Julian B. Gewirtz

on April 10, 2015

Julian Gewirtz is an Academy Scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is the author of Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China(Harvard University Press, 2017) and a new book on the tumult and legacies of the 1980s in China (Harvard University Press, 2021).

He previously worked in the Obama Administration, most recently as special advisor for international affairs to the Deputy Secretary of Energy, and was a Fellow in History and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His writing on Asia is published in Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Harper’s, the Journal of Asian Studies, The New York Times, Past & Present, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Gewirtz received his Doctorate in modern Chinese history in 2018 from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his undergraduate degree in 2013 from Harvard College.

Chinese Dreams and the African Renaissance

A China in Africa Podcast

By Eric Olander, Cobus van Staden & more on April 10, 2015

Leaders in both China and Africa have articulated new visions for their respective regions that project a strong sense of confidence, renewal, and a break from once-dominant Western ideologies. In both cases, argues East is Read blogger Mothusi Turner, Chinese and Africans are using these new slogans to define themselves as something other than victims of their colonial pasts.

Stroller Factory, 1999

By Willem Wernsen on April 10, 2015

In 1999, photographer Willem Wernsen spent ten days in the small city of Kengzi, in Guangdong province, about 30 miles northeast of Shenzhen in an industrial zone. This was part of a longer, five-week trip, Wernsen’s first to the People’s Republic. While in Kengzi, his interpreter brought him to a factory that made strollers. The designs and product orders came from AOK, a company in his native Holland. The factory was managed by a firm from Taiwan.

Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema, 1951-1979

By Zhuoyi Wang on April 9, 2015

A comprehensive history of how the conflicts and balances of power in the Maoist revolutionary campaigns from 1951 to 1979 complicated and diversified the meanings of films, this book offers a discursive study of the development of early PRC cinema. Wang closely investigates how film artists, Communist Party authorities, cultural bureaucrats, critics, and audiences negotiated, competed, and struggled with each other for the power to decide how to use films and how their extensively different, agonistic, and antagonistic power strategies created an ever-changing discursive network of meaning in cinema. —Palgrave Macmillan

Book Review: 

Chris Berry, Viewfinder (October 2014)

Power Play: China’s Ultra High Voltage Technology and Global Standards

on April 9, 2015

As a matter of government policy and corporate strategy, China has been intensifying its effort to set indigenous standards for homegrown ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission technology. The country also aims to contribute to UHV standards internationally. Indeed, this process of standard setting, influenced by both economics and politics, will have ramifications far beyond China’s borders. The potential internationalization of China’s domestic UHV standards will almost certainly affect the global market share for both Chinese manufacturers and dominant multinational companies.This paper explores China’s UHV standardization process and the myriad challenges it faces, from a technical, economic, and political standpoint. But beyond simply detailing China’s strategy in pushing out its own UHV technology to the domestic and international markets, the paper discusses how China’s ambition for its indigenous technology could ultimately pose a considerable challenge to global competitors who hope to sell comparable products. The paper concludes by outlining several potential scenarios for how China’s UHV standardization process, and its relationship to global standard setting, may ultimately evolve.

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Business
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Trade
Energy
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Paulson Institute