Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Nonresident Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for East Asia Policy Studies
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. She is also an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University. Her research focuses on security, East Asia, 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, and she has 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.
She is currently working on two main research projects: one on China's internal security policies and their implications for China in the world, and another on authoritarian diasporas, particularly focused on North Korea.
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 from Stanford University.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. She is also an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University. Her research focuses on security, East Asia, 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, and she has 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.
She is currently working on two main research projects: one on China’s internal security policies and their implications for China in the world, and another on authoritarian diasporas, particularly focused on North Korea.
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 from Stanford University.
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.
