Abstract

With the future of the U.S.-led international order in question, how will China use its growing power and influence to reshape world politics? Weiss argues that domestic political imperatives have structured Chinese interests and foreign policy behavior, reflecting a defensive effort to ensure the Chinese Communist Party’s continued rule. Drawing on her recent article in Foreign Affairs and a book-length project on China’s rise, autocracy, and the shape of international order, Weiss develops a theoretical framework to explain China’s international contributions and the domestic drivers of those efforts, with illustrations from a range of issue areas, including cyber sovereignty and digital authoritarianism, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and climate change.

Bio

Jessica Chen Weiss is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University. She is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her work appears in International Organization, China Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and Review of International Political Economy. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2008, where her dissertation won the 2009 American Political Science Association Award for best dissertation in international relations, law and politics. Before joining Cornell, she was an assistant professor at Yale University and founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford, while an undergraduate at Stanford. Weiss is an editor at the Washington Post Monkey Cage and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.