Webinar: Key Takeaways from China’s Two Sessions in 2025

Partnership Between the Center for China Analysis and the South China Morning Post

The Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA) partners with the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on a webinar covering key takeaways from the annual Two Sessions, the concurrent meetings of China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, and its political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

The webinar features Neil Thomas, CCA Fellow on Chinese Politics, and Lizzi C. Lee, CCA Fellow on Chinese Economy. Together with moderator Chow Chung-yan, SCMP Executive Editor, they discuss the significant aspects and outcomes of the Two Sessions.

For more of CCA’s coverage of the Two Sessions in 2025, see:

Another resource on domestic Chinese politics is CCA's flagship interactive website, Decoding Chinese Politics, which helps decode Beijing’s “black box” through visualizations and explainer essays that map formal institutions, informal networks, key decision-makers, and major policy trends.

For more coverage of the Two Sessions by SCMP visit their website.

Speakers

Chow Chung-yan (Moderator) is the Executive Editor at the South China Morning Post. He began his journalistic career at the South China Morning Post and rose to become Executive Editor in 2015, following stints on the City, China and Business desks. As the SCMP’s second-in-command, he is in charge of the China and US bureaus as well as the political economy, culture, print and digital teams. He also assembled an award-winning infographics desk and spearheaded the redesign of the newspaper. To strengthen the paper’s international coverage, he established the SCMP’s U.S. operations in 2017 with bureaus in New York and Washington, and subsequently set up offices in Brussels and Nairobi. He has been directing the SCMP’s China coverage since 2007 to build the newspaper into one of the most important sources of information on China for global readers.

Neil Thomas is a Fellow on Chinese Politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, where he studies elite politics, political economy, and foreign policy. Previously, he was a Senior Analyst for China and Northeast Asia at Eurasia Group, a world leading political risk advisory and consulting firm, a Senior Research Associate at MacroPolo, the in-house think tank of the Paulson Institute, and a lecturer at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. He has testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and his writing appears in publications including the China Story, ChinaFile, Foreign Policy, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Lowy Interpreter, the Washington Post, and the Wire China. He is regularly quoted by major media outlets such as Bloomberg, CNN, Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He holds a Master in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Western Australia, and certificates from Renmin University, Tsinghua University, and Zhejiang University.

Lizzi C. Lee is a Fellow on Chinese Economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Ms. Lee is an economist turned journalist. She graduated from MIT’s Ph.D. program in Economics before joining the New York-based independent Chinese media outlet Wall St TV. She was also the host of "The Signal Live with Lizzi Lee" powered by The China Project, where she interviewed the most knowledgeable minds on China for analysis of the ever-evolving business and technology ecosystem.