The year 2021 has proven to be a major inflection point in U.S.-China relations, and especially U.S. policy toward China. As China has become more autocratic at home and confrontational abroad, many countries, especially liberal democratic states, have hardened their postures against China. This has opened new space for closer U.S.-led international coordination on China policy. In this world, the defining challenge facing President Joe Biden’s administration and allies and partners of the United States, is understanding how China under President Xi Jinping is evolving in the face of changing domestic needs and external pressures. Accordingly, a major policy risk is that the United States will misread or misinterpret what is happening in China and will either overestimate or underestimate the threat China now poses.

These concerns motivated this third report — China’s New Direction: Challenges and Opportunities for U.S. Policy — by The Task Force on U.S.-China Policy. The Task Force was formed in 2015, bringing together a group of China specialists from across the United States, convened by the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, and the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy's 21st Century China Center.

The report is divided into eight sections. Each includes an analysis of the evolving trends inside China, and recommendations for how the Biden Administration might incorporate such understandings into the next phase of its China strategy. The eight sections are:

1. China’s Domestic Politics
2. Chinese Society: Media, Education, and Civil Society
3. Human Rights, Values, and Civil Society
4. China’s Economy
5. China’s Technology
6. China’s Military Challenge
7. Chinese Diplomacy
8. U.S.-China Climate Cooperation, Coordination, and Competition

Please join us for a discussion featuring organizers and participants of the Task Force on U.S.-China Policy.

The report will be available to download here on September 14, 2021.

Journalists interested in covering this event should contact Michael Laha: [email protected].

Panelists:

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society. He is a former professor and Dean at 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 is Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century with John Delury (2013). 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.

Susan Shirk is Chair of the 21st Century China Center and Research Professor at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. She previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State from 1997 to 2000, where she was responsible for U.S. policy toward China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mongolia. Shirk founded and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, an unofficial forum for discussions of security issues. Her book, China: Fragile Superpower (2008), helped frame the debate on China policy in the United States and other countries. Her most recent book is Changing Media, Changing China (2010).

Charlene Barshefsky is Chair of Parkside Global Advisors in Washington D.C., having previously served as Senior International Partner at WilmerHale where she chaired the firm’s International Trade, Investment and Market Access Group. She previously served as the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) from 1997 to 2001, holding the rank of Ambassador, and acting as deputy USTR from 1993 to 1996. Barshefsky is best known internationally as the architect and chief negotiator of China’s historic World Trade Organization agreement, as well as global agreements in financial services, telecommunications, intellectual property rights, high-technology products, and cyberspace.

Winston Lord was U.S. Ambassador to China from 1985 to 1989 under President Ronald Reagan, and served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 1993 to 1997 under President Bill Clinton. In the 1970s, he was Special Assistant to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and then Director of the State Department Policy Planning staff. During this period, he was on every China trip and attended every meeting that President Nixon, President Ford, and Dr. Kissinger had with President Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai, and Deputy Premier Deng Xiaoping, and was a principal drafter of both the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué and the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. In the 1960s, Lord served in the Pentagon and the Foreign Service.

Evan S. Medeiros is the Penner Family Chair in Asia Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His research and teaching focuses on the international politics of East Asia, U.S.-China relations, and China’s foreign and national security policies. He previously served for six years on the staff of the National Security Council as Director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia, and then as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Asia.

Mary Kay Magistad (Moderator) is the Associate Director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations. She is an award-winning journalist who lived and reported in East Asia for more than two decades, including in China for NPR (1995-99) and PRX’s The World (2003-13). She has taught international reporting at the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she also led the audio journalism department. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Dupont-Columbia Silver Baton award, an Overseas Press Club award, and awards from Sigma Delta Chi/Society of Professional Journalists and the Scripps-Howard Foundation. She has an M.A. from the University of Sussex (UK) in international relations and a B.A. from Northwestern University in journalism and history. 

Organized by:

The Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations