China's Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China's Foreign Relations

How do public opinion and nationalist sentiment affect the foreign policy of China and other non-democratic states? Can authoritarian states like China utilize domestic politics to their advantage in international bargaining?

 

Jessica Chen Weiss argues that nationalist street demonstrations can provide diplomatic leverage for authoritarian governments that are not electorally accountable to public opinion, enabling Chinese and other authoritarian leaders to signal their intentions and tie their hands in international negotiations.

 

In this talk, Chen Weiss will discuss China's management of dozens of anti-foreign protests — both those that occurred and those that were prevented — and their diplomatic consequences between 1985 and 2012, drawing on over 14 months of field research, including more than 170 interviews with nationalist activists, protesters, officials and analysts in China, Japan and the United States.

 

Jessica Chen Weiss is assistant professor of political science at Yale University and a current research fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She is the author of “Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations” (Oxford University Press, 2014). The dissertation on which it is based won the 2009 American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Reid Award for best dissertation in international relations, law and politics.

 

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in International Organization, China Quarterly and the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Her research has been supported by the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), National Science Foundation, Uppsala University, the Princeton-Harvard China and the World program, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Program.

 

Born and raised in Seattle, she received her Ph.D. from UC San Diego in 2008. Before joining the Yale faculty, she founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford, while an undergraduate.