S.(Routledge). Over 40,000 students have taken his two online classes with COURSERA on domestic Chinese Politics and on China and the World.

This talk is based on his new book, The War for Chinese Talent in America: The politics of technology and knowledge in Sino-U.S. relations which was published in the Asia Shorts Series of the Association of Asian Studies and is distributed by Columbia University Press.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Edward Wong — The Empire Reborn: China’s Expansion and Nationalism Today
2024-10-30 16:30 - 18:00 | CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium (S010), 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Edward Wong, Diplomatic Correspondent, The New York Times Moderator: Mark C. Elliott, Vice Provost of International Affairs, Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Harvard University

From the the earliest days of its rule, the Communist Party poured resources into reconstituting the Qing Empire. Edward Wong talks about his father’s role in the military occupation of Xinjiang in the 1950s, the subject of his new book, At the Edge of Empire, and his own reporting as a New York Times journalist on how China maintains control over its frontier regions. And what does the party’s focus on holding on to the territory of the Qing mean for the intentions of China’s leaders toward Taiwan, the South China Sea and other areas outside of interior China?

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and author of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China. He has reported for the Times for 25 years, working for 13 of those as a correspondent and bureau chief from China and Iraq. Wong was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. He was a recent fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington and at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Wong was awarded the Livingston Prize for his reporting on the Iraq War and was on a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the war. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He has joint master’s degrees in journalism and international studies from U.C. Berkeley. He received an honorary doctorate this year from Middlebury Language Schools.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Tyler Jost — Bureaucracy and Blunder: How Politics Shapes China’s Policymaking
2024-11-13 16:30 - 18:00 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Tyler Jost, Assistant Professor of Political Science, International & Public Affairs and Watson Institute Assistant Professor of China Studies, Brown UniversityModerator: Joseph Fewsmith, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Boston University; Fairbank Center AssociateWhen are China’s leaders able to extract quality information from their diplomatic, defense, and intelligence bureaucracies during international crises? Tyler Jost’s book, Bureaucracies at War, examines the Chinese national security bureaucracy in comparative perspective. Jost highlights how China’s leaders face a trade-off between institutional designs that offer political security and those that yield quality information. He illustrates this intuition through detailed historical cases on the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Anne Stevenson-Yang — What Happens After the Chinese Miracle?
2024-11-20 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Anne Stevenson-Yang, Founder and Reseach Director, J Capital ResearchModerator: Anthony Saich,Director, Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Anne Stevenson-Yang co-founded J Capital Research, which publishes highly diligenced research reports on publicly traded companies. She also writes a weekly research piece called China Primary Insight. Over 25 years living in Beijing, Anne worked as an industry analyst and founded three businesses in online and print media and software. She is author of three published books, including Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy (2024, Bui Jones).

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Jianbo Huang — Can China Live Without Religion?
2025-02-19 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Jianbo Huang, Professor of Anthropology, East China Normal University

China is often labeled as the least religious nation in the world, yet its people express a rich tapestry of spirituality. This talk reveals that Chinese citizens engage with a broad spectrum of religious and spiritual traditions—frequently in informal settings and beyond traditional institutional boundaries. These practices are driven by diverse personal motivations and deep-rooted cultural imperatives. Neither political pressures nor the forces of modernization and rationalization have eradicated religious influence in China. Rather, religious life in China endures and adapts, demonstrating that economic or material progress cannot substitute for the profound meaning offered by spiritual practices. Understanding this dynamic interplay is essential for anticipating China’s future trajectory.Jianbo Huang is Professor of anthropology at East China Normal University (ECNU), director of the Institute of Anthropology, and the Center of Ethnicity and Development. Before joining ECNU in 2014, he was a faculty member of anthropology institute, Renmin University of China since 2005. After receiving his PH.D. in anthropology from Central Minzu University in 2003, he was post-doc fellow at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in 2003-2005, and at the Institute of Studies of Religion, Baylor University, in 2007-2008. He received numerous funds from both the state social science foundation of China and international funds, and was named as Shanghai Shuguang Scholar in 2015.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret.) — Crisis Scenario: Imagining U.S.-China Relations and War in the Pacific
2025-02-26 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret.), Partner and Vice Chair, Global Affairs, The Carlyle Group; Chair of the Board of Trustees, Rockefeller Foundation

