Minxin Pei Keynote Speaker

Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and the director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College (2009-2019).

He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and sits on the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2019, Dr. Pei was the Library of Congress Chair on U.S.-China Relations. Before taking on his current role at Claremont McKenna College, Dr. Pei served as the director of the Asia Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. from 2004 to 2008.

Dr. Pei is a renowned expert on democratisation in developing countries, economic reform and governance in China, and U.S.-China relations. His research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Diplomat, Modern China, China Quarterly and Journal of Democracy.

As a respected Chinese-American academic, Dr Pei is a frequent commentator on BBC World News, Voice of America and National Public Radio. He is a regular opinion columnist for Bloomberg and has written for the Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, The South China Morning Post, International Herald Tribune, among other major newspapers.

Minxin Pei is the author of five highly lauded books on contemporary Chinese politics. China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (Harvard University Press, 2016), China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 2006), From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994) and The Sentinel State – Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China (Harvard University Press, 2024), and The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2025).

In 2008, Dr Pei was listed as Prospect’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals. He is a recipient of numerous prestigious fellowships, including the National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the McNamara Fellowship at the World Bank, and the Olin Faculty Fellowship of the Olin Foundation.