How Does Beijing Make and Change Policies?

 

How does Beijing make and change policies? Do authoritarian governments truly make public policy and how is it the process distinctive? This panel of preeminent China experts reflected on the opaque process of how decisions get made and overturned.  From economic policy to health to tech & science, the panel aimed to decipher it all.

 

 

Anna Lisa Ahlers is the founder and head of the Lise Meitner Research Group at the MPIWG which explores the many facets of China’s rapid and extensive ascent in the global system of science. In her current research projects, she analyzes authoritarianism and democracy as environmental factors for science and academia, the evolution of science policy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and science-policy interactions in China’s (local) governance. She does so with a general interest in the global structures of science and their local varieties in the twenty-first century.

Jessica C. Teets is a Professor at Middlebury College, and Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Chinese Political Science.  Her research focuses on governance in authoritarian regimes, especially the role of civic participation.  She is the author of Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and editor (with William Hurst) of Local Governance Innovation in China: Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance (Routledge Contemporary China Series, 2014), in addition to articles published in The China Quarterly, World Politics, Governance, and the Journal of Contemporary China.  Dr. Teets is currently working on a new book manuscript (with Dr. Xiang Gao) on changing governance under Xi Jinping, and a forthcoming edited volume (with University of Michigan Press) developing a theory of how to lobby dictators (with Dr. Max Grömping).

 

Kenneth G. Lieberthal is a senior fellow emeritus in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, where until 2009 he was the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Political Science and William Davidson Professor of Business Administration. He was director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies from 1986 to 1989, and on May 15, 2014, the university’s board of regents renamed the center as the “Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.” Lieberthal was special assistant to the president for national security affairs and senior director for Asia on the National Security Council for 1998 through 2000.

 

(Moderator) Diana Fu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science at The University of Toronto, and Director of the East Asia Seminar Series at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. She is a Non-Resident Fellow at Brookings Institution, a China fellow at the Wilson Center, and a public intellectuals fellow at the National Committee on US-China Relations. Her research examines civil society, popular contention, state control, and authoritarian citizenship in China.