Susan A. Thornton appointed Nonresident Senior Fellow

Susan A. Thornton has been appointed Nonresident Senior Fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings. In 2018, Thornton retired from a 28-year diplomatic career that focused primarily on East and Central Asia. She served most recently as the Acting Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

In addition, we are pleased to welcome three additional scholars to the John L. Thornton China Center as part of the recently announced partnership with the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School: Paul Gewirtz (Nonresident Senior Fellow), Mira Rapp-Hooper (Nonresident Senior Fellow), and Robert D. Williams (Nonresident Fellow).

Does Trump have an appetite for a U.S.-China trade deal? As Chinese Vice Premier Liu He leads a delegation to Washington this week for trade negotiations between China and the United States, expectations are low that a comprehensive deal can be reached. “At the end of the week we’ll probably get some fairly bland statements suggesting that talks made progress,” David Dollar predicted in an interview with Bloomberg. In the same article, Cheng Li pointed out that any deal will depend on Trump, who may see little reason to pursue anything generous.

Arrest of Huawei CFO viewed suspiciously from Beijing. Chinese leaders are skeptical of the motivations underlying the U.S. provisional request to Canada for the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, who is also the daughter of the company’s founder and CEO. “From the Chinese perspective, they think the whole thing is a conspiracy against China. It’s a national humiliation,” Cheng Li told The Globe and Mail in an interview.

U.S. business community has grown impatient over China’s repeated reform promises. Although U.S. business leaders may not agree with President Trump’s tactics in the U.S.-China trade dispute, they do hope that China will finally deliver on long-promised reforms, Ryan Hass told the Financial Times.