Tiananmen At 35
June 4, 2024 marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the violent, military suppression of peaceful, student-led protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere across the People’s Republic of China. To commemorate this occasion, Rowena He, a historian of social movements in China, and Perry Link, the biographer of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, joined Hoover William L. Clayton Senior Fellow Larry Diamond to reflect on the history and impact of June 4th, 1989 and the broader struggle for freedom and democracy in greater China.
Feminism In China After 2013: Social Movements, Media, And The State
Speaker Li Sipan, a participant in and chronicler of post-reform era feminist movements in China, analyzed the relationship between the state, the media, and movements, and compares the strategies and efficacy of Chinese feminist activism under shifting political opportunity structures.
Hong Kong After The National Security Law
This event presented perspectives on the current political and civic climate in Hong Kong since the passage of the National Security Law on June 30, 2020 and the imposition of Article 23 on March 23, 2024. How have these developments fit into the broader history of the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong? What has changed in Hong Kong’s once vibrant civil society? What is the latest on the trials of pro-democracy activists? How have diasporic advocates constructed a Hong Kong political identity in exile?
What China Remembers About The Cultural Revolution, And What It Wants To Forget
The devastating movement unleashed by Mao in 1966, which claimed around two million lives and saw tens of millions hounded, shapes China to this day. Yet in a country where leaders have long seen history as a political tool, the Cultural Revolution is a particularly sensitive subject. How does the Chinese Communist Party control discussion of the topic? And how has an era which turned the nation upside down been used to maintain the political status quo?
How Does China Spy On Its People?
Contrary to the widespread perception that advanced technology enables the Chinese state to maintain full-spectrum surveillance of its people, evidence collected from local yearbooks shows that the backbone of China's surveillance state consists of close bureaucratic coordination among security agencies, an extensive network of informants and labor-intensive surveillance tactics. This system is made possible and run effectively by the party's Leninist organizational structure. The hi-tech surveillance apparatus, which China began to construct in the late 1990s and did not become fully operational until probably around 2010, has given the ruling Communist Party a complementary, but not substitutive, tool.
Sparks: China's Underground Historians And Their Battle For The Future
Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future describes how some of China's best-known writers, filmmakers, and artists have overcome crackdowns and censorship to forge a nationwide movement that challenges the Communist Party on its most hallowed ground: its control of history. The past is a battleground in many countries, but in China it is crucial to political power. In traditional China, dynasties rewrote history to justify their rule by proving that their predecessors were unworthy of holding power. Marxism gave this a modern gloss, describing history as an unstoppable force heading toward Communism's triumph.
Industrial Policy Uncertainty In China
Will China maintain its comparative advantage in industrial policy? State-led investment boosts competitiveness today, but the long-run sustainability of this model depends crucially on policy efficiency. In this talk, Andrew Sinclair presented his work using a comprehensive dataset of all industrial policy announcements by China's State Council from 2008 to 2022 to find that policy uncertainty introduces a shadow financial cost that substantially reduces the efficiency of Chinese industrial policy. Industrial policies increase firm value, but investors heavily discount the value of future support because of the risk that policies may abruptly and arbitrarily change.
Accidental Holy Land: Biography Of A Book
Yan’an is now revered as China’s “revolutionary holy land.” From 1937 to 1947, including the entire War of Resistance to Japan, it was the refuge for Mao Zedong and the Communist Center at the end of the Long March, and also for Xi Zhongxun, the father of Xi Jinping, the current president of China and the first “princeling” to hold that post. Mao arrived there only by accident: learning of the Communist movement there from a newspaper, after deciding to seek military assistance on the Soviet border. This talk is based on a recently published book on the northern Shaanxi revolution, the product of thirty years of archival and documentary research and numerous fieldwork trips to the region.
Memory As Resistance: From Tiananmen To Hong Kong
This talk is grounded in two decades of fieldwork on the preservation of historical memory tabooed by the CCP regime. Drawing on contextualized personal accounts, Rowena He will illuminate the unequal contest between state-imposed interpretations of history and independent scholarship on China’s forbidden past, and their implications for nationalism, democratization, and the field of China studies. Highlighting her extensive interactions with local and mainland Chinese students during Hong Kong’s unprecedented social movement, she illustrates how memory becomes a form of resistance that embodies citizen autonomy and agency. The power of the powerless.
