Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives

This event is open to Asia Society Members and Patrons.

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Schedule of events:

5 PM - Discussion

6 PM - Cocktail reception and book signing

7 PM - Private dinner, open to Groundbreaker level Patrons and above

In the past five years, the United States and China have become embroiled in a trade war, a tech war, and the early skirmishes of a new cold war. In his new book, Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School and former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia Stephen Roach argues that this worrisome trajectory of conflict escalation would not have happened were it not for the false narratives that both nations embrace with respect to the other. In an analysis of both economies and their political systems, Roach concludes with a trust-based plan for conflict resolution that breaks from the dysfunctional approach of the past. With the confluence of false narratives providing the high-octane fuel of conflict escalation, urgent resolution is needed to avoid an accidental conflict between the world’s two superpowers. 

Stephen Roach will be joined in conversation with Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society Center on U.S. China-Relations. The Q&A session will be followed by a cocktail reception and book signing.

Speakers:

Stephen Roach served as a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs for 13 years beginning in 2010 and as a Senior Lecturer at Yale’s School of Management. In fall 2022, Roach joined Yale Law School's Paul Tsai Center China Center as a Senior Fellow. Before coming to Yale, he was Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the firm’s Chief Economist for the bulk of his 30-year career at Morgan Stanley, heading up a highly regarded team of economists around the world. Roach’s current teaching and research program focuses on the impacts of Asia on the broader global economy. His work has appeared in academic journals, books, congressional testimony and has been disseminated widely in the domestic and international media. Roach’s opinions on the global economy have been known to shape the policy debate from Beijing to Washington. His previous books include Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China (2014) and The Next Asia: Opportunities and Challenges for a New Globalization (2009). 

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and a former dean of the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes, including The New Yorker, the Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation, and The New York Review of Books. His most recent book My Old Home: A Novel of Exile, was published in 2021. Schell worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-‘70s.