NCUSCR Events

In his keynote speech at the U.S. Foreign Policy Colloquium on May 30, 2019, Ambassador Thomas Pickering explains the shift towards multi-polarity in the current world order and highlights seven key issues, from growth and development to weapons of mass destruction, confronting U.S. foreign policy. He discusses how some of these issues can be potential areas for collaboration between the U.S. and China, including climate change and cyberspace.

The annual U.S. Foreign Policy Colloquium (FPC) is an exclusive four-day program designed to provide 75 Chinese graduate students from universities across the United States with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the complex forces that shape American foreign policy and inform the U.S.-China relationship. The program is run annually by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and gives participants rare access into some of the capital's most important foreign policy-making institutions, such as the Department of State and the National Security Council, where they meet with individuals responsible for crafting and influencing policy.

Ambassador Thomas Pickering is vice chair of Hills and Company, an international consulting firm providing advice to U.S. businesses on
investment, trade, and risk assessment issues abroad. Ambassador Pickering served as the U.S. ambassador and representative to the United Nations under President George H.W. Bush, where he led the U.S. effort to build a global coalition during and after the first Gulf War. He also served as the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs under President Bill Clinton.

Susan A. Thornton delivered the 2019 Barnett-Oksenberg Lecture on Sino-American Relations in Shanghai on Wednesday, May 15. Now in its twelfth year, this annual lecture affords the opportunity for a frank and forthright discussion of current and potential issues between the two countries; it is the first and only ongoing lecture series on U.S.-China relations that takes place on the Mainland.

Susan A. Thornton is a retired senior U.S. diplomat with almost 30 years of experience with the U.S. State Department in Eurasia and East Asia. She is currently a senior fellow and research scholar at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center.

Until July 2018, Thornton was acting assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of State and led East Asia policy making amid crises with North Korea, escalating trade tensions with China, and a fast-changing international environment. In previous State Department roles, she worked on China and Korea policy and served in leadership positions at U.S. embassies in Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus, and China. She speaks Russian and Mandarin Chinese.

View more information on the Barnett-Oksenberg Lecture here: https://ncuscr.news/barnett-oksenberg

The National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (NCUSCR) hosted a conversation with four former White House officials who have served under Republican and Democratic administrations as the senior director for Asian Affairs on the National Security Council (NSC) – Kenneth Lieberthal, Evan Medeiros, Douglas Paal, and Daniel Russel – and Susan Thornton, the former acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. NCUSCR Chair Carla Hills provided the introductions and President Stephen Orlins moderated. The discussion focused on how the two countries have moved from strategic cooperation to strategic competition, and what can be done to help ease bilateral tensions.

View speaker bios: https://www.ncuscr.org/event/2019-annual-members-program

As the twentieth century drew to a close, Hong Kong, recently transformed into a Special Administrative Region of the PRC, seemed a city totally unlike any of its neighbors. Many observers were surprised by how light a touch Beijing seemed to be exerting in the wake of the 1997 handover, and the striking contrast between what could be said, done, and published in Hong Kong, compared to mainland metropolitan cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. Since the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule in 2017, controls have tightened dramatically amid fears of tighter political censorship and enhanced self-censorship. However, with the anniversary of the June 4th Massacre approaching, Hong Kong is still the only place on PRC soil where it can be discussed and marked in public. In 2019, what was once a chasm between civic life in Hong Kong and cities such as Guangzhou and Beijing is rapidly closing.

What does the future hold for Hong Kong? Will it become just another Chinese city that makes up the Greater Bay Area? The speakers, who have been tracking issues relating to higher education, journalism, protest, and the arts, address Hong Kong's future under Chinese rule.

Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University. She is an historian of modern China, with a particular focus on the social and cultural history of the Mao period (1949-1976). Her first book, Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao’s China, appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is also co-editing a volume with Jennifer Altehenger of King’s College London on the material culture of the Mao period. Dr. Ho is currently at work on a new research project on Hong Kong and China, entitled Cross-Border Relations.

Louisa Lim is an award-winning journalist who grew up in Hong Kong and reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC. She is a senior lecturer in audiovisual journalism at the University of Melbourne, and is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Hong Kong. She also co-hosts The Little Red Podcast, a podcast about China beyond the Beijing beltway, which won the News & Current Affairs award at the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards. Her writing about Hong Kong has appeared in the anthology Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections from a Borrowed Place, as well as The New York Times and The New Yorker, and she is the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine. His most recent book is the third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2018), which he coauthored with Maura Cunningham. In addition to contributing to academic venues, he has written many reviews and commentaries for newspapers, magazines, and journals of opinion, including pieces on Hong Kong that have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, serves as an academic editor for the China Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is a former member of the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Recent policy changes and a deteriorating bilateral relationship have greatly impacted cross-border investment flows between the United States and China. Chinese FDI in the United States has dropped to the lowest level seen in seven years, and was even negative if divestitures are taken into account. American FDI in China has held up better, but recent Chinese liberalization has not yet sparked a big rush by U.S. companies. Two-way flows of venture capital, on the other hand, have reached new record levels in both directions.

At this release event for a new report detailing two-way investment flows between the United States and China, report authors Thilo Hanemann and Daniel Rosen, both of Rhodium Group, present their findings, followed by a discussion with Constance Hunter (KPMG), Stephen Orlins (NCUSCR), and Catherine Pan-Giordiano (Dorsey & Whitney LLP).

Learn more at https://ncuscr.news/inv19

Amid the ongoing trade tensions between the United States and China, David P. Willard, founder and CEO of 52 Capital Partners, explores the primary issues now affecting the U.S.-China economic relationship, including national security risks, heightened regulatory scrutiny, and legal barriers for cross-border mergers and acquisitions.

David P. Willard is the founder, chief executive officer & managing partner of 52 Capital Partners, LLC., responsible for all major aspects of the firm’s executive management, strategy, client development, investment process and thought leadership. Throughout his career, Mr. Willard has executed and participated in major M&A transactions and other corporate matters at firms in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, closing 53 transactions totaling over $150 billion in aggregate value.

A recognized expert on China, Mr. Willard speaks regularly on U.S.-China mergers and acquisitions, as well as other investment topics. He received his B.A. in East Asian Studies from Princeton, and his J.D. from the New York University School of Law. Mr. Willard is a member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations.

In a new book, NCUSCR Vice Chair Nicholas R. Lardy of the Peterson Institute for International Economics draws upon new data to trace how Chinese President Xi Jinping's support of state-owned enterprises has begun to diminish the role of the market and private firms in China's economy. Dr. Lardy argues that China has the potential to match growth rates from previous decades, but only if it returns to a path of market-oriented reforms. At a National Committee corporate member luncheon on March 8, 2019, Dr. Lardy discussed the impact of revived state control over China's economy, and prospects for future growth.

Nicholas R. Lardy is the Anthony M. Solomon Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He joined the Institute in March 2003 from the Brookings Institution, where he was a senior fellow from 1995 until 2003. Before Brookings, he served at the University of Washington, where he was the director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies from 1991 to 1995. From 1997 through the spring of 2000, he was also the Frederick Frank Adjunct Professor of International Trade and Finance at the Yale University School of Management. He is an expert on the Chinese economy.

Dr. Lardy's most recent books are The State Strikes Back: The End of Economic Reform in China? (2019), Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private Business in China (2014), Sustaining China's Economic Growth after the Global Financial Crisis (2012), The Future of China's Exchange Rate Policy (2009), and China's Rise: Challenges and Opportunities (2008). In 2006, he contributed chapters on China's domestic economy and China in the world economy to China: The Balance Sheet (Public Affairs, 2006). In 2004, he coauthored Prospects for a US-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement with NCUSCR director Daniel Rosen. His previous book, Integrating China into the Global Economy, published in January 2002, explores whether reforms of China's economy and its foreign trade and exchange rate systems following China's WTO entry will integrate it much more deeply into the world economy.

Dr. Lardy is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the editorial boards of Asia Policy and the China Review.

He received his BA from the University of Wisconsin and his PhD from the University of Michigan, both in economics.

As the chaos of the Cultural Revolution engulfed China, Weijian Shan, age 15, endured years of manual labor in the remote Gobi Desert. Passionate about his education, Shan lost a decade of schooling. Yet, as he describes in his remarkable new autobiography, Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America, he never gave up on studying.

Having only completed elementary school, Dr. Shan attended prestigious academic institutions in the United States beginning in the early 1980’s. Dr. Shan shared his amazing story with the National Committee on January 28. 

Dr. Weijian Shan is chairman and CEO of PAG, one of the largest private equity firms in Asia. Before joining PAG, he was a partner of TPG, a private equity firm based in San Francisco, and co-managing partner of TPG Asia (formerly known as Newbridge Capital). At TPG, Dr. Shan led a number of landmark transactions including the acquisitions of Korea First Bank and China’s Shenzhen Development Bank, both of which made his investors billions of dollars in profits and were made into case studies of Harvard Business School. Previously, Dr. Shan was a managing director of JP Morgan, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and laborer in Inner Mongolia.

Despite not attending secondary school, Dr. Shan received an M.A. and Ph.D., both in economics, from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.B.A. from the Univer­sity of San Francisco. He studied English at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Trade (now the Beijing University of International Business and Economics), where he also taught.

The United States and China appear to be moving in opposite directions in their approaches to climate change with the United States withdrawing from the Paris Agreement while China vows to make itself a global leader in new, green technology. In a new book, Titans of the Climate: Explaining Policy Process in the United States and China, climate policy experts Kelly Sims Gallagher and Xiaowei Xuan examine the structural differences in how the two countries approach climate policy, and outline the political and economic challenges that prompt, or restrict, environmental cooperation.

On January 24, Kelly Sims Gallagher discussed her new book, and offered her analysis of the future of climate and environmental policy in the two largest carbon emitters. 

Kelly Sims Gallagher is professor of energy and environmental policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy where she is also the director of the Climate Policy Lab and the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy. From June 2014 to September 2015, she served in the Obama Administration as a senior policy advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and as senior China advisor in the Special Envoy for Climate Change office at the U.S. State Department. Dr. Gallagher is a member of the board of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. She is also a faculty affiliate with the Harvard University Center for the Environment, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the executive committee of the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and serves on the board of the Energy Foundation.

An expert panel discusses the shift in Chinese economic policy toward economic stabilization, as the Central Economic Work Conference pledged to develop a stronger home market to offset external uncertainties. Will China keep following the path of “reform and opening”? How will the Chinese leadership stabilize economic, finance, trade, investment, employment, and market expectations? Recorded at the annual Forecast of China’s Economy for 2019, hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research, at the Citigroup Center on January 10, 2019.

Panelists:

Daniel H. Rosen, Founding Partner and China Practice Leader, Rhodium Group

Huang Haizhou, Managing Director, China International Capital Corporation (CICC)

Huang Yiping, Professor and Deputy Dean, National School of Development, Peking University

Liang Hong, Chief Economist, CICC

Xu Gao, Chief Economist, China Everbright Investment and Assets Management Co., Ltd.

Moderator: Stephen A. Orlins, President, NCUSCR