Admiral James Stavridis is Partner and Vice Chair, Global Affairs of The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, following five years as the 12th Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. A retired 4-star officer in the U.S. Navy, he led the NATO Alliance in global operations from 2009 to 2013 as Supreme Allied Commander with responsibility for Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, counter piracy, and cyber security. He also served as Commander of U.S. Southern Command, with responsibility for all military operations in Latin America from 2006-2009. He earned more than 50 medals, including 28 from foreign nations in his 37-year military career.

Earlier in his military career he commanded the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet, winning the Battenberg Cup, as well as a squadron of destroyers and a carrier strike group – all in combat. In 2016, he was vetted for Vice President by Hillary Clinton and subsequently invited to Trump Tower to discuss a cabinet position in the Trump Administration.

Admiral Stavridis earned a PhD in international relations and has published fourteen books and hundreds of articles in leading journals around the world, including the recent novel “2034: A Novel of the Next World War,” which was a New York Times bestseller and “To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and The Crucible of Decision.” His most recent book “The Restless Wave: A Novel of the United States Navy” was published in October 2024. His 2012 TED talk on global security has close to one million views. Admiral Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Jeremy Daum — Unchained Watchdog: How China's Supervision Commission Escapes Legal Bounds
2025-03-05 16:30 - 17:45 | CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium (S010), 1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Jeremy Daum, Senior Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow, Paul Tsai China Center, Yale University

Discussant: Bill Alford, Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of Law; Director of East Asian Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School

***PLEASE NOTE THE TIME AND VENUE FOR THIS LECTURE DIFFERS FROM OTHERS IN THIS SERIES***

In 2018, China amended its constitution to establish the Supervision System as a fourth branch of government focused on preventing and correcting abuses of state power. The reform was framed as shifting the ongoing anti-corruption campaign from the opaque, extra-legal party discipline system to a more transparent and uniform legal process. The result, however, is sometimes less that the discipline system has been bound by law, than that law has been bound to the discipline system. By examining the development, duties, and institutional relationships of the new supervision commissions, Daum argues that this further integration of the Party and state risks the legitimacy of both.

Jeremy Daum is a Senior Research Scholar in Law and Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center. He is based in Beijing, and has more than a decade of experience working in China on collaborative legal reform projects. His principal research focus is criminal procedure law, with a particular emphasis on the protection of vulnerable populations such as juveniles and the mentally ill in the criminal justice system. He is also an authority on China’s “social credit system.” Jeremy has spoken about these issues at universities throughout China and the United States and has co-authored a book on U.S. capital punishment jurisprudence for Chinese readers. He is the founder and contributing editor of the collaborative translation and commentary site Chinalawtranslate.com, dedicated to improving mutual understanding between legal professionals in China and abroad.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Martin Whyte and Scott Rozelle — Getting Ahead in Today’s China: From Optimism to Pessimism
2025-03-12 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speakers:Martin K. Whyte, John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and Sociology, Emeritus; Former Acting Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies 2007-2008, Harvard UniversityScott Rozelle, Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and Co-Director, Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University.

Moderator: Ya-Wen Lei, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Wang Feng — The End of the Miracle: How a Shrinking Population Impacts China’s Future
2025-04-02 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Feng Wang, Professor, Sociology, UC IrvineDiscussant: Xiang Zhou, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

China’s spectacular economic growth of the past four decades is a happy outcome of numerous historical junctures and opportunism. One pivotal factor was China’s population, particularly its healthy and literate rural population on the eve of the economic take-off. China’s hyper-growth era commenced at the same time as the large migration flows is coming to an end, and as the country embarks on an irreversible journey of population aging and decline. In this talk Professor Wang revisits the crucial role of China’s population in its economic transformation, explore the forces shaping the country’s demographic future, and highlights the social and political challenges as well as the opportunities, that China faces as China enters a post hyper-growth era.

