On the 50th anniversary of President Nixon’s visit to China and his meeting with Mao Zedong, Scott Kennedy, Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), held a conversation with Professor Wang Jisi of Peking University to discuss past and present US-China relations. A recording of the event is available online.

Dr. Kennedy and Professor Wang are collaborating on a Luce-supported project advocating for continued in-person scholarly exchange between the two nations. Wang is spending a month in the United States, and Kennedy will head to China later in the spring to do the same.

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Dr. Scott Kennedy: Today’s event is titled “Beijinger in Washington,” which is borrowed from a 1991 novel written by Guilin Cao called “Beijinger in New York,” which was about a Chinese couple who were trying to make their way in the United States as immigrants and the difficulties they faced and how they reacted. And I’m hoping that your visit this time in the United States is going a little bit better than their visit.

Wang Jisi’s in the United States in large part because of a collaboration that we are having together to promote the importance of in-person scholarly exchange. He’s going to be here for one month in Washington and New York, and then I will do the same in China in the spring.

I want to thank the Luce Foundation for their support for this project. I also want to thank Peking University and Wang Jisi and his colleagues, including Professor Chen Muyang, who made the trip with him, as well as the CSIS Trustee Chair team, led by Alyssa Perez.

Wang Jisi is professor at the School of International Studies and president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University. He’s also honorary president of the Chinese Association for American Studies. He is, in short, China’s leading America watcher. He’s written probably hundreds of articles and reports in Chinese and in Western publications, including one that maybe many of you in the United States and Europe have read in 2012 with Ken Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution on strategic distrust in U.S.-China relations. That came out in March of 2012, before China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, was in power. He’s been a visiting professor at Oxford, UC Berkeley, Michigan, Claremont McKenna, and Princeton.

Read the full transcript