Political Thinkers In The Xi Jinping Era

Political Thinkers In The Xi Jinping Era

Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

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.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
David Ownby is professor of History at the Université de Montréal in Canada. He has worked on a variety of topics in Chinese history, including the history of secret societies, popular religion in modern and contemporary China, and currently contemporary Chinese establishment intellectuals. He directs the Reading the China Dream project, a website devoted to the world of establishment intellectual thought in contemporary China. 

ABOUT THE DISCUSSANT
Glenn Tiffert is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he manages its project on China’s Global Sharp Power. A historian of modern China, his research focuses on the PRC’s political and legal systems. He also works closely with government and civil society partners in the United States and elsewhere around the world to document and build resilience against authoritarian interference with democratic institutions. He currently serves on the executive committee of the Academic Security and Counter-Exploitation Program, an association of US universities established to help heighten security awareness in academia.