Should the World Fear China? w/ Zhou Bo, Nigel Inkster & Tian Shichen

The world of 2025 looks very different to the world of 1995. One central debate is the growing global role of China – and what this means for states and peoples around the world. Join two leading Chinese thinkers and former director of operations and intelligence for the British Secret Intelligence Service to discuss this theme.

About Zhou Bo’s book

For Washington, China is a strategic competitor: the only country with both the will to reshape the world order and, increasingly, the means to do so. For Europe, the People’s Republic is a ‘partner for cooperation, an economic competitor and a systemic rival’. For NATO, it is a ‘decisive enabler’ of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Yet Beijing’s image is far more positive in the Global South, of which the PRC considers itself a part.

Zhou Bo’s essays unpack China’s own view of its role today. The PRC is operating not only in a world becoming less Western, but—more importantly—a West becoming less Western; and the key to its outlook lies in Africa, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific as much as in Europe and the White House.

Are Moscow and Beijing really so closely aligned? Where are Sino-Indian relations headed? Is China a new Cold War foe for the West? Or will economic ties inevitably bring the two powers closer together?

About the speakers

Zhou Bo is a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy Tsinghua University. He is internationally recogniSed as a leading voice of China on global security issues in international media. He has served in the PLA for 41 years handling China’s mil-to-mil relations with foreign countries.

Nigel Inkster is Senior Advisor to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and Director for Geopolitics and Intelligence at Enodo Economics. In IISS he worked first as Director for Transnational Threats and Political Risk then as Director for Cyber Security and Future Conflict. In the latter capacity he was involved in para-diplomatic dialogues on cybersecurity and military cyber stability with China and Russia. He also served from 2017 to 2019 as a Commissioner on the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. Prior to joining IISS he served for thirty-one years in the British Secret Intelligence Service. From 2004 to 2006 he was Assistant Chief and Director for Operations and Intelligence.

Tian Shichen is the Founder and President of the Global Governance Institution (GGI). He holds a PhD in Public International Law from Wuhan University and an LLM in Public International Law from the University of Nottingham, where he was a UK FCO Chevening Scholar. Dr Tian’s academic research focuses on maritime security and law, the international law of the sea, the law of armed conflict, and international human rights law. He has published extensively on these topics in recent years. Prior to his full retirement from the Chinese Ministry of National Defense (MND), Captain Tian served as Head of the Department of Crisis Management and Media Relations at the MND Information Office. Over the course of his career, he held a range of operational, legal, and academic positions within the PLA Army, Navy, and MND headquarters.

Alexander Evans (@aiaevans) is Professor in Practice of Public Policy and Associate Dean of the School of Public Policy at the LSE. He is a former adviser to the Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street and Director Cyber at the Foreign Office where he was the U.K.’s chief international cyber policy negotiator. He served as a senior adviser in the U.S. Department of State during the first Obama Administration and led the U.N. Security Council expert group on Daesh, Al Qaida and the Taliban.