Podcast: China’s Coming “Refolution”

In this podcast, I interview Minxin Pei, Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 professor of government and George R. Roberts fellow and director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College, on his new research on the potential for regime transition in China. While many others have written about the likelihood of China’s transformation from an authoritarian state to a democracy, Pei has undertaken a much more careful study than most, exploring both the pressures within China and the forces outside China that are likely to contribute to a change in the nature of Chinese governance. He also looks at China’s potential transition in a comparative context alongside other earlier such transitions. Importantly, Pei does not predict that China will wake up overnight as a democracy; rather there will be protracted—often messy and possibly ugly—political battling that will contribute to China’s emergence as a different political entity from what it is today. Listen here as Pei describes his future China.