Guest lectures by Daniel A. Bell and Xiao Jialing

Two leading specialists on Chinese affairs, Dr. Daniel A. Bell from Tsinghua University in Beijing and Dr. Xiao Jialing from Fudan University in Shanghai will share their perspectives on China’s new forms of governance and foreign policy process.

Making Chinese Foreign Policies: Still a Black Box?

by Dr. Xiao Jialing

How should we view China’s foreign policy process? Conventional wisdom is that it remains a black box, which seems unpredictable.  This talk unravels the structure and process of policy-making and implementation in China and suggests that the reality is not so murky, as there is a growing transparency and a progressive trend of institutionalization.

Xiao Jialing is associate professor at the School of International Politics and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai.  Her research interests include theory of sovereignty, Chinese diplomacy and Japanese diplomacy. She is the author of A Study on Sovereignty (Beijing: Shishi Publishing House, 2003) and co-author of Contemporary Diplomacy (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2008). She is co-editor of Diplomacy of Great Powers (Beijing: Shishi Publishing House, 2003) and has published many articles.  Dr. Xiao earned PhD from Fudan in 1997, and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Tokyo. She has conducted research visits at Yale University and Georgetown University, Science Po and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Switzerland.

The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy

by Dr. Daniel A. Bell

The lecture will be based on the speaker’s forthcoming book (Spring 2015) The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, in which he explores the history of political meritocracy and its modern practices as well as implications in the Chinese context. It is argued that, compared with liberal democracy, political meritocracy contains some unique advantages in terms of producing just comes and contributing to good governance.

Daniel A. Bell is professor of ethics and political theory at Tsinghua University (Beijing). He was born in Montreal, educated at McGill and Oxford, has taught in Singapore and Hong Kong, and has held research fellowships at Princeton and Stanford. He has published extensively, including four books on East Asian politics with Princeton University Press: the latest is China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (2008).  He also published op-eds in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and Toronto Globe and Mail. His research works demonstrate how the ancient philosophy and moral value system of confucianism can provide a key to understand the Chinese people and Chines politics today.

The event is organized by the Fudan-European Centre for China Studies, NIAS, ADI and ThinkChina.dk