Abstract
How does the world’s most powerful authoritarian state govern vast and diverse diaspora communities?
Deftly managing internal and external threats has always been central to maintaining the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China. Yet in no other era has governing overseas populations been as crucial to China as under Xi Jinping (2012-2022). Xi’s administration is characterized by “overreach” in multiple spheres (Shirk 2022).
One particular area of overreach in the Xi era is the use of coercive power in the form of transnational repression—the harassment, surveillance, and extradition or abduction of diaspora members who the party-state views as threats.
How does global China as a power project manifest itself in governing the diaspora abroad? How and why has China’s use of coercive power abroad—in particular, transnational repression—increased under Xi? How has the party-state wielded coercive power alongside a wider toolkit of control against diaspora populations outside of its borders? And what makes China’s playbook of control distinctive compared to other authoritarian and illiberal states?
This talk will present a comparative analysis of what, if anything, distinguishes the Chinese party-state’s governance of its global diaspora.
Date
Monday, 28 October 2024
Time
1:15 pm – 2:30 pm (JST)
Venue
Lecture Hall B, International Academia Research Building (MAP) (ACCESS)
Registration
Needed. Please register from the link below
Speaker’s Biography
Diana Fu is associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and a fellow at Brookings Institution, the Wilson Center, and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Her research examines popular contention, repression, civil society, and authoritarian citizenship in contemporary China. She is currently co-authoring a second book examining how the Chinese state governs the global diaspora (under contract, Cambridge). She is the author of “Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China” (Cambridge, 2018), which won best book awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the International Studies Association. Her research and commentary have appeared BBC, Bloomberg, CBC, CNN, NPR, the Economist, and The New York Times, among others. She was host of the TVO documentary series “China Here and Now” and of POLITICO China Watcher. Prof. Fu received her doctorate in Politics from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She regularly gives public lectures and participates in track 1.5 dialogues on Canada-China and U.S.-China relations.