Technology and Innovation in an Era of U.S.-China Strategic Competition

A China in the World Podcast

By Paul Haenle & Elsa Kania on August 28, 2018

China has taken significant steps to implement national strategies and encourage investment in order to surpass the U.S. in high tech fields like artificial intelligence. In this podcast, Paul Haenle sat down with Elsa Kania, adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former Carnegie-Tsinghua Young Ambassador, to discuss the impacts of increasing competition in technology development and innovation on the U.S.-China relationship and the consequences for future cooperation in these fields.

Caitlin E. Schultz

on August 27, 2018

Caitlin E. Schultz is a lawyer and China researcher. She held the 2017 Robert L. Bernstein Fellowship from New York University School of Law, where she earned an L.L.M. in International Legal Studies and was a student scholar at the NYU U.S.-Asia Law Institute. An NGO law fellow at Zhicheng Public Interest Lawyers in Beijing, she has taught on comparative law of nonprofit organizations at the China University of Political Science and Law. Her interest in China began as an undergraduate journalism student at Lanzhou University in 2008-2009.

Beijing’s Bid for Global Power in the Age of Trump

By Alfred W. McCoy on August 27, 2018

As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, so the empowered presidents of the United States and China are now pursuing bold, intensely personal visions of new global orders that could potentially reshape the trajectory of the 21st century—or bring it all down.

Martin Thorley

on August 23, 2018

Martin Thorley is a PhD candidate at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. He is also an Editorial Assistant for China submissions at the university’s Asia Research Institute. Martin explores international interactions with the Chinese Party-state, focusing predominantly on Sino-British relations at present. His research employs elite theory to consider the strategies and rationales of the actors of various nations and regions engaging with China. He also applies elite theory to Chinese Party-state efforts to project influence abroad. 

Prior to academia in the UK, Martin studied at Tianjin University before establishing a recruitment group in Beijing. The company assisted Chinese and China-based groups to recruit experts from outside China. This position led to interaction with a range of Chinese officials and industry leaders.

We Need to Be Careful about How We Use the Word ‘Chinese’

By Martin Thorley on August 23, 2018

In recent years, the growing reach of the Chinese Communist Party’s (C.C.P.’s) political influence abroad has prompted numerous countries to reappraise their engagement with China. Optimism about Chinese convergence with international norms has been replaced with concerns over C.C.P. influence strategies in the wider world. As the pendulum swings from naivety to vigilance, dangers abound, not least to overseas Chinese communities. In some cases, these communities face both suspicion in their own countries and pressure from Beijing to present an image of China that accords with the C.C.P. narrative. Observers of China need to be much more careful when discussing the influence tactics of the Chinese Party-state in order not to implicate vast swathes of people identified in various ways under the umbrella term “Chinese.” We ought to pay greater attention to the difference between “official” China and “unofficial” China—that is, between the position of the state on the one hand and the often obscured lived experience of Chinese people in the private realm and in the diminishing space beyond officialdom’s grasp.

What Satellite Images Can Show Us about ‘Re-education’ Camps in Xinjiang

A Q&A with Shawn Zhang

By Jessica Batke on August 23, 2018

Claims that “re-education” camps are merely vocational training centers seem even less credible after one looks at the work of Shawn Zhang. A law student focusing on jurisprudence at the University of British Columbia in Canada, in May Zhang began scouring Google Earth for evidence of detentions in Xinjiang—matching up the addresses he found in documents related to the camps that he found online with satellite images; learning to recognize the distinguishing characteristics of camps, both in written materials and in images so that he could confidently identify them even in cases where details were scant. His collection of satellite images is a key and oft-cited piece of evidence of the camps’ existence, laying bare the hard physical contours of a campaign of ethnic and religious repression. Zhang, a Chinese citizen, continues to do this research despite the fact that the Chinese police have previously pressured his family related to other content he has posted online.

Chi Yin

on August 23, 2018

Chi Yin is a research scholar at New York University Law School’s US-Asia Law Institute. She joined the Institute in 2013, and her research currently focuses on China’s recently revised Criminal Procedure Law. Yin previously served as a judge in the Intermediate Court of the greater Chengdu Municipality. The cases she tried included both appellate and first-instance criminal trials of white collar, drug trafficking, and violent crimes. Other work in the court included managing projects related to internal court reform, and editing an internal law review. She left the court in 2008 and moved to the U.S., where she pursued public interest law, volunteering with Colorado Legal Services and then interning with China Labor Watch. She received an L.L.M. from NYU in 2013. She received an L.L.B and Master’s of Law from Sichuan University, and has been a member of the Chinese bar since 2004. She is also a member of the New York State Bar.

It’s Too Easy to Wind up in a Chinese Psychiatric Hospital, and Far Too Hard to Get Out

By Jerome A. Cohen & Chi Yin on August 23, 2018

Every day in China, hundreds of people are involuntarily confined in mental health facilities, some through their involvement in criminal cases, many more via the government’s civil commitment processes. Whether, how, and how long to detain the seriously mentally ill is, to be sure, a worldwide problem of increasing gravity. In China, where the government employs many types of detention, these issues have proved to be particularly troublesome.