ChinaFile Presents | Get Tough But Never Close: What Does Xi Jinping and China’s Rise Mean for the United States and Europe?

As long-held beliefs about how Western democracies ought to work are being questioned in Europe and the United States, anxieties in the West are being intensified by the increasing ambitions of a newcomer on the global stage of major powers: China.

By first looking at China’s contemporary economic and political configuration, Sebastian Heilmann, La Repubblica’s Federico Rampini, Ambassador Peter Wilson, Susan Shirk, and Asia Society’s Orville Schell will discuss how Europe and America might stand to achieve shared goals while navigating varied views and interests that shape Western interactions with China.

China’s Political System, edited by Sebastian Heilmann, President of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, Europe’s biggest think tank on Chinese affairs, and just published in English, presents an innovative analysis of how politics and economics interact in China and have shaped the country’s dramatic global ascent. How could a communist country suffering from abject poverty only a few decades ago grow into a serious rival to democratic market economies of the West? How exactly was it possible for China to transform itself from an isolated empire to such a dynamic and self-confident world power?