WANG Feng is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine. He is a scholar with expertise in global demographic change, social inequality, public policy, and comparative population and social history. Between 2010 and 2013, he was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and directed the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing. He is the author of several award-winning books in his research areas and has contributed to many other publications. His latest book, China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath, examines the underlying forces driving China’s four-decade-long historical transformations. He is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Chenggang XU — How Will China's Institutional Problems Cripple its Economy?
2025-04-09 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Chenggang XU, Senior Research Scholar, Stanford Center on China’s Economic and Institutions; Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Visiting Professor, Department of Finance, Imperial College London

Discussant: Meg Rithmire, James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Chenggang Xu is a Senior Research Scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economic and Institutions, and a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a Visiting Professor, Department of Finance, Imperial College London.

Chenggang received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1991. He previously taught at the University of Hong Kong as Chung Hon-Dak Professor of Economics, at Tsinghua University as Special-term Professor of Economics, at Seoul National University as World-Class University Professor of Economics, and at LSE as Reader of Economics. He was the President of the Asian Law and Economics Association. He was a first recipient of China Economics Prize (2016) and a recipient of the Sun Yefang Economics Prize (2013).

Chenggang’s research is in political economics, institutional economics, law and economics, development economics, transition economics and the Chinese political economy. His research and opinions have been covered widely in the Greater China area and in the world. He is currently a board member of the Ronald Coase Institute (RCI) and a research fellow of the CEPR.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Li Zhang — Anxious China: Rethinking Therapeutic Governing Before and After the Pandemic
2025-04-16 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Li Zhang, Professor of Anthropology, University of California-Davis

Discussant: Arthur Kleinman, Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology; Professor of Medical Anthropology in Social Medicine; Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard University

Li Zhang (Ph.D. Cornell 1998) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Davis. She is the author of three award-winning books: Strangers in the City (Stanford 2001), In Search of Paradise (Cornell 2010), andAnxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (UC 2020). She is also a co-editor of Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (Cornell 2008) and Can Science and Technology Save China? (Cornell 2020). Broadly speaking, her research concerns social, political, spatial and psychological repercussions of the post-Mao economic reform and postsocialist transformations in contemporary China. Currently, she is working on a new project on aging, care, and the digital divide in post-COVID 19 China. She was a 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and the President of the Society of East Asian Anthropology (2013-15). She also served as Interim Dean of the Division of Social Sciences (2015-17) and Chair of Anthropology Department (2011-15) at UC Davis.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Suisheng Zhao — The Dragon Roars Back: Xi's Power Concentration and Foreign Policy Implications
2025-04-23 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Suisheng Zhao, Suisheng Zhao, Professor and Director, Center for China-US Cooperation, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver

Discussant: Robert Ross, Professor of Political Science, Boston College; Fairbank Center Associate

Suisheng Zhao is Professor and Director of the Center for China-US Cooperation at Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. A founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary China, he is member of the Board of Governors of the US Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, a member of National Committee on US-China Relations, a Research Associate at the Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research in Harvard University, and a honorary jianzhi professor at Beijing University, Renmin University, China University of International Relations, Fudan University and Shanghai foreign Studies University. A Campbell National Fellow at Hoover Institution of Stanford University, he was Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Washington College in Maryland, Associate Professor of Government and East Asian Politics at Colby College in Maine and visiting assistant professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at University of California-San Diego. He received his Ph.D. degree in political science from the University of California-San Diego, M.A. degree in Sociology from the University of Missouri and BA and M.A. degrees in economics from Peking University. He is the author and editor of more than ten books, including: China and East Asian Regionalism: Economic and Security Cooperation and Institution-Building (Routledge 2012), In Search of China’s Development Model: Beyond the Beijing Consensus, (Routledge 2011), Village Elections in China (Routledge, 2010), China and the United States, Cooperation and Competition in Northeast Asia (Palgrave/Macmillion, 2008), China-US Relations Transformed: Perspectives and Strategic Interactions (Routledge, 2008), Debating Political Reform in China: Rule of Law versus Democratization (M. E. Sharpe, 2006), A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford University Press, 2004), Chinese Foreign Policy: Pragmatism and Strategic Behavior (M. E. Sharpe, 2003), China and Democracy: Reconsidering the Prospects for a Democratic China (Routledge, 2000), Across the Taiwan Strait: Mainland China, Taiwan, and the Crisis of 1995-96 (Routledge, 1999). His articles have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, The Wilson Quarterly, Washington Quarterly, International Politik, The Hague Journal of Democracy, European Financial Review, The China Quarterly, World Affairs, Asian Survey, Asian Affairs, Journal of Democracy, Pacific Affairs, Communism and Post-Communism Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, and elsewhere.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Jeffrey Wasserstrom — Hong Kong 2025: Competing Visions of a City's Past, Present, and Future
2025-10-01 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Distinguished Professor of History, UC IrvineDiscussant: Moira Weigel, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University

