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Dr. Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. In 2019 he was the inaugural Library of Congress Chair on U.S.-China Relations. Prior to joining Claremont McKenna College in 2009, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as its director of the China Program from 2003 to 2008. He was an opinion columnist for Bloomberg (2023-2024) and the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (1994); China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (2006); China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016); The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China (2024); and The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (2025).
Minxin received his Ph.D. in government at Harvard and taught at Princeton University (1992-1997). He is the recipient of the National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the Robert McNamara Fellowship of the World Bank, and the Olin Faculty Fellowship. His op-eds and columns have appeared in the New York Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, FT, Nikkei Asian Review, Project Syndicate, the Economist, Bloomberg, and many other publications.
The topic of his talk will be: “China’s new Taiwan strategy: Could it trigger a confrontation with the US similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis?”
As the US-China relationship turned increasingly adversarial and the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) cemented its political dominance on Taiwan in recent years, China has adopted a new strategy toward Taiwan. Mixing information warfare, economic pressure, and escalating gray zone tactics, China’s new Taiwan strategy aims to impose rising costs on Taiwan short of war while maintaining a full range of options to fulfill the objective of national reunification. Although the likelihood of a full-blown invasion and a pre-planned large-scale military attack or blockade remains low in the short to medium term, the aggressiveness of Chinese hybrid warfare, the defiance and political tactics of the current Taiwanese administration, and the dynamics of US-China strategic competition in an environment of mutual hostility and distrust have significantly increased the risks of a confrontation similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis in the coming years.
