This chapter explores the ways in which the United States and several US-led multilateral institutions have adapted, or struggled to adapt, to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The United States has weighed heavily on the transitions that two major multilateral institutions—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—have made to adapt to the BRI and the rise of bilateral sources of infrastructure financing more generally. The World Bank, once a major financier of developing economy infrastructure, has struggled to reform its safeguards programmes in the wake of the BRI. The IMF has similarly struggled to adapt the programmes that it uses to assist countries in debt crises post-BRI. The United States has also created, or attempted to create, new bilateral or multilateral initiatives in the infrastructure sector to ‘compete’ with the Belt and Road, including the US Development Finance Corporation, the Blue Dot Network, the Partnership for Global Infrastructure, and the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor. This chapter reviews those initiatives and the common challenges that they face in providing developing economy borrowers with an alternative source of infrastructure financing to the BRI.
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Chapter in "De Gruyter Handbook of Cities, Infrastructure and International Relations," edited by Michele Acuto, Simon Curtis, Ian Klaus, and Gaea Morales
This article was written by Dr. Susan J. Duggan, initial Coordinator of the Western Europe Project at SPICE (1988–1990). In its early years, SPICE comprised several separate area-focused projects. This is the eighth of several articles—focusing on the 50-year history of SPICE—that will be posted this year.
Happy 50th Birthday to SPICE! I am honored to be part of this special group of multi-talented, internationally experienced educators and innovators.
I came to SPICE in a roundabout way. After studying in France and Italy during my undergraduate years at Stanford, I did my first master’s degree in Political Science (international relations) at Université Laval in Québec in 1980. My thesis was on the political role of educational exchange in Québec’s desire for sovereignty (from Canada). Upon returning to my home in California, I landed a job as the Project Associate at the “Bay Area and the World Project” hosted at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco and sponsored, among others, by Stanford University. In that small, windowless office Dr. Ron Herring discovered me researching the connections between the Bay Area and other countries; and promoting those connections through our publications and conferences with businesses, local governments and educators. He convinced me to come back to Stanford to get my Ph.D. That was the beginning of my SPICE connection, though it would be another six years before I officially worked for SPICE.
Initially, I pursued a second master’s degree in Education at Stanford. That is when I met Dr. David Grossman at the Center for Research in International Studies (CRIS), the predecessor to the Institute for International Studies (IIS), now FSI. I have fond memories of working on a research project looking at young U.S. students’ perceptions of Germany and Germans. David was there in Berlin when I began my field work for my dissertation in 1985. David and Ron encouraged me throughout my pre-SPICE time to explore the role of educational exchange, not only for students, but also for teachers.
Ron recruited me to be the initial coordinator of the newly founded Western Europe Project in 1988. I had just finished my dissertation at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford on the political role of educational exchange between Germany and the United States and was eager to work with the SPICE folks on curriculum development for K–12 students and teachers. Dr. Judy Wooster had just assumed the leadership of SPICE. I had a lot of fun working with this bright group of creative folks!
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In the summer of 1989, Ron asked me to help coordinate and run a study tour of American teachers to Western Europe. SPICE and the California International Studies Project (CISP) sponsored the tour. I had experience having co-founded the “Berlin-California Teachers Exchange” in 1985 with friend, colleague, and teacher Flex Ninow from the Internationale Lehrerkonferenz Berlin. In our 1989 tour (photo above courtesy of Sue Duggan), 12 brave teachers spent 24 intense days in Berlin; southern Germany (Weinstadt); Strasbourg; and on to Zeeland, Amsterdam and North Holland in the Netherlands.
The participants focused on two main themes for eventual curriculum development: “Communities, Regions, Nations” and “Conflict and Cooperation.” Mind you, this was the summer of 1989. The study tour focused on Western Europe and what would evolve, eventually, into the European Union. They heard, of course, analyses and speculation about Eastern Europe and Soviet aspirations. In retrospect, what an honor it was to hear from so many European teachers, politicians, political scientists, and regular folk about their perceptions of a 1989 version of Western Europe. No one among our many European interlocutors imagined that the Berlin Wall would fall just a few months after our departure creating a huge change in the political, economic and educational landscape of all of Europe.
