Career
In 1976, Lampton was an early American visitor to China as part of scientific exchanges between the two countries and people's diplomacy. [2] : 76 At the time, exchanges with social scientists had been fraught, and Lampton substituted for an anthropologist who was more politically sensitive since the anthropologist had been expelled from China in 1950. [2] : 76–80 Lampton was regarded as politically safe and viewed as a young expert on China's health care system. [2] : 79
From 1988 to 1997, Lampton was president of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. From May 1998 to May 2006, he also was affiliated with The Nixon Center (now the Center for the National Interest) as the founding director of its Chinese Studies Program. Prior to 1988, Dr. Lampton was founding director of the China Policy Program at the American Enterprise Institute and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University where he started his academic career in 1974. After serving as Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University's Asia-Pacific Research Center (2019-2020), he returned to SAIS where he is Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute. In 2020, with co-authors Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik, he published Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press), on PRC high-speed rail construction in eight Southeast Asian states.
Lampton specializes in Chinese domestic politics, leadership, U.S.-China relations, and Chinese foreign policy. He is the author of The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds (2008), which won Honorable Mention in the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award competition for 2009. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He has an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies, is an Honorary Senior Fellow of the American Studies Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and was a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins. On June 17, 2010, The National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars awarded Lampton the inaugural Scalapino Prize, an award established in honor of Asia scholar Robert A. Scalapino. Presented at the 2010 Asia Policy Assembly in Washington, D.C., the award was given to Lampton in recognition of his contributions to America's understanding of the vast changes underway in Asia. [3] He is the recipient of a 2011 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio "Residency Award." His book, Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, was published in January 2014 and a second edition in 2020, both published by University of California Press.
Lampton is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Executive Committee and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He served on the board of trustees of Colorado College from 1999 to 2013 and now is a life trustee. He also serves on the advisory boards of the National Bureau of Asian Research and US-China Education Trust. He served as enlisted and commissioned officer of the U.S. Army Reserve, was a fireman at Stanford University, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Eta Sigma academic honorary societies.
On February 27, 2014, Lampton was part of a panel discussion sponsored by the US-Asia Institute entitled "Sino-Japan Dynamics and Implications for The U.S.-Japan Alliance." [4] His May 2015 speech at The Carter Center is often cited as the earliest serious warning that U.S.-China relations were in serious decline--"The Tipping Point".
In January 2015, Lampton was named the most influential China watcher by the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. Researchers chose him after assessing the credentials of 158 China experts. [5] [6] [7]
In July 2019, Lampton was among the signers of an open letter to the Donald Trump administration and United States Congress which argued that efforts by the United States government to isolate China would weaken "those Chinese intent on developing a more humane and tolerant society." [2] : 189
Paul Henry Nitze was an American businessman and government official who served as United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Secretary of the Navy, and Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department. He is best known for being the principal author of NSC 68 and the co-founder of Team B. He helped shape U.S. Cold War defense policy over the course of numerous presidential administrations.
Charles Woodruff Yost was a career U.S. Ambassador who was assigned as his country's representative to the United Nations from 1969 to 1971.
The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) is a graduate school of Johns Hopkins University based in Washington, D.C. with campuses in Bologna, Italy and Nanjing, China.
Kenneth Guy Lieberthal is an American professor and politician known as an expert on Chinese politics, political economy, domestic and foreign policy, and on the evolution of US-China relations.
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Michael E. Cox is a British academic and international relations scholar. He is currently Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Director of LSE IDEAS. He also teaches for the TRIUM Global Executive MBA Program, an alliance of NYU Stern and the London School of Economics and HEC School of Management.
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Andrew Carrigan Kuchins is an American political scientist, academic, and former head of American University of Central Asia. He has held senior positions at several think tanks, including Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for Strategic and International Studies and Carnegie Moscow Center. Kuchins has written numerous books, articles, book reviews. He has been interviewed on mainstream and academic outlets including as CNN, Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washington Times, The Moscow Times, Chicago Tribune and CS Monitor. Additionally, Kuchins has given testimony before the United States Congress on Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.
The National Committee on United States China Relations (NCUSCR) is a nonprofit organization and advisory body founded in 1966 to encourage understanding and cooperation between the United States and China. Since 1966, the committee has conducted exchanges, educational, and policy activities in the areas of politics and security, education, governance and civil society, economic cooperation, media, and transnational issues, addressing these topics with respect to Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
Robert Anthony Scalapino was an American political scientist and East Asia specialist. He was a co-founder and inaugural chairman of the National Committee on United States–China Relations. Together with his co-author Chong-Sik Lee, he won the 1974 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs from the American Political Science Association. Scalapino's daughters include the artist Diane Sophia and poet Leslie Scalapino (1944–2010).
Michael Dalzell Swaine is a senior research fellow in the field of China and East Asian security studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Prior to joining the Quincy Institute, Swaine was a Senior Associate in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before joining the Carnegie Endowment as co-director of the China Program in 2001, Swaine worked for 12 years at the RAND Corporation, where he was appointed as the first recipient of the RAND Center for Asia-Pacific Policy Chair in Northeast Asian Security.
The US–China Education Trust is a non-profit organization based in Washington D.C. Founded in 1998 by Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch, the first Chinese-American U.S. Ambassador, USCET seeks to promote China–United States relations through a series of education and exchange programs. The organization sponsors a variety of fellowships, conferences, workshops and exchanges, focused primarily on strengthening Chinese academic institutions related to the fields of American Studies, Media and Journalism, American Governance, and International Relations.
David Shambaugh is the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science & International Affairs, and director of the China Policy Program at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington DC. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Yasuhiro Matsuda is a Japanese professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo.
Cheng Li is a Chinese-American scholar specializing in Chinese elite politics and contemporary Chinese society; he has served as the director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution from 2014 to 2023, replacing Kenneth Lieberthal in the role. He is currently professor of political science and founding director of the Centre on Contemporary China and the World (CCCW) at the University of Hong Kong. Li is a prominent authority on Chinese politics, specifically leadership dynamics and the changes in leaders over generations.
Arthur Doak Barnett was an American journalist, political scientist, and public figure who wrote about the domestic politics and the foreign relations of China and United States-China relations. He published more than 20 academic and public interest books and edited still others. Barnett's parents were missionaries in China, and Barnett used his Chinese language ability while travelling widely in China as a journalist before 1949. He grounded his journalism and his scholarship in exact detail and clear language. Starting in the 1950s, when there were no formal diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, he organized public outreach programs and lobbied the United States government to put those relations on a new basis.
Prospect Foundation, is a government-affiliated think tank based in Taiwan, established in 1997, which aims to analyze the Cross-Taiwan-Strait relations and international politics and economy and provide suggestions of policies for Taiwan government. There are about a dozen of research fellows in Prospect Foundation who research and analyze the development of Cross-Strait relations and international developments.
Thomas J. Christensen is an American political scientist. He is the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.
Elizabeth C. Economy is an American political scientist, foreign policy analyst, and expert on China's politics and foreign policy. She was a Senior Advisor for China to the Secretary of Commerce in the Biden administration and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
