Episode #49 - December 2022

Over the past two years the Chinese Communist Party has worked to keep the COIVD pandemic at bay through a series of policies requiring strict quarantines, sometimes of millions of people at the same time, that reduced the opportunity for community spread. Over the past couple of weeks, the Chinese public has come out into the streets to demand the end of the Dynamic Zero COVID polices, as they has suffered too much in this time. From being locked in their homes, sometimes with little to no food, to being forced into quarantine centers without warning, as well as an economy in decline, the protests were a pressure release that looked for substantive change in a number of areas of Chinese life. In today's episode we speak with Dr. Chris Reardon of the University of New Hampshire about what drove people into the streets and what the response from the CCP may look like.  

Lawrence C. Reardon received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. He wrote The Reluctant Dragon: The Impact of Crisis Cycles on Chinese Foreign Economic Policy (University of Washington Press, 2001), and has written on China's foreign policy for China Quarterly, The Journal of Contemporary China, China Business Review, and The Journal of Shenzhen University. He translated two volumes of key Chinese policy documents concerning China's coastal development strategy (Chinese Law and Government, 1994). He also publishes on the politics of religion in Asian states (Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 2011), co-edited the volume, The Catholic Church and the Nation-State (Georgetown University Press, 2006). He is currently completing a follow-up manuscript on Chinese foreign economic policy in the 1980s, and an historical analysis of Chinese government religious policy. He is a research associate at Harvard University's Fairbank Center, was a Luce fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a special researcher at Jinan University. At the University of New Hampshire, he is an associate professor of political science, and is the coordinator for Asian studies.

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