In 2015, a group of Hong Kong filmmakers made an anthology film called “Ten Years,” made up of dystopian vignettes set in a dramatically transformed city one decade in the future. Now that 2025 has arrived, while everyone agrees that Hong Kong has changed a lot, some see the film as having proved prophetic but supporters of the Chinese Communist Party in the city itself and in Beijing insist that the metropolis has in fact been moving in a positive direction. This talk will bring in three kinds of comparisons to try to place the debate about today’s Hong Kong, and the dilemmas the CCP has long faced and continues to face in dealing with the city and its discontents, into perspective. It will ask what we can learn from looking at developments in Macau and Singapore in the recent past and in Shanghai circa 1950, back when that port was the most important urban center shaped by cosmopolitan and capitalist currents that the Party was striving to integrate fully into the PRC.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine. Along with publishing in academic journals, he often writes for general interest periodicals, ranging from the New York Times and the Atlantic to the TLS, and he is on the editorial boards of two of them: Dissent Magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His most recent books are a pair of interrelated short ones published by Columbia Global Reports–Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (2025).

Wasserstrom was educated at UC Santa Cruz (B.A. in History), Harvard (Masters in Regional Studies: East Asia), and Berkeley (PhD in HIstory), and he is a past editor of the Journal of Asian Studies (2008-2018) and a past member of the advisory board of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. He will have a new book out in February from Brixton Ink, which is a short primer on the era of Xi Jinping: Everything You Wanted to Know About China* (But Were Afraid to Ask). He is now working on a book about Orwell and Asia that is under contract with the trade division of Princeton University Press.

Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and a Sociotechnical Security Fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute. She writes and teaches about the history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early 19th century to the present.

Her first book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2016, Macmillan), countered widespread claims that the rise of mobile phones and apps were bringing about the “death of romance,” showing that modern courtship practices have consistently coevolved with consumer capitalism and gendered work.  Labor of Love has been translated into six languages and appeared in dozens of outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, and  HBO.

Her current recent research focuses on transnational online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay and China’s “four little dragons” (四小龍): Alibaba, Shein, Temu, and TikTok. She notes that despite tech competition, cross-border e-commerce (跨境電商) has made ordinary people in China and the U.S. ever more closely entangled.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Zenobia Chan — The Influence Game: What Does China Really Want?
2025-10-08 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Zenobia T. Chan, Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Georgetown UniversityMore information coming soon!

Professor Chan is a researcher in international relations, focusing on economic statecraft, as well as influence and information operations. I also develop machine learning methods for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects in experimental and observational data.

Her book project Alms and Influence examines when economic inducements — such as foreign aid, large-scale investment initiatives, and discounted sales of natural resources — can buy influence abroad. She holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton and has taught at Columbia, Georgetown, Oxford, Princeton, and the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (IQMR). She also led an analytics team at Google and worked at the United Nations, World Bank, and OECD on development assistance, infrastructure financing, and industrial policy.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring David Yang — Laboratories of Autocracy: How China’s Re-centralization Impacted Economic Growth
2025-10-15 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: David Yang, Yvonne P. L. Lui Professor of Economics, Harvard UniversityDiscussant: Anthony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs; Director, Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, Harvard Kennedy School

David Y. Yang is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and Director of the Center for History and Economics at Harvard. David is a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER, a Global Scholar at CIFAR, and a fellow at BREAD. David’s research focuses on political economy. In particular, David studies the forces of stability and forces of changes in authoritarian regimes, drawing lessons from historical and contemporary China. David received a B.A. in Statistics and B.S. in Business Administration from University of California at Berkeley, and PhD in Economics from Stanford.A part of Harvard Worldwide Week

