Preface

Isaac Kardon

The Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace studies disruptive security, governance, and technological risks that threaten peace, growth, and opportunity in the Asia-Pacific region, with an enduring focus on China. This compendium of essays on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) by some of the world’s leading China scholars advances Carnegie’s long-standing commitment to rigorous, insightful, and policy-relevant research at a moment when a sober and strategic approach to China has never been more essential—or more difficult to define and achieve.

In Xi Jinping’s “new era,” students of Chinese politics face diminishing access to reliable sources. They must contend with biased or absent data, dwindling access to Chinese scholars and officials (and lack of candor when access is possible), and closed doors to archives, conferences, and meetings that, at least for a brief period of relative liberalization, were previously open. The avenues for substantive interactions between Chinese and American scholars that were being institutionalized in universities and think tanks during that “old era” have narrowed dramatically, due to restrictions on both sides.

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