In the early months of 1990, I felt compelled to return to Berlin to gather fresh insights about the Fall of the Berlin Wall (which had happened on November 9, 1989, just three and a half months after our return from the SPICE Study Tour). I imagined how hearing from real Germans about an actual historical event could inspire American high school students studying German. I pitched the idea to Judy Wooster along the lines of “Where were you when Kennedy was killed?” I wanted to hear from a variety of Berliners—from the East and West—about where they were when they heard the news of the Berlin Wall being taken down. Remember, there were two parallel walls that bisected the city of Berlin. For some, they only knew the existence of a divided city. For others, they had strong memories of the Wall being built, starting on August 13, 1961. I bought a Sony Walkman and a ticket to Berlin. I was able to line up interviews with various people, from politicians, to teachers, to a pub owner, and even a Berliner in her 60s who not only remembered when the Wall was built, but what happened during the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949) in her hometown. I came back to SPICE with precious recordings of remembrances and personal connections to one of the biggest changes in the latter part of 20th century Europe.
Possibly because of the Study Tour and the inspiration to record the voices of Berlin after the Wall fell, I felt drawn to return to Germany. The Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (Foundation) created a new program in 1990 called the “Chancellor Scholars” bringing young, professional Americans to Germany to witness the unfolding of a new version of Europe. I was recruited to be in the initial group. I could not turn that down. With reluctance mixed with anticipation to experience a “whole” Germany, I left my position at SPICE in September 1990. I was pleased to leave the Berlin Perspectives curriculum unit in the capable hands of my successor, and even more pleased that that unit still exists today.
I have always considered myself lucky to have been part of the developing times of CRIS, IIS, and SPICE. I enjoyed smart, fun, creative colleagues who really cared about the world, education, and each other. Dr. Steve Thorpe, formerly the coordinator of the SPICE China Project, and I finished our PhDs around the same time and have stayed in touch all these years. Dr. Ron Herring is “Uncle Ron” to my daughter, Coral. Gosh, even the SPICE folks survived the Loma Prieta Quake together in the basement of Littlefield Center at 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989!
Photo above: Governor Neil Abercrombie of Hawai‘i, Dr. Susan Duggan, Executive Director of the Hawai‘i Language Roadmap Initiative, and Senator Daniel Akaka, 2013 | courtesy of Susan Duggan.
I have enjoyed a career mostly in international education. After SPICE and the Humboldt year, I started an international study abroad program in formerly Eastern European countries. I became the Senior Research and Policy Consultant to the National Security Education Program and ended up on the founding team that created the Boren Scholarship Program. Later, as Senior Strategist, I helped shaped The Language Flagship, now comprised of 14 U.S. universities with language and cultural studies in South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Morocco, and Kazakhstan. Toward the end of my career, I had the great pleasure of re-connecting with the K–12 sector as I created and ran many state Language Summits to create Language Roadmaps for those states. At times I have branched into the areas of high tech and agricultural tech innovations, but always with an international connection. I feel my early years at SPICE prepared me well for working with a variety of people in education, business, and government, all with creativity and integrity.
With gratitude, I wish SPICE—and all those involved with this wonderful program—a very happy 50th anniversary!
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Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
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Diego A. Zambrano’s primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of civil procedure, transnational litigation, and judicial federalism. His work explores the civil litigation landscape: the institutions, norms, and incentives that influence litigant and judicial behavior. Professor Zambrano also has an interest in comparative constitutional law and legal developments related to Venezuela. He currently leads an innovative Stanford Policy Lab tracking “Global Judicial Reforms” and has served as an advisor to pro-democracy political parties in Venezuela. In 2021, Professor Zambrano received the Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Professor Zambrano’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Virginia Law Review, among other journals, and has been honored by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) and the National Civil Justice Institute. Professor Zambrano will be a co-author of the leading casebook Civil Procedure: A Modern Approach (8th ed. 2024) (with Marcus, Pfander, and Redish). In addition, Professor Zambrano serves as the current chair of the Federal Courts Section of the AALS. He also writes about legal issues for broader public audiences, with his contributions appearing in the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Lawfare.
After graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 2013, Professor Zambrano spent three years as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, focusing on transnational litigation and arbitration. Before joining Stanford Law School in 2018, Professor Zambrano was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.
Looking back at the long list of pages on Canvas, I feel so accomplished about finishing the Design Thinking into Action: Teen Wellbeing course. From the first “Introduce Yourself” video we filmed, edited, and shared with our classmates, to the final prototype presentation, every module showed me a different way to think about teen wellbeing and how our skills could create real, meaningful change.
