GlobalFive Things to Know about China in the Era of Xi Jinping
Online via Zoom
This presentation will focus on placing major trends in today's People's Republic of China into comparative and historical perspective. Zeroing in on domestic issues ranging from censorship and Internet to protest and repression and international ones ranging from the Chinese diaspora to global images of Beijing's shifting place in the world order, the speaker will offer some basic information and also suggest the value of unexpected analogies in sharpening our understanding of the subjects at hand.
He will try to convince the audience of three things: there are surprising echoes of China's own past in some of the most seemingly novel developments of the Xi era; conversely, there are phenomena that Beijing would like to convince domestic and international audiences are age-old that are in fact of recent origins; and there are some aspects of today's China that tend to be thought of as unique that parallel things that are happening or have happened before in other parts of the world.
This program is part of China Center's "Considering China Webinar Series", exploring important topics related to China's many facets with the local community.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he serves as Director of the Humanities Honors Program and holds courtesy appointments in Law and in Literary Journalism. He often writes for both academic journalists and general interest periodicals, and his work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, TIME Magazine, the Atlantic, and the Times Literary Supplement. His most recent books are, as editor, The Oxford History of Modern China, which was published in 2022, and, as author, The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing, a short book that was published in 2025 in first in the United States in English language edition and then in Taiwan translated into Chinese, and Everything You Wanted to Know About China* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), a very short primer on the Xi era that has just come out in European and Asian markets and will be published in the future in a separate updated North American edition.