Cheng Li
a director of the John L. Thornton China Center, The Brookings Institution
Cheng Li is director of the John L. Thornton China Center and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings.
Articles by Cheng Li
China plays increasing role in global governance
I was very skeptical about last September's US-China "agreement" in which China pledged that it would not "conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information, with the intent of providing com ...
March 18, 2016
President Xi has a good chance to make a convincing case that the U.S. and China need each other," Li Cheng, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the U.S. think tank Brookings Institution, told Xinhua in an interview. "There is no other choice, except to move forward for coo ...
September 18, 2015
Analysts of the Chinese leadership are mistaken to characterize President Xi Jinping in a simplistic, stagnant, and one-dimensional way.
Prior to Xi’s ascent to the top leadership in the fall of 2012, many overseas China analysts described this new party boss as “a weak leader,” “a co ...
September 17, 2015
From China's perspective, its strategic rethinking should follow the idea developed by the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1970-80s. Deng believed that peace and development are the two major themes of the contemporary world. Should Beijing continue to adhere to this strategic judgment g ...
September 15, 2015
Few words are more frequently mentioned in the context of China’s economic reform agenda than “rebalancing”. What will a rebalanced Chinese economy look like? Has the Chinese leadership come to grips with sources of resistance to change? What is the likely balance and sequencing of local go ...
September 1, 2015
The continuing consolidation of power has been the most noticeable trend under the leadership of President Xi Jinping since the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in November 2012. Undoubtedly, a key component in this strengthening of both Xi’s personal power and his new admi ...
August 13, 2015
The seventh meeting of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue—or S&ED—takes place June 23 to 24 in Washington, D.C., with Secretary of State John Kerry and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew representing the United States, and Vice Premier Wang Yang and State Councilor Yang Jiechi repre ...
June 17, 2015
After several years of drift and decline, relations between China and the United States ended 2014 in a modestly improved condition. The presidential summit in Beijing in November not only produced several important and tangible accomplishments, but more importantly it stabilized the relationship ...
January 7, 2015
Nixon's visit to China and the U.S.-China rapprochement was historically important in the context of the Cold War. It marginalized the Soviet Union, dramatically changed the global political and strategic landscape, and one could argue that it was not Ronald Reagan that ended the Cold War but rat ...
September 26, 2014
I have just returned from several days in Beijing, where I joined seven other Brookings colleagues in a series of meetings with academics, entrepreneurs and senior government officials for conversations about the state of U.S.-China relations. Nearly all of our conversations addressed the sharp a ...
July 1, 2014
The June 2013 Sunnylands meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping and Barack Obama demonstrated the increasing importance that both leaders attach to a close and constructive relationship between the United States and China. Both leaders increasingly view the bilateral relationship in regional and g ...
June 24, 2014
The idea of the Cold War is a conception. It depends on how you look at that, how much you believe that. Certainly the Cold War was real during the 1960s, 70s, etc. But now it's very problematic because by definition the Cold War is confrontation of two blocks on ideological and military fronts. ...
December 13, 2012