What made this course so special was that learning wasn’t restricted to the weekly virtual classes. The resource pages for each module on Canvas created a great balance between theory and practice, input and output. We learned about topics like the teenage brain, managing academic stress, creating a body map, and purpose learning. We didn’t just write essays as in a traditional class. We created prototypes with step-by-step exercises leading up to our final project. My favorite part was the design thinking process: empathizing with a real person, defining a need statement, brainstorming wildly, prototyping, and iterating based on feedback. The prototype I created, called the “Dream Door,” was designed for a friend who feels lonely and disconnected from peers and frustrated by surface-level conversations. The “Dream Door” is a small box with a bell and color-coded prompts to help her start deeper conversations with classmates. While creating the prop for my friend, I also learned to solve my own wellbeing challenges through the same process. When I gifted the finished product to my friend, her excited reaction felt better than any grade. That’s the magic of this design thinking course. When we truly empathize with someone, understand their needs, and listen to their feedback, we can see the physical results our ideas have on them.
I left this course with a toolbox I’ll use for life, for studying, for friendships, for future projects.
I participated in this course during a particularly challenging time. When the course began, I was overseas for an exchange program. Then I returned to China to prepare for AP exams, which felt like an ever-present gray cloud looming over me. Instead of adding to my stress, this course helped me navigate it more clearly. One of my favorite classes with a Stanford scholar, Dr. Cari Costanzo, combined anthropology with our connection to our bodies through an exercise called body mapping, a creative and reflective piece of art that pushed us to reflect on important aspects of our lives. When I added drawings of the AP exams in the thought bubble above my head on my body map, I realized they were my current, main priority. In this course I also learned that the concept of “failing forward” and pacing ourselves aren’t just nice ideas; they are ways to sustain our busy lives. After the Stanford e-China course ended, as I was taking an exam back in my regular school in China, I wrote about the concept of “failing forward” in my essay. I literally smiled in the middle of the exam because I was so excited to apply what I’d learned.
I also loved the small, surprising moments, like drawing my body map and realizing I could create a stickman with my arms and legs because I’ve been drawing them since primary school. I also loved writing a reflection of my views on life and education and noticing that my love for roller coasters and seeking thrilling experiences actually drives how I approach learning.
I left this course with a toolbox I’ll use for life, for studying, for friendships, for future projects. I’m leaving with gratitude. Thank you to Stefanie Orrick, Carey Moncaster, and the whole Stanford e-China team for creating a space where teenagers can be creative, vulnerable, and ambitious all at once.
The following reflection is a guest post written by Nathan Chan, an alumnus and honoree of the 2021 Stanford e-China Program, which is accepting student applications until September 1, 2022.
Cathy at the Summer Palace in Beijing | Photo courtesy of Cathy Fang
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High school student Cathy Fang, an alumna of the Stanford e-China course, Design Thinking into Action: Teen Wellbeing, shares how the program enlightened the way she thinks about making meaningful change. Cathy is currently a student at Chongqing Yucai Secondary School.
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Cathy performing in a production of Billy the Kid, where she played the role of Mary Meacham
In most countries, bureaucratic agencies handle regulatory enforcement. But the United States does things differently. Embedded in statutes governing consumer protection, antitrust, employment, civil rights, and the environment are more than 10,000 "private rights of action"―legal provisions that empower ordinary citizens and their lawyers to enforce the law through lawsuits. This is how Americans regulate everything from wage theft to air pollution to corporate fraud.
How Americans Enforce the Law tells the story of this distinctively American approach to governance. Diego Zambrano reveals that private enforcement is not a modern innovation but an inherited tradition dating to medieval English "penal statutes" that colonial America adopted and intensified. The book traces how this system evolved through critical junctures and was boosted by twentieth-century procedural innovations like broad discovery rules and class actions that transformed scattered statutory clauses into a mass-litigation engine.
This is the first comprehensive account of private enforcement's origins, operations, and future. Offering both celebration and critique, Zambrano shows why private enforcement works well in employment law, for instance, but has been weaponized in environmental law. He creates a framework for determining when this uniquely American form of governance serves the public interest, and when it can be used to undermine democracy.
The National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA), funded by the Freeman Foundation, is a multi-year initiative to encourage and facilitate teaching and learning about East Asia in elementary and secondary schools nationwide. NCTA is a premier provider of professional development on East Asia.
