Speaker: Jennifer Lind, Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth University

Great 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.