On Wednesday, November 28, 2018, the Strauss Center is pleased to welcome Aaron Friedberg, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, for a talk on "China’s Authoritarian Challenge." This talk is part of the Strauss Center's Brumley Speaker Series.
China’s rise represents a challenge, and indeed a danger, to the United States and other democratic countries, not primarily because of its growing wealth and power, but because of the oppressive, authoritarian character of its domestic political regime. The nature of the Chinese Communist Party regime and its prevailing ideology shapes and is reflected in the perceptions of its leaders, the ways in which they define their goals and the policies through which they seek to attain them. Just as, at the start of the 20th century, American policymakers set out to “make the world safe for democracy” so, at the start of the 2st, Chinese leaders seek to make it safe for authoritarianism, or at least for continued CCP rule of China.
Aaron L. Friedberg is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1987, and co-director of the Woodrow Wilson School’s Center for International Security Studies. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a Senior Advisor to the National Bureau of Asian Research. Friedberg is the author of The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905 and In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-Statism and its Cold War Grand Strategy, both published by Princeton University Press, and co-editor (with Richard Ellings) of three volumes in the National Bureau of Asian Research's annual "Strategic Asia" series. His third book, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, was published in 2011 by W.W. Norton and has been translated into Japanese, Chinese and Korean. His most recent monograph, Beyond Air-Sea Battle: The Debate Over U.S. Military Strategy in Asia was published in May 2014 as part of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Adelphi Paper series. Friedberg’s articles and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Commentary, The National Interest, The American Interest, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, Survival, and International Security.