Video: Sarah Eaton Discusses Her Recent Study on Populism in China

Talk of populism is everywhere these days, but the recent boom in comparative populist research has focused almost exclusively on developments in electoral democracies. This talk explores the possibilities of bottom-up forms of populism under conditions of authoritarianism. Drawing from a nationwide survey conducted in August 2018, Eaton makes the case that a popular populism is alive and well in one-party China. 

Sarah Eaton is Professor of Chinese Society and Economy at the University of Göttingen and concurrently Director of Göttingen’s Centre for Modern East Asian Studies. She is the author of The Advance of the State in Contemporary China: State-Market Relations in the Reform Era (Cambridge, 2016). She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto and held previously faculty positions at the University of Oxford and the University of Waterloo.

This event was co-sponsored by the USC Center for International Studies.