Vita Spivak is an analyst at Control Risks, a global consulting firm. Her research interests focus on the issues of the China-Russia relationship, China’s worldwide investment in the energy sector, and the anti-corruption campaign in the People’s Republic of China.
Guan Guihai is Executive Vice President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University.
Kate Magill is an editor at AmCham Shanghai and the host of the China Voices podcast.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, the term “military-civil fusion” (MCF) came to feature prominently in U.S. officials’ characterizations of their concerns about China. While efforts to integrate China’s civilian and defense economies have been a goal of China’s leaders for decades, Xi Jinping has elevated MCF as a priority and has expanded, intensified, and accelerated the effort across multiple domains, including to concentrate on more integrated development of emerging technologies. This strategy is regarded as critical to China’s capacity to succeed in a confrontation of systems.
They met at a crossroads in October 2019. That day, Hong Kong’s people came out in their tens of thousands, to protest the proposed Extradition Bill, which would allow the territory to detain and transfer citizens to mainland China. Hoikei was there in the city’s southern Kowloon district of Yau Ma Tei by herself (she asked me to use a pseudonym to protect her from possible arrest or other official reprisal). A petite figure in a black T-shirt and balaclava, she was carrying an umbrella—not for rain, but to shield her face from surveillance cameras. This was the protesters’ uniform.
Lorand Laskai is a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. He recently co-edited “Measure Twice, Cut One,” a series of reports on the prospect of U.S.-China decoupling for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Laskai has written extensively on China, technology, and national security for publications including Foreign Affairs and Slate and he has testified before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He previously worked at the Council on Foreign Relations and at the Financial Times in Beijing. He holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College.
William Nee is the Research and Advocacy Coordinator at Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), where he carries out research regarding a wide array of human rights concerns impacting human rights defenders in China. Previously, Nee worked as a Business and Human Rights Analyst and China Researcher at Amnesty International, where he researched human rights abuses caused by multinational companies and focused on freedom of expression, censorship, criminal justice developments, and the death penalty in China. Before that, he was Development Director at China Labour Bulletin. Nee’s commentary has appeared in The Diplomat, Hong Kong Free Press, and Open Democracy.
Xu Zhangrun, perhaps China’s most famous dissident legal scholar, released a letter addressed not only to China’s censors but also to the editors and publishers with whom he had worked for decades. That essay, translated below, is Letter Eight in his ‘Ten Letters from a Year of Plague,’ a collection that, read as a whole, is an account of the persecution he has suffered since he published a fierce point-by-point appraisal of the Xi Jinping era and warned of the calamities that lay ahead. The letters also comprise an agonized farewell both to his former life and to China’s short-lived era of progressive reform.
Peter Wood is a Program Manager at BluePath Labs, a Washington, D.C.-based consulting company. Wood specializes in analysis of the Chinese military and science and technology ecosystem. He is the author of, most recently, “China’s Ballistic Missile Industry” and “China’s Military-Civil Fusion Strategy” with Alex Stone. He has worked in a number of consulting and think tank roles, including as Editor of China Brief at the Jamestown Foundation. He received an M.A. from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and is proficient in Chinese.
