On June 12, 2020, join the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) to welcome the launch of Bob Davis and Lingling Wei’s newest book, Superpower Showdown: How the Battle Between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War.

Wall Street Journal reporters Bob Davis and Lingling Wei trace the U.S.-China trade relationship from the early 1990s, through China’s accession to the WTO, all the way to the Trump Administration’s trade war and the Phase One deal that signaled a pause in U.S.-China economic hostilities.

Davis and Wei have conducted hundreds of interviews with government officials and business leaders in both countries to uncover how and where the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship soured, and what the recent tensions might portend for the future of U.S.-China relations.

The escalation of hostilities, they show, has had a negative impact on both countries’ economies, the world at large, and is bound to worsen with the spreading coronavirus epidemic. Despite the January 2020 truce, they explain, the two years of trade wars continue to drive the two nations apart, darkening prospects for global peace and prosperity.

“Think of this as a romance gone bad,” the authors write, describing a competition that, as the title suggests, they do not expect to come to an end soon.

The event is co-sponsored by the Washington International Trade Association (WITA), and will be moderated by ASPI Vice President Wendy Cutler, and will also feature former Senior Advisor to President Trump on global development and international trade Clete Willems, as a discussant.

SPEAKERS

Bob Davis is a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal, where he covers economic issues, particularly those related to China, and U.S.-China economic tensions. Davis was posted in Beijing from 2011 to 2014 and published an e-Book with his wife about their experience there, titled Beijing from A-to-Z. He was part of a group of Wall Street Journal reporters that won a 1999 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Asian and Russian financial crises, and he also won the Overseas Press Club award in 2005 for his Latin American coverage.

Lingling Wei is an award-winning journalist who most recently worked in the Wall Street Journal’s Beijing bureau. She earned a master’s degree in journalism from NYU in 2000 and joined the Journal to cover real estate in 2008.  In 2011, Wei returned to China as a China correspondent for the Journal. Her reporting has since focused on the intersection between Chinese politics and the economy, specifically rising Chinese debt, tightened state control over the economy, and, most recently, the U.S.-China trade war, where her shared bylines with Bob Davis often indicated an article would become a must-read for trade experts and China watchers around the world.

Wendy Cutler is Vice President of ASPI and Managing Director of its Washington, D.C. office. She joined ASPI following nearly three decades as a diplomat and negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). Most recently, she served as Acting Deputy U.S. Trade Representative, working on a range of U.S. trade negotiations and initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region. In that capacity she was responsible for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, including the bilateral negotiations with Japan.

Clete Willems is a partner at Akin Gump and formerly served in the White House as Deputy Assistant to President Trump for International Economics, Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, and part of the National Security Council. Prior to that, he was Chief Counsel for Negotiations, Legislation and Administrative Law at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. He has also worked as a Legal Advisor to the U.S. Mission to the WTO and an Assistant General Counsel at USTR. From 2007 to 2009 Willems worked on the Hill Budget Committee immediately after serving as Legislative Director for Representative Paul Ryan.