From July 6 to 9, 2026, SPICE Teacher Professional Development Manager Naomi Funahashi and Event Coordinator Sabrina Ishimatsu hosted a summer institute for middle school teachers, most of whom are teaching in California. Fifteen teachers enrolled. SPICE was so grateful for their active participation and for sharing their reflections and insights on subject matter content and pedagogical content knowledge.
The first three days featured subject matter content lectures on topics commonly taught at the middle school level in California. These included lectures on “Chinese Dynasties” and “The Silk Road” by Dr. Clayton Dube, Senior Fellow at the USC U.S.-China Institute, and “Tokugawa Japan” by Professor Ethan Segal, Michigan State University, who received his PhD from Stanford. SPICE is a partner site of the USC U.S.-China Institute, one of seven National Coordinating Sites of the NCTA. Dr. Clayton Dube is Director Emeritus of the USC U.S.-China Institute, and SPICE now works with Glenn Osaki, Director, and Crystal Hsia, Program Specialist, of the USC U.S.-China Institute.
I have been very inspired by all the interactive meetings. Each truly serves as a model for creating engaging lessons for our students… There were so many interesting and relevant topics such as the different dynasties, the role and expectations of women, and cultural exchange!—Elena Giron, Elizabeth Learning Center, Cudahy, California
As a K–8 Mandarin teacher, I’m always looking for meaningful ways to help my students understand how Chinese language and culture have influenced other parts of East Asia. After today’s session, I began thinking about how I might incorporate elements of Japanese history, culture, or art into my Mandarin curriculum while still keeping Chinese language learning at the center.—Shu-Chen Lin, San Domenico School, San Anselmo, California
The first three days also featured demonstrations of SPICE curricula that focused on pedagogical content knowledge. These included demonstrations of Japanese Art in the Edo Period, by Karen Tiegel, Middle School Division Head at The Nueva School and a former SPICE Curriculum Writer; Along the Silk Road, by Rylan Sekiguchi, SPICE Manager of Curriculum and Instructional Design; and Angel Island, Chinese American Voices, the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, and What Does It Mean to Be an American?, by Jonas Edman, SPICE Instructional Designer.
I will definitely incorporate the SPICE Silk Road curriculum into my teaching. I especially appreciate the interactive nature of its online resources, which make the content more engaging and accessible for students. The curriculum provides meaningful opportunities for students to actively explore the history, geography, and cultural exchanges of the Silk Road rather than simply learning through lectures or textbooks. I can see these resources helping my middle school students build a deeper understanding of the topic while keeping them motivated and engaged.—Jenn Wu, Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, San Francisco, California
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On day four, three authors of young adult novels (from top to bottom in image above)—Van Hoang, Judy I. Lin, Waka T. Brown—were featured on a panel titled, “Incorporating Asian American Literature and Voices into Middle School Curricula.” Including the Asian American experience in SPICE/NCTA seminars has been requested by many teachers and also supports the NCTA as it “strives to develop global citizenship based on the principles of cross-cultural understanding, equality, and justice.”
I loved being part of the summer cohort with SPICE… I was really inspired by the authors’ panel, as I had never heard from authors, especially ones who are so relatable. I love how they intertwine their identity and history and can create such cool stories.—Morgan Johnson, Kenmore School, Arlington, Virginia
Following the institute, each teacher will develop and share an original lesson plan inspired by the knowledge and resources gained throughout the seminar. Some of the themes and concepts that were shared by the lecturers, authors, teachers, and SPICE staff included diaspora, cultural relevance, the master narrative of history, diverse perspectives, and empathy; and SPICE hopes that one or more of these themes will be incorporated into their lessons.
SPICE is especially grateful to President Graeme Freeman and Vice President Shereen Goto of the Freeman Foundation for their support of the NCTA since 1998 and to Crystal Hsia of the USC U.S.-China Institute for her unwavering support and collaboration.
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) is pleased to announce that James Fearon will serve as the next co-director of the institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), effective September 16, 2026.
Fearon is currently the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science, and a senior fellow at FSI, where he is affiliated with both CISAC and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. In 2021 and 2022, he served as a senior advisor in the U.S. Department of Defense, working primarily on the 2022 National Defense Strategy and its implementation within the Department.
He is the author of several highly influential studies of the causes of interstate and civil war, signaling and bargaining in interstate disputes, and deterrence theory. Earlier this year he published the book Worse than War: The Global Costs of Violence (Princeton University Press), co-authored with Anke Hoeffler, that estimates and compares the prevalence and costs of war with the prevalence and costs of interpersonal violence. His current work includes research on how U.S. and Chinese defense postures affect risks of escalation in the western Pacific; AI and the stability of nuclear deterrence; and the organizational design of defense bureaucracies. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley and joined Stanford as an associate professor in 1998.