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Dan Wang — Breakneck: Can China Outcompete the U.S. on Innovation?
2025-10-22 17:30 - 18:45 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Dan Wang, Hoover InstitutionDiscussants: Susan Greenhalgh, John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society Emerita, Department of Anthropology, Harvard UniversityMark Wu, Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, Harvard Law School; Director, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University***PLEASE NOTE DIFFERENT START TIME FOR THIS CRITICAL ISSUES CONFRONTING CHINA SERIES TALK ***

Dan Wang is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in its Hoover History Lab and is one of the most-cited experts on China’s technological capabilities. He is the author of the forthcoming Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (W. W. Norton [US] and Penguin [UK], Fall 2025).

Wang was previously a fellow at the Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and a lecturer at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. From 2017 to 2023, he worked in China as the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, based in Hong Kong, Beijing, and then Shanghai.

While based in China, Wang covered the web of US tech restrictions; their impact on leading companies; and the country’s growing capabilities in semiconductors, clean technology, and advanced manufacturing.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Yanmei Lin — The Fire Alarm and the Iron Hand: Civil Society’s Place in China’s Environmental Rule of Law
2025-10-29 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Yanmei Lin, Professor of Law, Vermont Law and Graduate SchoolDiscussant: William P. Alford, Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of East Asian Legal Studies; Director of East Asian Legal Studies; Chair, Harvard Law School Project on Disability, Harvard Law School

Over the past decade, Chinese NGOs gained formal roles in environmental governance through public interest litigations, access-to-information requests, and participation in legal processes. That space is narrowing today. A more centralized political climate, the expanded authority of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, increased prosecutorial control, and campaign-style enforcement have reasserted central state power. Drawing on cases like Friends of Nature v. State Grid Co. and the Green Peacock case, this lecture explores how civil society actors continue to adapt, influence, and navigate in a shifting political landscape, raising open questions about what forms of engagement remain viable, and what strategies still make a difference.

Yanmei Lin is Acting Director of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment and Professor of Law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, where she also serves as Deputy Director of the U.S.-Asia Partnerships for Environmental Law. Her work focuses on comparative environmental rule of law and the role of civil society. She has supported environmental strategic litigation, public interest legal networks, environmental damages and compensation system’s legislative reform and community legal empowerment initiatives in collaboration with environmental NGOs, legal clinics, judicial institutions and academic partners in the region.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Anthony Saich — Through the Past Darkly: Culture and Practice of the Chinese Communist Party
2025-11-05 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Anthony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs; Director, Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, Harvard Kennedy SchoolDiscussant: Rana Mitter, ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations, Harvard Kennedy School

Little could the founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have known that they were setting in motion one of history’s greatest revolutionary movements. While much has changed, there is important continuity in the practice and the culture of the party. It is an organization and propaganda party; an infallible and autonomous party; a controlling party; a collectivist party; an adaptable and flexible party; and a global party.

Anthony Saich (托尼·赛奇) is the director of the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs, teaching courses on comparative political institutions, democratic governance, and transitional economies with a focus on China. In his capacity as Institute Director, Saich also serves as the faculty chair of the China Programs, the Asia Energy Leaders Program, Unseen Legacies of the Vietnam War and the Global Vietnam Wars Studies Initiative.

He holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Letters, University of Leiden, the Netherlands. He received his master’s degree in politics with special reference to China from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, and his bachelor’s degree in politics and geography from the University of Newcastle, UK.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Yi Lu — Garbage Time of History? Chinese Archives in the Era of Xi Jinping
2025-11-12 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Yi Lu, Assistant Professor of History, Dartmouth CollegeDiscussant: Daniel Koss, Associate Senior Lecturer on East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

The Chinese internet has recently been captivated by a meme: “the garbage time of history.” The phrase evokes the Soviet Union’s final, suffocating decades to suggest that China, too, has entered an era of stagnation. Beyond a general sense of anomie born from Covid-19 and economic malaise, the meme speaks to the very difficulty of remembering in Xi Jinping’s China — indeed, the posts themselves are quickly scrubbed.

