Recent Events

In this thought-provoking book, noted China experts from Harvard Business School and the Wharton School assert that while China has experienced remarkable economic growth in recent decades, it now faces major challenges–tests that could shift the country’s political and economic trajectory. A lack of accountability, transparency, and ease of operating in China, combined with growing […]

China’s energy policy exerts a profound influence on the global economy and the environment. To better understand the future trajectory of China’s energy needs, the National Committee hosted China Energy 2020. The forum explored how China — the world's biggest energy producer and consumer, and largest generator of greenhouse gas emissions — can reach its […]

Dr. Jessica Chen Weiss explores the role of nationalism and popular protest in China's foreign relations.

A century ago, Chinese feminists fighting for the emancipation of women helped spark the Republican Revolution, which overthrew the Qing empire. After China's Communist revolution of 1949, Chairman Mao famously proclaimed that "women hold up half the sky." In the early years of the People's Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations with expansive initiatives including the Marriage Law and assigning urban women jobs. Those gains have been eroded in the post-socialist era; women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of many rights and gains relative to men.

Assignment: China – Tiananmen Square tells the behind-the-scenes story of the American reporters who covered the tumultuous events of spring 1989 in Beijing. With video footage and still photos, some never shown before in public, and interviews with journalists who were there, including Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, Daniel Southerland of the Washington […]

From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly dedicated students destined to rule the global economy—or an addled Goliath, riddled with corruption and on the edge of stagnation. What we don’t see is how both powerful and ordinary people are remaking their lives as their country dramatically […]

In the waning years of the Cold War, the United States and China began to cautiously engage in cultural, educational, and policy exchanges, which in turn strengthened new security and economic ties. These links have helped shape the most important bilateral relationship in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The Buddhist monk Tanxu surmounted extraordinary obstacles--poverty, wars, famine, and foreign occupation--to become one of the most prominent monks in China, founding numerous temples and schools, and attracting crowds of students and disciples wherever he went. Now, in Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth Century Monk, James Carter draws on untapped archival materials to provide a book that is part travelogue, part history, and part biography of this remarkable man.

When the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975, they inherited a war-ravaged and internationally isolated country. Pol Pot’s government espoused the rhetoric of self-reliance, but Democratic Kampuchea was utterly dependent on Chinese foreign aid and technical assistance to survive. Yet in a markedly asymmetrical relationship between a modernizing, nuclear power and a […]

A year has passed since China installed a new president, Xi Jinping; he has moved forcefully in several areas but many challenges remain. How will the country move forward as its double-digit rate of economic growth slows? How does it plan to deal with international calls for political reform and cope with an aging and increasingly polarized population? How do China's leaders see the nation's future, including its strategic role in the region and beyond?

Mary Brown Bullock, founding executive vice chancellor of DKU, discussed Duke Kunshan University in the context of the globalization of higher education.

At a National Committee program hosted by Sidley Austin on February 27, 2014, a delegation from the Consensus Media Group (CMG) led by CMG CEO Zhou Zhixing took part in a wide-ranging discussion of some of the critical issues facing China and U.S.-China relations. Professor Li Weisen, vice dean of the School of Economics at […]