“Jim Fearon will be a superb co-director of CISAC,” said outgoing co-director Scott Sagan. “He is one of the nation's finest scholars on bargaining in crises, the causes of interstate and civil wars, and global trends in forms of violence. He combines this scholarly expertise with keen policy interests in Pentagon budgeting, grand strategy, and nuclear weapons. What a great mix of interests and expertise to address international security in a changing world.”
Scott Sagan with former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, another longtime member of the CISAC community. | Light11B
Sagan has served as the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) from 2021 to 2026, though his legacy and influence at CISAC extends well beyond the last five years. He previously served as CISAC co-director from 1998 to 2012. In 2021, he returned for another term of leadership service alongside Rodney Ewing, a geologist whose multidisciplinary research led to the development of techniques to predict the long-term behavior of materials used in radioactive waste disposal. Sagan and Ewing led the center together until Ewing’s passing in 2024.
CISAC’s co-director leadership structure has been in place since its founding in 1983, and reflects the belief that it takes scholars from different disciplines with different experiences, ideas, strengths, and interests to solve the most pressing security problems.
“We’re in a new global era where security, technology, geopolitics, and policy are more interconnected than ever before,” said Colin Kahl, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “CISAC is crucial to understanding that intersectionality and producing the knowledge we need to create a safer and more secure world. Scott has led this center with incredible vision, and I am fully confident that Jim, with his unique talents and expertise, will lead CISAC and its community into its next era of growth and world class research.”
CISAC’s mission is to produce policy-relevant research on international security problems, teach and train the next generation of security specialists, and inform policymaking in international security.
Things are changing fast in international security affairs. But CISAC has long been the place for high-quality research at the intersection of science, technology, and the politics of international security.
James Fearon
Co-director of CISAC
Under Ewing’s and Sagan’s leadership, CISAC has expanded to include new programs and initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific Policy Lab, led by Oriana Skylar Mastro, whose mission is to disseminate leading academic knowledge on Indo-Pacific security issues to policymakers and build connections between scholars and industry that promote innovation and strengthen regional security and prosperity. Similarly, the new India-U.S. Security Studies Fellowship allows engineers, scientists, historians, and social scientists the opportunity to focus on issues related to Indian and U.S. security issues in collaboration with the CISAC community.
“It's not clear how the U.S. and global partners can best deal with the complex security dilemmas emerging on the horizon,” said Sagan. “But that’s the role of independent thinking inside a university. We’re independent from bureaucratic inertia. We’re nonpartisan. We’re free to figure out what policies and strategies will lead to a more secure and peaceful world. That’s the goal.”
CISAC’s fellowship and teaching programs are instrumental in training the next generation of security studies specialists.
“CISAC showed me how to be a rigorous and curious academic committed to building community,” said Luis Rodriguez, a former CISAC fellow now teaching at George Mason University.
Ethan Lee (BS, ‘23) feels similarly. Currently an associate in the Defense, Emerging Technology, and Strategy Program at Harvard’s Belfer Center for International Affairs, Lee is an alum of CISAC’s undergraduate honors program, which was established in 2000 as a way of providing Stanford seniors from all disciplines the opportunity to conduct rigorous, scholarly research on international security issues.
“As a student, I felt both challenged and supported at CISAC,” recalled Lee. After graduation, Lee and Sagan co-authored an article on U.S. public opinion, law, and the use of military force against Iran, which is forthcoming in the journal Security Studies. “I have benefited tremendously from Scott’s generosity, and I know I'm just one of many students who have.”
Members of the 2014-2015 CISAC Honors Students cohort on a visit to the CIA to discuss their thesis topics with analysts. | Darren L. for the CIA
Alumni of CISAC’s undergraduate honors program and fellowships go on from Stanford to create a global network of policymakers.
“When I take students to the Pentagon or to think tanks in Washington, you meet our former fellows and honors students,” says Sagan. “In major universities across the country, the political science departments and the international security research centers are populated with scholars who came through Stanford. That's a legacy about which all the directors at CISAC should be very proud.”
Looking to the future, incoming co-director James Fearon acknowledges that while there are very real challenges ahead in international relations, there are also increased opportunities for scholars at places like CISAC to make an impact for good.
