Shanghai’s Lockdown

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Kenton Thibaut, Guobin Yang & more on April 29, 2022

In late March, China started its largest lockdown in more than two years, with most of Shanghai’s 26 million residents confined to their homes in an effort to battle the rapid spread of Omicron. As of mid-April, 45 cities across the country were under some kind of lockdown. Though China’s overall vaccination rate is around 88 percent, just 80 percent of those over 60 had been fully vaccinated as of early April. It is clear the hard lockdowns have come with costs. In megacities like Shanghai, they have underscored vast inequality and the unequal distribution of government services—particularly for migrant workers. How sustainable are current government approaches to the latest wave of infections, and where are they likely to lead?

Mattie Bekink

on April 27, 2022

Mattie Bekink is the China Director for the Economist Intelligence Corporate Network at The Economist Group. She is responsible for the Economist Intelligence Corporate Network’s China strategy, including program development and client engagement across China. Bekink has extensive experience in the public, private, and policy sectors. Prior to joining The Economist Group, she was the Executive Director of the Fulbright Commission in the Netherlands. She also ran an eponymous consulting business, advising businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations on China policy, strategy, public affairs, and CSR. Bekink practiced law at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, has worked with the U.S.-Asia Law Initiative at New York University Law School and the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative China Program, and served in the legal department at General Motors China. She has a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.

Qin Chen

on April 27, 2022

Qin Chen is a writer and editor based in Shanghai. She focuses on China’s tech industry and related policies and is an observer of Chinese society. In her previous life, she was a Beijing-based reporter at Inkstone, a China-focused news site from The South China Morning Post, helping English readers make sense of the top news from the world’s second-largest economy.

Qin worked for five years in the news industry in the U.S. She was a video producer at The New Yorker, a documentary producer at CNBC, and a multimedia designer at the San Jose Mercury News.

Europe’s China Policy Has Taken a Sharp Turn. Where Will It Go Next?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Rogier Creemers, Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova & more on April 14, 2022

In their first such meeting in nearly two years, representatives of the European Union and Chinese government met on April 1 for a virtual summit. The conversations took place against the backdrop of not only unprecedented unity among the members of the 27-nation bloc in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also a renewed closeness with the U.S. Both factors, on top of several years of cooling relations between Europe and China aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic and Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, complicate Beijing’s use of the forum as a means for forging closer ties with Europe amid the deterioration of its relations with the U.S. China’s position on the war, its resistance to sanctioning Russia, as well as its recent trade actions against Lithuania did not appear to leave much room for the forging of common ground. And the summit ended with no deliverables and no joint statement.

Jacques deLisle

on April 14, 2022

Jacques deLisle is Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His writings, on China’s engagement with the international order, Chinese law, U.S.-China relations, and China-Taiwan and China-Hong Kong issues have appeared in Journal of Contemporary China, Asia Policy, Orbis, China Review, Administrative Law Review, and other journals and edited volumes. He is the co-editor of and a contributor to The Party Leads All: The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in China’s Politics, Governance, Society, Economy, and External Relations (Brookings Institution Press, 2022), After Engagement: Dilemmas in U.S.-China Security Relations (Brookings Institution Press, 2021), Taiwan in the Era of Tsai Ing-wen: Changes and Challenges (Routledge, 2021), To Get Rich is Glorious: Challenges Facing China’s Reform and Opening at Forty (Brookings Institution Press, 2019), China’s Challenges (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), and Political Changes in Taiwan under Ma Ying-jeou (Routledge, 2014).

Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova

on April 13, 2022

Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova is a political scientist, China scholar, head of the Political Science Ph.D. program and China Studies Centre at Riga Stradins University, head of the Asia program at the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, and a member of the China in Europe Research Network (CHERN) and the European Think Tank Network on China (ETNC). Since defending her doctoral dissertation on traditional Chinese discourse, she has held a Senior Visiting Research Scholar position at the Fudan University School of Philosophy, Shanghai, and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar position at the Center for East Asia Studies at Stanford University. Bērziņa-Čerenkova is a European China Policy Fellow at MERICS and an affiliate of the Lau Institute at King’s College, London.

Bērziņa-Čerenkova publishes on People’s Republic of China political discourse, contemporary Chinese ideology, EU-China relations, Russia-China, and BRI. Her most recent monograph is “Perfect Imbalance: China and Russia” (World Scientific, 2022).

Frans-Paul van der Putten

on April 13, 2022

Frans-Paul van der Putten is a researcher and consultant on China and its role in global geopolitics, and the founder of ChinaGeopolitics. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the Clingendael Institute, where he previously was the coordinator of the Clingendael China Centre (2019-2022). Van der Putten studied history at Leiden University, where he specialized in the history of European imperialism in East Asia. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on political risk and business strategies in early 20th-century China. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions. Prior to working for Clingendael (2007-2022), he worked as a researcher at Nyenrode Business University (2001-2006).

Richard Q. Turcsanyi

on April 12, 2022

Richard Q. Turcsanyi is a Program Director at the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS), Senior Researcher at Palacky University Olomouc, and Assistant Professor at Mendel University in Brno. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations and further degrees in Economy and Political Science. He conducted long-term research stays at the University of Toronto, Peking University, National Chengchi University in Taipei, and the European Institute for Asian Studies in Brussels. He is the author of Chinese Assertiveness in the South China Sea (Springer, 2018) and has published several academic articles and opinion pieces on Chinese foreign policy and relations between China and (Central and Eastern) Europe. He is a member of various networks focusing on contemporary China and EU-China relations, including the Horizon project ReConnect China, European Think Tank Network on China (ETNC), the COST action China in Europe Research Network (CHERN), and Chinese Observers in Central and Eastern Europe (CHOICE). Most recently, he conducted surveys of public attitudes towards China in 56 countries worldwide as part of the Sinophone Borderlands project.

Miguel Otero-Iglesias

on April 12, 2022

Miguel Otero-Iglesias is Senior Analyst at Elcano Royal Institute and Professor in International Political Economy at the School of Global and Public Affairs at IE University. In addition, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the EU-Asia Institute at ESSCA School of Management in France. Over the past decade, he has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of World Economics and Politics (IWEP) at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in China and the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Germany, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an Adjunct Lecturer at University of Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. in International Political Economy from Oxford Brookes University and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Manchester.

His main areas of expertise are international and comparative political economy, international and European monetary affairs, the international financial architecture, global economic governance and the power triangle between the U.S., the EU, and China, and theories of money. He is the author of The Euro, the Dollar and the Global Financial Crisis: Currency Challenges seen from Emerging Markets: Currency Challenges Seen from Emerging Markets (New York, Routledge, 2015). He has published in the leading academic journals in his field such as Review of International Political Economy, The World Economy, Journal of Common Market Studies, and New Political Economy and has contributed as a columnist or expert for international media such as El País, The Financial Times, Libération, China Daily, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Reuters, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. He has offered policy advice to the Spanish Government, the OECD, and the European Commission. He is a co-founder and coordinator of the European Think Tank Network on China (ETNC).

Silvia Menegazzi

on April 12, 2022

Silvia Menegazzi is a political scientist and sinologist who works on Chinese foreign policy and public diplomacy. She is EAVI Fellow at the East Asia National Research Center at George Washington University and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, where she teaches International Relations and Chinese Studies.

Menegazzi lived in China for four years and has spent long periods of time in Chinese universities (Nankai University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Renmin University, East China Normal University). Her research interests cut across international politics and area studies with a focus on contemporary China, non-governmental actors, and international institutions. She is the author of Rethinking Think Tanks in Contemporary China (Palgrave, 2018). Menegazzi holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from La Sapienza University, an M.Sc. in International Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Luiss Guido Carli University.