Club Lunch: The Collapse of the US-China Grand Bargain

During the past 40 years US-China relations were built on a grand bargain that addressed the economic, strategic and political aspects of the relationship. Commitment to that bargain has collapsed, first in Beijing and more recently in Washington. This talk explained the reasons for this turn in the relationship, analyzed the evolving debate in the U.S. on a broader China strategy, and handicapped the possible trends in the relationship in the near and long term.

Scott Kennedy is deputy director of the Freeman Chair in China Studies and director of the Project on Chinese Business and Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. A leading authority on China’s economic policy and its global economic relations, Kennedy has been traveling to China for almost 30 years. He is the author of The Fat Tech Dragon: Benchmarking China’s Innovation Drive ; (with Chris Johnson) Perfecting China Inc.: China’s 13th Five-Year Plan , and The Business of Lobbying in China. He has edited three books, most recently Global Governance and China: The Dragon’s Learning Curve. For over 14 years, Kennedy was a professor at Indiana University, where he was founding director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics & Business and academic director of IU’s China Office.