China's 20th Party Congress: Outlook and Implications

featuring

Kim Fassler, Senior Analyst, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's China Strategic Focus Group and Adjunct Fellow, East-West Center

Dr. Denny Roy, Senior Fellow, East-West Center
and
Dr. Teresa Wright, Professor of Political Science, California State University
and Visiting Scholar, East-West Center

China's Communist Party will hold its 20th Party Congress the week of October 16 in Beijing.  The every-five-year convening of China's top leaders is one of the biggest events on China's political calendar and will set the country's foreign and domestic policy direction through 2027.   Xi Jinping is also vying for a historic third term as head of the Party, breaking norms deliberately put in place by recent predecessors to prevent a return to one-man rule.  What can we expect from this landmark gathering?  What are the implications for China's domestic and foreign policies?  Taking place during the Congress, this expert panel will discuss what to watch and implications for the region.

Kim Fassler is a Senior Analyst at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s China Strategic Focus Group and an Adjunct Fellow at the East-West Center. She has worked for the Department of Defense since 2011, including serving in the Office of the Defense Attaché at U.S. Embassy-Beijing and as an analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C. Kim has an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a graduate certificate from the Hopkins Nanjing Center which she attended on a Boren Fellowship. She also has a B.A. from Williams College. Her research interests are China’s political and military leadership and decision-making. 

Denny Roy's work has focused mostly on Asia Pacific security issues, particularly those involving China.  Recently Roy has written on Chinese foreign policy, the North Korea nuclear weapons crisis, China-Japan relations, and China-Taiwan relations.  His interests include not only traditional military-strategic matters and foreign policy, but also international relations theory and human rights politics.
 
Before joining the East-West Center in 2007, Roy worked at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu for seven years, rising to the rank of Professor after starting as a Research Fellow.  In 1998--2000 Roy was a faculty member in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.  There he taught courses on China, Asian history, and Southeast Asian politics.  He also designed and taught an innovative course titled Human Rights and National Security in Asia.

Dr. Teresa Wright is currently a Visiting Scholar at the East-West Center. She has been a professor of Political Science at California State University, Long Beach since 1996. She earned her PhD and MA in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in Political Science at Santa Clara University. Dr. Wright’s research focuses on state-society relations, protest and dissent, and the relationship among capitalism, democracy and authoritarianism—particularly in China and Taiwan. Along with four solo-authored books and one solo-edited volume, her published work includes journal articles in Comparative Politics, Economy and Society, The Journal of International Affairs, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, The China Quarterly, China: An International Journal, Church and State, and Asian Survey; and numerous chapters in edited volumes. Since 2012 she has served on the Editorial Board of the China Quarterly.