Dukakis Center to launch new event series on China and the world
Former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis has a long-standing interest in China and its standing in contemporary global affairs. He has been an advocate of talking with friends and foes alike, and of listening rather than dictating, and he has spoken at and animated numerous initiatives aimed at improving Sino-US understanding, including the Boston Global Forum. But he has also shown keen support for multilateral institutions and practices through which to discourage unchecked unilateral challenges to international standards, notably by large countries like Russia and China.
With this in mind, the Dukakis Center will initiate a new series of public events dedicated to a better understanding of China’s role in contemporary international, in tandem with an internship program for college undergraduates designed to encourage young people to examine media coverage of China and China’s interaction with the world.
The first event in the new series will be a webinar on March 10 featuring Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York.
The webinar will be co-hosted by the Manchester China Institute at the University of Manchester in the UK.
The event will be moderated by David Wisner, Executive Director of the Dukakis Center, author or of a China Watch initiative at ACT from 2000-2005. Peter Gries, Director of the Manchester China Institute, will appear as respondent.
China and the World after COVID-19: A conversation & book launch
Register here for the Zoom Webinar
Featuring Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society
Respondent: Peter Gries, Professor of Chinese Politics, University of Manchester, and Lee Kai Hung Chair and Director, Manchester China Institute
Moderator: David Wisner, Executive Director, Michael and Kitty Dukakis Center for Public and Humanitarian Service
Wednesday, March 10, 7 PM
Guest speakers:
Orville Schell has written ten nonfiction books about China, and has written extensively about China for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Review of Books. My Old Home: A Novel of Exile (2021) is his first work of fiction, exploring life in Cold War China through the story of a father and his son. This webinar will commence with a discussion of legacies of China’s Cold War past in Chinese domestic and foreign policies today, before exploring the prospects for China’s relations with the world after Covid-19. Audience members will be invited to ask questions.
Peter Hays Gries is the Lee Kai Hung Chair and founding Director of the Manchester China Institute at the University of Manchester, where he is also Professor of Chinese politics. He was previously founding director of the Institute for US-China Issues at the University of Oklahoma. He studies the causes and consequences of how Chinese feel and think about the world—and how the world feels and thinks about China, and is particularly interested in the dynamics of mis/perception and mis/trust.