Xi Jinping’s Power Concentration And Foreign Policy Implications After The 20th Party Congress
General Secretary Xi Jinping further consolidated his power into an all-powerful empire at the CCP 20th National Congress. How has the leadership lineup changed CCP elite politics? How has Xi reached this point of power? What are the foreign policy implications of Xi’s power concentration? Suisheng Zhao will explore these questions in a talk based on his new book, The Dragon Roars back: Transformational Leaders and Dynamics of Chinese Foreign Policy, which argues that the unique visions and political wisdom of transformational leaders have been game-changers in Chinese foreign policy.
What Are Xi Jinping’s Global Ambitions for China?
with Elizabeth Economy
Hoover senior fellow Elizabeth Economy provides her perspective on Xi Jinping’s global ambitions and how likely he is to succeed in reaching them.
China's Leaders: From Mao To Now
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China over 70 years ago, five paramount leaders have shaped the fates and fortunes of the nation and the ruling Chinese Communist Party: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Drawing on his recent book, China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now, in this lecture Professor David Shambaugh will explore the differing backgrounds, contrasting leadership styles, and impact of each paramount leader.
Credible, Lovable, and Respectable
interview with Elizabeth Economy
Hoover fellow Elizabeth Economy appraises China’s performance as a star player on the world stage. Beijing, she concludes in her new book, The World According to China, is still struggling to master the role.
Cadre Country: How China Became The Chinese Communist Party
China’s communist party regards itself as engaged in a global information war. In his new book, Cadre Country, historian John Fitzgerald probes some of the key stories the party tells to advance its cause. In this talk, he focuses on one story that resonates in China and internationally, China’s ‘Century of Humiliation.’ Where does this term come from, when it is deployed, and why?
Mafia-Like Business Systems In China: Xi’s Crackdown In Context
The Hoover Institution hosts Mafia-Like Business Systems in China: Xi’s Crackdown in Context on Tuesday, December 7, 2021.
Read the paper, The Emergence of Mafia-like Business Systems in China, by Meg Rithmire and Hao Chen.
Shifts in Chinese Domestic and Foreign Policy
with Elizabeth Economy
Elizabeth Economy explains how China’s shift toward repressive authoritarianism has triggered a rethink and reset of US foreign policy.
Xi Jinping Makes History: Perspectives On The CCP's 6th Plenum
Leading experts unpack the significance of the 6th Plenum (2021) of the Chinese Communist Party's 19th Congress and what lies ahead for Xi Jinping and China.
The China Model: Not One to Emulate
with Elizabeth Economy
Though the Chinese model of governance is appealing to many authoritarian leaders, its absence of democratic norms and institutions encourages corruption and constrains healthy economic growth.
The China Challenge
interview with Elizabeth Economy
Hoover fellow Elizabeth Economy and her colleagues seek to deepen our understanding of Chinese ambitions.
Political Thinkers In The Xi Jinping Era
China’s establishment intellectuals are not widely known beyond its borders. These professors, journalists, writers, and artists try to shape public debate and state policy and more or less play by the Chinese Communist Party’s rules while not acting as spokespeople for it. Ownby will describe the evolution of their “thought world,” which has adapted to Xi Jinping’s tighter strictures, and introduce a number of its key thinkers and themes.
China’s Communist Party-State Under Xi Jinping
interview with Elizabeth Economy
Hoover senior fellow, Elizabeth Economy discusses the structure of the Chinese party-state, and Xi Jinping's populist appeal.
The End Of "One Country, Two Systems" And The Future Of Freedom In Hong Kong
The Hoover Project on China’s Global Sharp Power held an event on The End of "One Country, Two Systems" and The Future of Freedom in Hong Kong with Victoria Tin-bor Hu, University of Notre Dame, and Nathan Law, Democracy Activist.
How Racist Rhetoric Increases Chinese Overseas Students' Support For Authoritarian Rule
The cross-border flow of people for educational exchange in Western democracies is seen as a way to transfer democratic values to non-democratic regions of the world. What happens when students studying in the West encounter racism? Based on an experiment among hundreds of Chinese first-year undergraduates in the United States, we show that seeing racist, anti-Chinese rhetoric interferes with the transfer of democratic values. Chinese students who study in the United States are more predisposed to favor liberal democracy than their peers in China. However, anti-Chinese racism significantly reduces their belief that political reform is desirable for China and increases their support for authoritarian rule.
China, Hong Kong, And The Future Of Freedom: A Dialogue Between Director Condoleezza Rice And Lord Chris Patten
Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice and Lord Chris Patten engage in a wide-ranging discussion about China's deepening authoritarianism, its escalating assault on Hong Kong's freedom and way of life, and the challenge that China's intensifying assertion of "sharp power" poses to democracies worldwide.
