Sam Chetwin George

Delighted to have my piece published in Foreign Affairs today. Thanks to my friend and teacher Geremie Barmé for the many discussions about empire over the years, and to colleagues at the @AsiaSociety for reading various drafts of this essay.

New Yorkers! Prof. Andrew Nathan and I will be hosting a conversation with one of China's most famous investigative journalists and unofficial historians, Dai Qing, at Columbia University on November 5, 12:00-1:30pm.

Dai Qing is a member of China's red aristocracy. She was raised in the family of one the most important military men of the People's Republic and has deep insight into the Party and the country it governs. Despite her privilege, she became increasingly concerned with the Party's instinct to censor and edit the historical record in politically expedient ways. She went on to write several of the most important volumes on Party history, and also become one of China's most significant environmentalists through her reporting on the Three Gorges Dam.

We will discuss her life, her motivations, and her forthcoming book "Inquiring into History". The conversation will be in Chinese but we will offer simultaneous interpretation. She's a fascinating person -- please come!

I’m pleased to share that I’ve joined the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre at Victoria University as a Non-Resident Fellow. I’m a Kiwi and I’ve spent much of my career studying the Chinese Communist Party, so I’m excited that these two paths have converged!

Recent days have only shown how potentially transformative Trump’s second presidency may be for traditional allies and partners like New Zealand and Australia. America and Canada – both members of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network – are now in an open trade war. Meanwhile, Trump also scaled back annual joint military exercises with South Korea, saying that Kim Jong-un has been “unthreatening and respectful” (recall that North Korean troops are actively fighting alongside Russian soldiers in Ukraine). In his bracing piece in Foreign Affairs, Mark Leonard wrote that: “A rotten-tail world is emerging, one in which states will have to adapt cunningly, improvise new uses for elements of the old order that remain valuable, and adjust swiftly to the dramatic decay of others.”

New Zealand has some hard problems to wrestle with – in relation to both America and China – and I’m excited to work with Jason Young, Andrew Wilford, and other Fellows at the Centre to contribute directly to New Zealand’s foreign policy debate.

Thank you to @radionz and @annafifield , one of our national treasures, for inviting me onto The Detail podcast to discuss New Zealand's way through these troubled times. We covered the changing shape of the U.S. under Trump, China's evolving global role as it grows stronger under Xi Jinping, and what this means for the traditional matrix of global trading and security relationships that have endured till now.

Countries like New Zealand must focus urgently on basic resilience as far as possible: energy security, diversified trading relationships, and defensive capabilities. But there are also opportunities for smaller countries to build some carefully selected niches that greatly enhance their strategic value in global supply chains (for NZ this might includes elements of rare earths processing, naval technology, and satellite capabilities). @Peter_J_Beck and @angusblair are leading this work in New Zealand at @OutsetVentures.

Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-…

There’s an ongoing debate about how China views what is often called the “post-WWII order”. Is Beijing the beneficiary of it? Is it trying to upend it? Or is it more complicated than this?

In this episode of the Pekingology podcast, I spoke with @Henrietta_Ivy about how China is balancing its great power ambitions alongside the costs and risks of becoming entangled in a more chaotic geopolitical environment. It’s a question many rising powers have had to confront, and there are no easy answers. Beijing has become overtly involved in the civil war in Myanmar and is providing significant diplomatic and material support for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but it has, at least openly, been less frontally involved in the conflict in Iran. We discussed why this might be the case.

We also explored the history of China’s relationship with the U.S.-led order, its vision for global governance, and how the structure of its domestic economy might influence its foreign policy in the future.

Thank you to Henrietta for having me on for an excellent discussion. I’ve learned a tonne from the Pekingology podcast over the years.