Is China in the garbage time of history? This talk takes the concept seriously — as material, as metaphor, and as memento of our times — by exploring the fate of archives in contemporary China. Specifically, I focus on China’s grassroots archives, collections of de-accessioned Mao-era records salvaged by waste recyclers and sold in flea markets before being acquired by major universities. Once celebrated as counter-archives preserving history beyond the Party-State’s reach, what has become of these collections as archives are folded ever more deeply into China’s information security system and Xi’s project of national rejuvenation? Drawing on documentary research, ethnographic fieldwork, and quantitative analysis, I explore the challenges of remembering the past when revisionism, nationalism, and denialism make archives more politicized and precarious — and not just in China.

Yi Lu is a historian of modern China, with particular interests in the history of information, material culture, and digital humanities. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College and completing his first book project, The Dustbin of History: Chinese Archives and Their Afterlives.

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Critical Issues Confronting China featuring Fan Dai — Decoupling Crisis: Subnational Climate Action and China’s Domestic Coal Challenge
2026-02-18 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Fan Dai, Assistant Professor, International Climate Policy, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, BerkeleyDiscussant: Henry Lee, Jassim M. Jaidah Family Director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program; Co-Chair, Arctic Initiative, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy SchoolMore information coming soon.Fan Dai is an Assistant Professor in International Climate Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley. She is also a Senior Fellow with the Belfer Center’s Environment and Natural Resources Program and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center.

Dr. Dai has played a significant role leading California’s collaboration with China on climate, energy and environment. She was appointed by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr as Special Advisor on China. Under Brown, Dr. Dai chaired the state’s China Interagency Working Group, and acted as the state’s liaison on its critical economic and environmental initiatives on China. Previously, Dr. Dai served as senior advisor at California Environmental Protection Agency and California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, advising on the state’s international policy and global climate partnership. In 2017, she organized Governor Brown’s trip, which resulted in a successful meeting with President Xi Jinping and the commitment to establish the California-China Climate Institute.

Dr. Dai is a graduate of Berkeley Law, University of California, and holds a doctoral degree on Environmental Policy and Economics from State University of New York. Her research has been focused on market mechanisms for climate change mitigation, energy efficiency and innovations.

Henry Lee is the Jassim M. Jaidah Family Director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program and Co-Chair of the Arctic Initiative in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at HKS.

Before joining HKS in 1979, Lee spent nine years in Massachusetts State Government as Director of the State’s Energy Office and Special Assistant to the Governor for Environmental Policy. He has served on numerous state, federal, and private advisory boards concerning energy and the environment. Lee is a former Chairman of the Massachusetts Stewardship Council, which oversees state parks and recreation facilities. Additionally, he has worked with private and public organizations, including the InterAmerican Development Bank, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, the State of Sao Paulo, the U.S. Departments of Energy and Interior, the National Research Council, the Intercontinental Energy Corporation, General Electric, and the U.S. EPA.

Lee’s research interests surround energy and transportation issues, U.S. climate policy, China’s energy policy, and public infrastructure projects in developing countries. Lee is a co-author of Foundations for a Low-Carbon Energy System in China (Cambridge University Press, 2021). His forthcoming publications include: a book chapter on state electricity regulation and climate (with Judy Chang), a paper on deploying renewable energy in China (with Bo Bai), and a new case study on solid waste disposal in Serbia.

Co-sponsored by the Belfer Center for International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

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***NOW TAKING PLACE VIA ZOOM*** Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Courtney Fung — Can China Achieve its UN Ambitions?
2026-02-23 16:30 - 17:45 | Presented via Zoom
Zoom Webinar Registration Link

Speaker: Courtney Fung, Associate Professor, School of International Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

