Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Nonresident Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for East Asia Policy Studies
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, and a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at Brookings. She directs UT's Asia Policy Program, a joint initiative of the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Her work focuses on East Asia, American national security, and authoritarian politics and foreign policy.
Greitens' work on China and North Korea has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in English, Chinese, and Korean, and in major media outlets. She has also previously testified to Congress on security issues in the Indo-Pacific. Her first book, “Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence” (Cambridge, 2016) received the 2017 Best Book Award from both the International Studies Association and the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association.
In 2017–18, Greitens served as the first lady of Missouri, where she helped lead the state's 2017 trade mission to China and South Korea, and successfully advocated for major legislative and administrative reforms to Missouri's policies on foster care, adoption and child abuse prevention.
She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; a Master of Philosophy from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor's degree from Stanford University. From January 2015 to August 2020, she was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and co-director of the university's Institute for Korean Studies.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, and a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at Brookings. She directs UT’s Asia Policy Program, a joint initiative of the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Her work focuses on East Asia, American national security, and authoritarian politics and foreign policy.
Greitens’ work on China and North Korea has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in English, Chinese, and Korean, and in major media outlets. She has also previously testified to Congress on security issues in the Indo-Pacific. Her first book, “Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence” (Cambridge, 2016) received the 2017 Best Book Award from both the International Studies Association and the Comparative Democratization section of the American Political Science Association.
In 2017–18, Greitens served as the first lady of Missouri, where she helped lead the state’s 2017 trade mission to China and South Korea, and successfully advocated for major legislative and administrative reforms to Missouri’s policies on foster care, adoption and child abuse prevention.
She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; a Master of Philosophy from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. From January 2015 to August 2020, she was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and co-director of the university’s Institute for Korean Studies.
It seems like the administration has tried to keep a clear, consistent tone in terms of being really upfront about the range of U.S. concerns vis-à-vis Beijing’s behavior and about the competitive nature of the relationship overall, and [President Biden's first call with Chinese President Xi] reflects that.
Since [Xi Jinping’s] ascent, we’ve seen more statements about the need to prevent diffusion of political threats from abroad into China. Hong Kong has always been one site where the Chinese Communist Party is particularly sensitive or prone to seeing foreign infiltration aimed at destabilising the party.
One lesson for the future is that American strategy and national security shouldn't depend on or assume transparency from China because it's not an empirically valid assumption to make given the nature and structure of China's domestic politics.
