Academic Programs From
Case Western Reserve University

Bringing a diverse range of academic perspectives on local, national, and global issues to audiences around the world.

Case Western Reserve University

frame image
frame image

Programs for the Topic ‘Foreign Policy’


Thursday, February 27th, 2020


Building the Post-1949 State in China and Taiwan

Julia Strauss, Ph.D.
Professor of Chinese Politics SOAS
University of London

Thursday, February 27, 2020
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Tinkham Veale University Center, Room 134
11038 Bellflower Rd, Cleveland, OH 44106

Building a new state is hard. A governing apparatus must be built, a populace convinced (not always willingly!) and a sense of what the state is and how it should act must make it intelligible to both its agents and citizens or subjects. How a state is built shapes its future – and is shaped by the past. Professor Strauss shows how somewhat similar challenges and inherited understandings led to both commonalities and differences in how authority was consolidated on both sides of the Straits. That has lessons for understanding both China and state-building.

This program was made possible by the generosity of Ms. Eloise Briskin and sponsored by the Case Western Reserve University Center for Policy Studies

About Our Guests

Julia C. Strauss joined the faculty of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London in 1994, and currently serves as Professor of Chinese Politics. From 2002 – 2011 she also served as editor of The China Quarterly. Professor Strauss earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992 and has published widely on 20th century state building and institutional development in China and Taiwan. This includes her new book, State Formation in China and Taiwan: Bureaucracy, Campaign and Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2019) as well as her previous Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927-1940 (Oxford University Press, 1998). She co-edited, with Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, Staging Politics: Power and Performance in Asia and Africa (I.B. Tauris, 2007). As part of her work with The China Quarterly, Professor Strauss also co-edited special volumes on China and Africa, China and Latin America, Gender in contemporary China, The History of the People’s Republic, and Culture in the Contemporary PRC.