Please note the different day and time for this Critical Issues talk.***DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER, THIS LECTURE WILL NOW TAKE PLACE VIA ZOOM WEBINAR***REGISTER AT: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_af-PQxTHQXaRabRNCONE6QChina presents itself as a supporter of ‘true multilateralism,’ with the United Nations as a bedrock institution of global governance. The United Nations’ truly global reach, China’s UN Security Council veto, and position as the only legal representative of China in the UN system, makes the body a key forum for China’s foreign policy. China seeks reform from within the multilateral institution to have it better align with PRC foreign policy preferences. Indeed, China’s well-reported multilateral rise is presumed to challenge US leadership in a Western-dominated UN system, especially in the wake of the recent US departure from various UN bodies. To assess whether China can achieve its UN ambitions, I first outline China’s power and influence against a basic heuristic of China’s UN contributions, before focusing on China’s self-proclaimed ‘global public goods’ campaign. I next turn to the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative to highlight how each of these Initiatives draw upon different facets of power, clarifying PRC tactics to promote these Initiatives within and through the UN system. My research draws mainly on written primary and secondary sources produced by PRC and UN elites, and supplemented by insights from PRC, US and UN officials in Washington, DC and New York City in May and June 2024, and Beijing in December 2025.

Dr. Courtney J. Fung is Associate Professor in the Discipline of Security Studies in the School of International Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She is concurrently Non-Resident Fellow at LSE IDEAS; the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University; at Asia Society Australia, and at the Lowy Institute. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University in spring 2024. Her research focuses on how rising powers address the norms and provisions for global governance and international security, with a primary focus on China within the UN system. Courtney’s published research spans international civil service personnel contributions and human protection issues broadly defined (e.g. cyber norms, peacekeeping, intervention, and the responsibility to protect) and the effects of status for cooperation and international norm development. Courtney’s book, China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the BISA LHM Ling Outstanding First Book Prize. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. She serves as an associate editor for H-DIPLO ISSF, Contemporary Security Policy and the Australian Journal of International Affairs.

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Critical Issues Confronting China series featuring Xi Lian — Christian Social Activism in Contemporary China
2026-03-04 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Xi Lian, David C. Steinmetz Distinguished Professor of World Christianity, Duke University Divinity School; Visiting Scholar, Harvard Divinity School

Discussant: James Robson, James C. Kralik and Yunli Lou Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard College Professor, Harvard University; Director, Harvard-Yenching Institute

In his Asian tour in 1920, Bertrand Russell noted the prominence of Christians in the Korean independence movement, adding that in Korea “a Christian was practically synonymous with a bomb-thrower.” This talk explores a less colorful but no less pronounced role of Christians in rights defense and political dissent in China a century later.

Professor Lian is David C. Steinmetz Distinguished Professor of World Christianity at Duke Divinity School. His research is focused on China’s modern encounter with Christianity. His first book, The Conversion of Missionaries (1997), is a critical study of American Protestant missions against the backdrop of rising Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century. His second book, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (2010), winner of the 2011 Christianity Today Book Award, examines the development of missionary Christianity into a vibrant, indigenous faith of the Chinese masses. Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China (2018) is his most recent book. It is the first authoritative, documented biography of the most important political dissident in Mao’s China, whose open opposition to communism was sustained by her Christian faith. Dr. Lian’s other research projects include the flourishing of Christianity among minority peoples on the margins of the Chinese state and the emergence of Protestant elites and their prominent, if also precarious, role in the search for civil society in today’s China.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Jennifer Lind
2026-03-11 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Jennifer Lind, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth University

Discussant: Meg Rithmire, James E. Robison Professor of Business Administration, Business, Government, and International Economy Unit, Harvard Business SchoolGreat power competition requires countries to be technological leaders, but an influential literature holds that autocracies, which suppress creativity and information flows, stifle innovation. Many observers of China’s rise thus argued that it would be unable to compete technologically with the United States. Jennifer Lind’s Autocracy 2.0 shows that China has become a global innovation leader. She argues that China and other “smart authoritarians” have adapted their tools of control to better compete with free societies in today’s globalized information age. Authoritarian adaptation suggests that China – and the countries that emulate its smart authoritarian model – will be far more competitive than many observers expect: which has dramatic implications for the balance of power, the future of international order, and the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

Jennifer Lind is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, and a Faculty Associate at the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University. She is also a Research Associate in the US and North America Programme at Chatham House. Professor Lind’s research focuses on the international relations of East Asia and US foreign policy toward the region.

