Videos
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ChinaFile Presents: Shifting Terrain in U.S.-China Relations, Xi Jinping’s Vision for China’s Future -
When Innovation Meets Authoritarianism
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Julian Gewirtz: "Unlikely Partners"
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US Perceptions of China's Middle East Presence
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Databite No. 120: Logic Magazine, Chinese Tech: The New Global Map -
Can the Next Generation in China and America Share the Future? (Full Session)
Learn More About Julian Gewirtz
Julian Gewirtz, a scholar at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and former Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the National Security Council, is one of today’s sharpest minds on geopolitical, economic and regional issues across the world.
As a former senior foreign policy official at the White House and global diplomat at the State Department during the Biden administration, Gewirtz brings first-hand knowledge of the strategies shaping today’s geopolitical standoff and sheds light on the future of supply chains, tech policy and trade brinkmanship.
An expert on U.S. foreign policy, Chinese politics and the next chapter of U.S.-China economic competition who was named one of the “50 people shaping our society in 2025” by The Washington Post, he speaks with rare clarity about how China’s leadership sees the world and what it means for corporate risk, regulation and opportunity across sectors. Author of the highly praised books “Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s,” and “Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China,” and a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has taught at Harvard and Columbia, he uses vivid examples drawn from the past and present of US-China relations to explore how former partners became rivals whose competition is defining this century.
As finance, manufacturing and global markets react to shifting tariffs and intensifying rhetoric, Gewirtz equips decision makers with a grounded, policy-informed view of what might happen next and how to prepare.
Gewirtz received his doctoral degree in modern Chinese history in 2018 from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his undergraduate degree from Harvard College in 2013.
Julian Gewirtz is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group®.
Julian Gewirtz Can Address These Topics and More Through Keynotes, Workshops and Advisory Services
- On the Precipice: Where Are U.S.-China Relations Heading?
- What Xi Jinping Wants
- China’s Quest to “Catch Up and Surpass” in Advanced Technology
- How the Chinese Communist Party Controls History
- Why China’s Growing Global Ambitions Matter
- The Future of American Power in a Multipolar World
Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s
(Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, October 2022)
Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China
(Harvard University Press, January 2017)
"China-watching wunderkind Julian Gewirtz" (SupChina) has been praised for his "broad vision and imagination" (Los Angeles Review of Books), for speaking "with fluency and grace" (Washington Post), and for research that is "a gift to our understanding of today’s China" (Evan Osnos). He was recently named one of "50 people shaping our society in 2025" by the Washington Post.
"The diplomat, the historian and the poet each rely on words as their primary tools, their vocabularies sometimes comically distinct. Julian Gewirtz speaks each of these languages with fluency and grace. He is a diplomat who served as senior director for China and Taiwan affairs at the National Security Council during the Biden administration and who argues that making nice is not the path to easing tensions between the rival powers. He is a historian who asks whether Americans have gotten China wrong. And he creates poetry that pierces the reserve of his other forms..."
"Gewirtz [has had] influence as a scholar and a government leader... Gewirtz the historian sees large without losing sight of turning points that could have turned otherwise. Gewirtz the poet sees small, limning his subjects’ constraints without sacrificing their freedom. As the historian searches for coherence, the poet weaves possible futures... The grace of the historian poet is to caution us that neither individual nor communal history is foreordained."
"For China scholars, Gewirtz’s work is notable not just for its research but for what it possibly says about the Biden administration’s China policy."
"Connecting world history, development economics, and political theory with a lyrical style, Gewirtz has written an exceptionally wide-ranging book for a new generation."
“I lived in 1980s China and covered it for the New York Times, yet I learned so much from Gewirtz’s outstanding, brilliantly researched book about the infighting in that period that resulted in the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen democracy movement. Many of those Chinese debates of the 1980s about political and economic reform persist today in Beijing and will determine the country’s future―and that’s why this book is so important."
