The Hoover Institution Program on the US, China, and the World invites you to How Beijing Governs its Global Diaspora: Consent & Coercion on Friday, January 24, 2025 from 4:00 – 5:00 PM PT.
How does the world’s most powerful authoritarian state govern vast and diverse diaspora communities? Deftly managing internal and external threats has always been central to maintaining the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China. Yet in no other era has governing overseas populations been as crucial to China as under Xi Jinping (2012-2022). Xi’s administration is characterized by “overreach” in multiple spheres (Shirk 2022). One particular area of overreach in the Xi era is the use of coercive power in the form of transnational repression—the harassment, surveillance, and extradition or abduction of diaspora members who the party-state views as threats. How does global China as a power project manifest itself in governing the diaspora abroad? How and why has China’s use of coercive power abroad—in particular, transnational repression—increased under Xi? How has the party-state wielded coercive power alongside a wider toolkit of control against diaspora populations outside of its borders? And what makes China’s playbook of control distinctive compared to other authoritarian and illiberal states? In this event, Diana Fu will offer a comparative analysis of what, if anything, distinguishes the Chinese party-state’s governance of diaspora members from other regimes.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Diana Fu is associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research examines popular contention, repression, civil society, and authoritarian citizenship in contemporary China. She is currently co-authoring a second book examining how the Chinese state governs the global diaspora (under contract, Cambridge). She is the author of “Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China” (Cambridge, 2018), which won best book awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the International Studies Association. Her research and commentary have appeared on the BBC, Bloomberg, CBC, CNN, NPR, the Economist, and The New York Times, among others. She was host of the TVO documentary series “China Here and Now” and of POLITICO China Watcher. Prof. Fu received her doctorate in Politics from Oxford University, where she studied as a Canadian Rhodes Scholar. She regularly gives public lectures and participates in track 1.5 dialogues and is a public intellectual fellow with the National Committee on US-China Relations.
Glenn Tiffert is a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a historian of modern China. He co-chairs Hoover’s program on the US, China, and the World, and also leads Stanford’s participation in the National Science Foundation’s SECURE program, a $67 million effort authorized by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 to enhance the security and integrity of the US research enterprise. He works extensively on the security and integrity of ecosystems of knowledge, particularly academic, corporate, and government research; science and technology policy; and malign foreign interference.
