Title:

Working with Beijing: Lessons from the Past and Future U.S. Policy Toward China

Description:

China’s assertive behavior in the East and South China Seas, its unwillingness to crack down on North Korea, and its steadily growing clout in the global arena has generated a debate on whether and how the United States should recalibrate its posture toward China. How has the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia performed in the past eight years? Should the next U.S. administration continue engaging Beijing? Or are tougher measures in order? This lecture will outline the contours of the ongoing debate on U.S. policy toward China, and ask what lessons we can learn from the history of Sino-U.S. relations to inform present deliberations. It will examine previous attempts by American leaders to elicit cooperation from their Chinese counterparts, and discuss the elements of both failed and successful diplomatic efforts.

Speaker Bio:

My name is Patricia Kim and I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program.

My broad research interests include diplomacy, the international relations of East Asia, Chinese foreign policy, and archival research.

My dissertation, supported by a fellowship from the Bradley Foundation, examines China’s behavior in international negotiations with a focus on China’s relationships with the United States, Japan and South Korea. I specifically assess China’s “core interests” that serve as the foundation for its negotiating positions, and the diplomatic tools, ranging from coercion to persuasion, that Beijing’s counterparts have used with varying degrees of success to shape China’s behavior.

I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at Princeton University in 2016. From fall 2014 to spring 2016, I was in residence at Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs as an International Security Program Research Fellow.

Before beginning my graduate studies, I worked as an intern at the Center for East Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, and at the Congressional Executive Commission on China. I received my B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.