If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it is that the world is bound together by shared challenges—and that at the center of those challenges stands China. China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology Are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future (Oxford UP, 2022) re-envisions China’s role in the world in terms of sustainability and technology. The danger is that China’s next act will drive divergence on the rules and standards the world desperately needs in the decades ahead. This book helps foreign countries, companies, and other organizations prepare for a future shaped by sustainability, technology—and a dramatic new chapter for China and our world.

Sample takeaways:

China-linked political + economic risk isn’t going away and will get worse. No-regrets supply chain diversification will only make more sense over time.
Environmental sustainability will become a bigger and bigger priority in the China market because of growing regulatory + consumer pressure. This is both in direct operations & larger supply chains.
Data privacy, security, and surveillance will pose growing dilemmas for multi-national companies. Data governance is becoming more fragmented, and compliance and cross-border transfer more difficult. Firms need to prepare for “data de-globalization.”
China is becoming a more isolated, but still large & important, innovation ecosystem. How to access & leverage this ecosystem, and the talent within it, will become a bigger challenge as China-global research collaborations, student flows, etc. shrink.
China’s frothy biotech sector is cooling, but will still be a major growth driver in the years ahead. And developments in biotech will disrupt and reshape many sectors and industries via biometrics, biomaterials, etc.

Dr. Scott Moore is an acclaimed authority on China, sustainability, and technology whose career has spanned the U.S. government, multi-lateral institutions, and academia. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Director of China Programs and Strategic Initiatives. Before returning to academia, Dr. Moore worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change at the U.S. Department of State and at the World Bank. He graduated from Princeton University and received his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dong Wang is collection editor of Asian Studies books at Lived Places Publishing (New York & the UK), H-Diplo review editor, director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History (Germany & USA), research associate at Harvard Fairbank Center (since 2002), distinguished professor of history at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

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Michael Köllner