Lind is the author of Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny (Cornell University Press, 2025), a book that shows how authoritarian adaptation enabled China’s rise to become a superpower and technological peer competitor of the United States. Previously, Lind published (also with Cornell University Press), Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics (2008). She has authored numerous scholarly articles in journals such as International Security and International Studies Quarterly and writes for wider audiences in Foreign Affairs. Her commentary is regularly quoted in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio (NPR). Lind founded and serves as the editor-in-chief of Blue Blaze, a multi-author Substack about international relations and U.S. foreign policy. Lind holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a MPIA from the School of Global Policy Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from the University of California.

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Critical Issues Confronting China series featuring Robert Suettinger — Factional Politics in the CCP: Is Change in the Air?
2026-03-25 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker:Robert Lee Suettinger, Former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia, National Intelligence CounselMore information coming soon.

Robert Lee Suettinger is a historian of contemporary elite politics in the People’s Republic of China. He recently completed a biography of Hu Yaobang (1915-1989), General Secretary and Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party of China, published by Harvard University Press, under a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation.

Suettinger was a Senior Advisor and Consultant at the Stimson Center, Analytic Director at CENTRA Technology Inc., a Senior Policy Analyst at RAND and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He retired from US government service in 1998, after nearly 24 years in the intelligence and foreign policy bureaucracies.

He joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1975, and spent his entire career in the analysis of Asian affairs. After several years as an analyst and manager in CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, he was assigned as Director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Subsequently, he served for five years as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia on the National Intelligence Council.

Beginning in March 1994, Suettinger was Director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council, where he assisted National Security Advisors Anthony Lake and Samuel R. Berger in the development of American policy toward East Asia. He returned to the NIC as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia in October 1997. Suettinger holds an M.A. from Columbia University and a B.A. from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He served in the U.S. Army in the then Republic of Vietnam in 1969-70.

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Critical Issues Confronting China Series featuring Dongsheng Zang — China's Great Leap Forward to AI Supremacy
2026-04-08 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Dongsheng Zang, Professor of Law, University of Washington School of LawThe talk aims to provide a framework in understanding China’s industrial policy on artificial intelligence (AI) in the last decade, 2016-2026. It examines the AI policy from the perspective of state-industry relationship. For this purpose, it divides the decade into three stages of development: (1) the harmonious period, 2016-2018; (2) the crackdown, 2018-2022; and (3) the DeepSeek paradox, 2022-2026. It explains the success, to some degree, China has in AI development; but also reveals the underlying dilemma that China under Xi Jinping is facing in this crucial area of technology in the competition with the United States.

Professor Zang joined the UW faculty full-time in 2006, after serving as a visiting professor in 2005-06. His academic interests include international trade law, and comparative study of Chinese law, with a focus on the role of law and state in response to social crises in the social transformation in China. He holds an S.J.D. and LL.M. from Harvard Law School, in addition to his LL.M. from Renmin University (Beijing) and LL.B. from Beijing College of Economics. His doctoral dissertation, One-way Transparency: The Establishment of the Rule-based International Trade Order and the Predicament of Its Jurisprudence, was awarded the 2004 Yong K. Kim ’95 prize. He was a research fellow at the East Asia Legal Studies at Harvard Law School during the 2004-05 academic year.

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Critical Issues Confronting China series featuring Ian Johnson — Reclaiming Historical Memory and the Struggle for China’s Future
2026-04-15 12:00 - 13:15 | CGIS South S020, Belfer Case Study Room, 1730 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States
Speaker: Ian Johnson, Author; Founder, China Unofficial Archives

More information coming soon.

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, teacher, and researcher. He has been engaged with China for the past thirty-five years, writing on the country’s search for faith and values, as well as efforts to control dissent and history.

He was a 2024-2025 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he is writing a new book on China. He also contributes to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and regularly speaks in the media or to public audiences about China.

He is the founder of the China Unofficial Archives, an online repository of hundreds of samizdat magazines, books, and underground films. This website is a registered (501c3) non-profit that uploads and annotates new movies and publications daily.

His latest book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, describes how some of China’s best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history.

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