As China’s flagship platform for cultural diplomacy, the global expansion of Confucius Institutes has been shadowed by mounting controversy ‒ particularly in the West. Allegations have cast them as vehicles of propaganda, geopolitical influence, espionage, and even as threats to academic freedom or instruments of surveillance over Chinese students abroad. Are these claims justified? How do Confucius Institutes actually operate?

Scholars argue that great powers must be technological leaders, and that autocracies, which suppress creativity and information flows, will stifle innovation. Many observers of China’s rise thus argued that it would be unable to compete technologically with the United States. Professor Lind's book, Autocracy 2.0: How China's Rise Reinvented Tyranny (Cornell University Press 2025), challenges this view by showing that China has become a global innovation leader.

In the early 1940s, Nationalist China was an important shaper of the post-World War II economic order founded at Bretton Woods; by the early 1950s, the People’s Republic of China had become a target of Cold War economic sanctions and absent from the order’s major institutions. Tracing Nationalist and Communist ideas about China’s place in the international economic order, Amy King examines how these ideas shaped, and were shaped by, the changing character of that order from World War II to the early Cold War.

Xi Jinping has preserved his position but can he revive reform? In this talk, Dr Willy Lam will examine supreme leader Xi Jinping’s relations with principal stakeholders in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) establishment, including the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) top brass, the spies and security-related cadres, fellow princelings, and party elders. Particular focus will be put on his ties with top generals and admirals, including speculation that his military proteges have been removed by his foes so as to isolate Xi.

China's leader, Xi Jinping, is one of the most powerful individuals in the world ‒ and one of the least understood. Much can be learned, however, about both Xi Jinping and the nature of the party he leads from the memory and legacy of his father, the revolutionary Xi Zhongxun (1913–2002). The elder Xi served the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for more than seven decades. He worked at the right hand of prominent leaders Zhou Enlai and Hu Yaobang.