EVENT DESCRIPTION
Please join the Global Taiwan Institute as we preview this fall’s upcoming 19th Party Congress in Beijing. Taking place once every five years, this year’s gathering is being closely scrutinized for signs of whether CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping is in fact consolidating power, and will consequently seek stability or pursue needed political reforms. Relatedly, the Party Congress could have significant implications for the PRC’s policy towards Taiwan. Public statements made by Xi on cross-Strait relations as well as multiple personnel changes in the PRC’s Taiwan policymaking apparatus have indicated that Taiwan is an area of special interest for Xi Jinping.
To help us analyze the potential effects that the 19th Party Congress may have for Taiwan policy, we will be joined by noted China and Taiwan experts in the field.
Doors will open at 11:30. A light lunch will be served, and the event will begin at 12:00. Kindly RSVP by August 28. Please direct questions or concerns to abell@globaltaiwan.org.
**Media: Please contact Anna Scott Bell at abell@globaltaiwan.org if you would like to bring additional crew members or equipment, so that we can be sure to accommodate you.
PANELISTS
Scott W. Harold is the Associate Director of The Center for Asia Pacific Policy and a political scientist at the non-profit, non-partisan RAND Corporation, as well as a member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty. He specializes in Chinese foreign policy, East Asian security, and international affairs. Prior to joining RAND in August 2008, Dr. Harold worked at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center from 2006 to 2008. In addition to his work at RAND, he is an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he has taught since 2006. He has also taught Chinese politics at Columbia University. Dr. Harold is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations from 2012 to 2017. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. His doctorate is in political science from Columbia University, where he wrote a thesis on China’s foreign policy decision-making with respect to joining the World Trade Organization.
Christopher K. Johnson is a senior adviser and holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. An accomplished Asian affairs specialist, Mr. Johnson spent nearly two decades serving in the U.S. government’s intelligence and foreign affairs communities and has extensive experience analyzing and working in Asia on a diverse set of country-specific and transnational issues. Throughout his career, he has chronicled China’s dynamic political and economic transformation, the development of its robust military modernization program, and its resurgence as a regional and global power. He has frequently advised senior White House, cabinet, congressional, military, and foreign officials on the Chinese leadership and on Beijing’s foreign and security policies. Mr. Johnson worked as a senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he played a key role in the analytic support to policymakers during the 1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis, the 1999 accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the downing of a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft on Hainan Island in 2001, and the SARS epidemic in 2003. Mr. Johnson served as an intelligence liaison to two secretaries of state and their deputies on worldwide security issues and in 2011 was awarded the U.S. Department of State’s Superior Honor Award for outstanding support to the secretary and her senior staff.
Richard McGregor served as the Washington Bureau Chief for the Financial Times from 2011 to 2014. Previously, McGregor served as the FT’s deputy news editor in London, as well as Beijing bureau chief and Shanghai correspondent. Prior to joining the FT, he was the chief political correspondent and China and Japan correspondent for The Australian. He has also reported for the International Herald Tribune, the BBC and the Far Eastern Economic Review. McGregor has won numerous awards throughout his nearly two decades of reporting from north Asia, including a 2010 Society of Publishers in Asia Editorial Excellence Award (Excellence in Reporting Breaking News category) for his coverage on the Xinjiang Riots and 2008 SOPA Awards for Editorial Intelligence (Excellence in Opinion Writing and Excellence in Feature Writing categories). He is author of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (2010). The Party was awarded the third annual Bernard Schwartz Prize by the Asia Society in New York in 2011 for nonfiction books making an outstanding contribution to understanding Asia. The Party also won the Mainichi Newspaper in Tokyo’s award for best book on the Asia-Pacific in 2011. From February, 2015, he has been a public policy fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington.