​Please join us at the National Press Club at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 18th for the panel event “Chinese Politics As Chinese See It: What Reading China's Establishment Intellectuals Can Teach Us.”

​​This event—the Center for Strategic Translation’s opening event in Washington DC—will feature a panel discussion and Q&A, followed by a cocktail reception. Attendance is free but seating is limited. Please register here to secure your spot. We look forward to seeing you at the event.

The panel will be moderated by the director of the Center for Strategic Translation, Tanner Greer. Panelists include:

​·       ​Jude Blanchette. Freeman Chair of China Studies and Co-Director of Interpret: China, CSIS.

​·       ​David Ownby. Professor of history, University of Montreal; Director, Reading the China Dream.

​·       ​Nadège Rolland. Distinguished Fellow in Political and Security Affairs, National Bureau of Asian Research.

​​About the Event

​ Many of the routes that Western analysts once relied on to interpret the inner workings of the Chinese system—historical archives, field surveys, or interviews with officials—have been closed off. Increasingly we rely on open source analysis to understand both policy and politics in Beijing.

​Few sources are more interesting and valuable than the writings of China’s public intellectuals. Our panelists have all worked to bring the debates of China’s public sphere into Western research on China by translating these writings into English or incorporating them into their own analysis of Chinese policy. We gather them in one room to discuss questions such as:

​·       What is the relationship between the Chinese state and the ‘establishment’ intellectuals who thrive in its shadow?

​·       How can we judge the importance of individual speeches, reports, and essays produced by these intellectuals?

​·     What are the promises and pitfalls of incorporating these writings into our analysis of Chinese politics? Why should Washington care about what writers and academics in China are debating?

​We invite you to consider these questions with us on January 18th. The panel discussion will last for one hour; it will be followed by an open cocktail hour.

​​About the Panelists

​David Ownby is a professor of history at the University of Montreal whose academic research specializes in religion, social movements, and intellectual life in China. He is also one of the foremost translators of 21st century Chinese social and political thought into English and director of Reading the China Dream, a website that publishes writings of contemporary Chinese intellectuals that are otherwise unavailable in English.

​Jude Blanchette holds the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he directs the Center’s study of the internal politics, decision making, and ideology of the Communist Party of China. He also co-directs Interpret: China, a CSIS project that translates articles, speeches, policy documents, and other important Chinese language materials that shed light on Chinese policy and politics.

​Nadège Rolland is a Distinguished Fellow in Political and Security Affairs at the National Bureau of Asian Research. Her research is centered on China’s foreign and defense policy, grand strategy, and China’s vision for itself as a great power on the world stage, as articulated in official Party documents and the writings of China’s state-affiliated intellectuals.

​About the Center for Strategic Translation

​The mission of the Center for Strategic Translation is to translate and annotate valuable documents that are currently unavailable in English, and to train young scholars, journalists, and analysts how to understand these sources. Through these means we forge the tools needed to interpret the China of Xi Jinping and raise up the generation of specialists who will guide our relations with China in the decades to come.

​Our translations can be found at: https://www.strategictranslation.org.