Pekingology

In this week's episode of Pekingology, Freeman Chair Jude Blanchette is joined by Andrew Polk of Trivium China and Barry Naughton, the So Kwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs at UC San Diego, to discuss Beijing's evolving theory and praxis towards managing its economic and financial systems. 

Meg Rithmire, a Harvard Business School professor specializing in China's state capitalism, delves into the complexities of this evolving model. She discusses the transformation of China's capital markets and the effects of historical events like the 2015 stock market crisis. Rithmire examines how state entities increasingly influence the private sector, raising questions about corporate governance. The conversation also addresses the balance between state control and innovation, and the implications for domestic and international security in a rapidly changing landscape.

In this episode of Pekingology, Jude Blanchette is joined by Yale University's Dan Mattingly to discuss his new working paper, "How the Party Commands the Gun: Coups, Revolts, and the Military in China." In it, Dan leverages a new dataset of over 10,000 appointments in the PLA to explore how Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, manage the possibility of coups through personnel appointments. 

How did communist ideology affect state-building efforts in the early PRC? How and why does the current CCP leadership view statistics through the lens of politics? In this episode, Freeman Chair Jude Blanchette is joined by Arunabh Ghosh, an associate professor of Modern Chinese History at Harvard University to discuss his new book, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People's Republic of China. 

In this episode of Pekingology, Jude Blanchette talks to Jörg Wuttke, the president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, to discuss the expanding power and influence of state-owned enterprises in China's economy.

What is the role of the quinquennial Party Congress? And why was the 19th Party Congress in 2017 so important to China's future economic, political, and military trajectory? In this episode, Jude Blanchette is joined by Dan Tobin, a member of the China studies faculty at the National Intelligence University, to explore the "watershed" of the 19th Party Congress. The opinions expressed in the podcast belong solely to the guest and do not in any way represent the views of the United States government.

Under the rule of Xi Jinping, the space for intellectual debate has shrunk dramatically, impacting both China's left and right. To explore the realities of intellectual discourse in contemporary China, Jude Blanchette is joined by veteran journalist Chris Buckley of the New York Times. 

Is China a developing country or a superpower? This question is at the heart of Pu Xiaoyu's 2019 book, Rebranding China: Contested Status Signaling in the Changing Global Order. In this episode, he joins Jude Blanchette to explore how China's "contradictory posturing" complicates interpretations of its foreign policy. 

What explains Beijing's extraordinary campaign of repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region? In this episode, Jude Blanchette is joined by political scientist Sheena Greitens to discuss her 2019 paper, "Counterterrorism and Preventive Repression: China's Changing Strategy in Xinjiang."

With the removal of the only term limit on office in March 2018, Xi Jinping stands to rule indefinitely. But what happens if he suddenly dies in office? How will China's political and economic system respond? In this episode, Jude Blanchette is joined by Michigan State University's Erica Frantz to discuss her co-authored paper, "When Dictators Die."