Book Talk - Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise

Susan Shirk, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration, discussed her new book, Overreach, and its implications for China's 20th Party, cross-strait relations, and China's relations with the West. Lynette Ong provided commentaries and moderated the discussion.  

 

ABOUT THE BOOK:  

 

For decades, China's rise to power was characterized by its reassurance that this rise would be peaceful. Then, as Susan L. Shirk, shows in this sobering, clear-eyed account of China today, something changed.  For three decades after Mao's death in 1976, China's leaders adopted a restrained approach to foreign policy. They determined that any threat to their power, and that of the Chinese Communist Party, came not from abroad but from within—a conclusion cemented by the 1989 Tiananmen crisis. To facilitate the country's inexorable economic ascendence, and to prevent a backlash, they reassured the outside world of China's peaceful intentions.  Then, as Susan Shirk shows in this illuminating, disturbing, and utterly persuasive new book, something changed. China went from fragile superpower to global heavyweight, threatening Taiwan as well as its neighbors in the South China Sea, tightening its grip on Hong Kong, and openly challenging the United States for preeminence not just economically and technologically but militarily. China began to overreach. Combining her decades of research and experience, Shirk, one of the world's most respected experts on Chinese politics, argues that we are now fully embroiled in a new cold war.  

 

BIOS:  

 

SUSAN SHIRK is Research Professor and Chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego. She is one of the most influential experts working on U.S.-China relations and Chinese politics. She is also director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) and the author of Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise (Oxford University Press, 2022).  Dr. Shirk first visited China in 1971 and has been teaching, researching and engaging China diplomatically ever since. From 1997-2000, Dr. Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia.    

 

LYNETTE H. ONG is Professor of Political Science at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, the University of Toronto. She is the author of Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China (Oxford University Press, 2022), The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts (Cambridge University Press, Elements Series in Contentious Politics, 2022), and Prosper or Perish: Credit and Fiscal Systems in Rural China (Cornell University Press, 2012). Her publications have also appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, Foreign Affairs, among other outlets. Twitter: @onglynette.