Continuing our exclusive series of Lunch Briefings on the international upheaval caused by Trump’s first months in office, a trio of Institute experts will discuss the impacts of Trump’s policies on US-China relations as well as the challenges and opportunities facing China.

Adopting a historical approach, Jan Kiely will assess the rupture to decades of intertwining US-China relations beyond trade, as well as the roles played by the Communist Party and the military in this moment of challenges and opportunities.

Sociocultural anthropologist, Minhua Ling will address the topic by focusing first on the meaning of "Made in China" by discussing the impacts of the tariff war on China's (migrant) labor conditions, before then considering what the American Dream might now resemble for Chinese students under Trump 2.0.

Finally, from an economic angle, Yuan Zi will elaborate on the key facts on China–US trade, before considering China’s economic policy response to Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs.

Biographies

Jan Kiely is Senior Lecturer in the International History and Politics Department.  A historian of modern China with over four-decades of experience in China, he was formerly Co-Director and Associate Professor of the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies, and Director and Professor of the Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Minhua Ling is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute and a specialist in the areas of mobility, urbanisation, food and health, socio-ecological sustainability, and sociocultural transformation in China and East Asia. Prior to joining the Geneva Graduate Institute, Dr. Ling was a 2022-23 Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong until 2022.

Yuan Zi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Her research spans international trade, production networks, spatial economics, and the Chinese economy, with a focus on applied, policy-relevant insights. Prior to joining the Graduate Institute, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Oslo.

Moderated by Annouk Buess, Master Student in International History and Politics