“Things are changing frighteningly fast in international security affairs, in alarming ways that are often linked with effects of rapid technological change,” Fearon acknowledges. “But CISAC has long been the place for high-quality research at the intersection of science, technology, and the politics of international security. I am excited by the opportunity and am greatly looking forward to working with a fantastic set of scholars building on this tradition in a new international context.”
To learn more about Fearon’s research and how geopolitics and technology are intersecting across borders, listen to the latest episode of the World Class podcast, hosted by FSI Director Colin Kahl.
Fearon’s co-director will be announced in November 2026.
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Pei-Chia Lan to Join FSI as the Wang and Chen Senior Fellow in Taiwan Studies
Pei-Chia’s research explores the complexity of intersecting social inequalities in everyday life, shaped by macropower dynamics such as globalization and international migration.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and the New Frontier of Artificial Intelligence in National Security
The heads of national security policy at OpenAI and Anthropic join Colin Kahl on the World Class podcast to discuss how AI is changing national security strategies and the nature of U.S.-China competition.
This paper considers whether financialization is a necessary stage of financial modernization. It argues that comparisons of financial systems should not stop at the structural distinction between bank finance and market finance, or between indirect and direct finance. Instead, they should examine how credit is identified, recognized, constrained, and circulated, and how credit risk is allocated. A bank-centered system produces credit through relational trust, organizational review, continuous monitoring, and the internalization of risk. A financialized system expands credit circulation through standardization, assetization, securitization, and market transactions. Evidence from Germany, Japan, China, and the United States suggests that bank-centered finance and financialization are not lower and higher stages of the same developmental path, but two different modes of credit organization. The key issue in financial modernization is not a choice between banks and markets, but how institutional boundaries are reorganized between credit embeddedness and credit mobility.
How do portrayals of foreign nations as threats shape public opinion on foreign policy and domestic racial attitudes? This study examines how portrayals of China as a threat influence Americans’ support for U.S. policy toward China and attitudes toward Asian Americans. A content analysis of CNN and Fox News transcripts from 2010 to 2020 shows that both outlets increasingly portrayed China as a threat, although Fox News more often emphasized threats to the United States, whereas CNN focused more on threats affecting other countries, international institutions, and populations. A national survey and a preregistered survey experiment further demonstrate that exposure to China threat narratives, regardless of whether the threat targets the United States or another country, increases support for hawkish U.S. foreign policy and heightens anti-Asian resentment, especially among Republicans. These findings show how portrayals of foreign threats shape public opinion and spill over into racial attitudes at home.
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The U.S. Alliance and Public Attitudes Toward China: Evidence from the Asia-Pacific Region
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Wang and Chen Senior Fellow in Taiwan Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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Pei-Chia Lan is the Wang and Chen Senior Fellow in Taiwan Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of the Taiwan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. As a qualitative sociologist, she studies the complexity of intersecting social inequalities in everyday life, shaped by macropower dynamics such as globalization and international migration.
Before joining Stanford in September 2026, Lan was a distinguished professor in the Department of Sociology at National Taiwan University, where she was the founding director of the Global Asia Research Center and recipient of five teaching awards.
Her scholarly articles have been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Migration Review, The Sociological Review, and Comparative Migration Studies, among others. She is also the author of several books in Chinese and English, the latter including Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford University Press, 2018), which examines how ethnic Chinese parents in Taiwan and the United States negotiate cultural differences and class inequality to raise children in the contexts of globalization and immigration; and Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke University Press, 2006), which won a Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars.
Lan received her doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University, and her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from National Taiwan University. She was a 2024-2025 Stanford-Taiwan Social Science Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; a 2011-2012 Yenching-Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University; a 2026-2007 Fulbright scholar at New York University; and a 2000-2001 postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Working Families, University of California, Berkeley. She also held visiting positions at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Kyoto University, Tubingen University, and IIAS at Leiden University.
She has actively engaged in international professional networks, serving as deputy editor of the journal Gender & Society and an editor or board member for other esteemed journals. Her research cultivates critical dialogue between academia and the public, and her expertise is sought by local government agencies and global organizations alike, as demonstrated by her role on the advisory board of UN Women.
Director, Taiwan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Photo above: Governor Neil Abercrombie of Hawai‘i, Dr. Susan Duggan, Executive Director of the Hawai‘i Language Roadmap Initiative, and Senator Daniel Akaka, 2013 | courtesy of Susan Duggan.
