Event Date: February 25, 2020 - 2:30pm to 4:00pm
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private

Presented by CIPS and the International Political Economy Network

Xiaojun Li‘s talk and book intend to make sense of how Chinese leaders perceive China’s rise in the world through the eyes of China’s international relations (IR) scholars. Drawing on a unique, four-year opinion survey of these scholars at the annual conference of the Chinese Community of Political Science and International Studies (CCPSIS) in Beijing from 2014–2017, the authors examine Chinese IR scholars’ perceptions of and views on key issues related to China’s power, its relationship with the United States and other major countries, and China’s position in the international system and track their changes over time. Furthermore, the authors complement the surveys with a textual analysis of the academic publications in China’s top five IR journals. By comparing and contrasting the opinion surveys and textual analyses, this book sheds new light on how Chinese IR scholars view the world as well as how they might influence China’s foreign policy. 

Xiaojun Li received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and joined the UBC Political Science Department in 2013 as an assistant professor. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies (2014-2015), Fudan Development Institute (2016), and University of Hawaii’s East-West Center (2018).

His previous and ongoing research on international and comparative political economy can be broadly divided into three research programs that investigate (1) the impact of domestic politics on the process and content of foreign economic and security policies, (2) the impact of global supply chains on trade and investment, and (3) the political economy of trade liberalization in developing and post-communist countries. In all of these research programs, he uses China as the primary case of inquiry and employs a variety of methods, including interviews, archival research, historical institutional analysis, survey research, web-scraping, and large-N analysis.

His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Affairs, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Journal of Contemporary China, among others, and has received grants and awards from such organizations as the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Science Foundation of the United States, the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, the Association of Chinese Political Studies, and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation.