Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
China Initiative

Research

The Watson China Initiative has ambitious goals for programmatic growth and institution building, ones that we are committed to achieving within the next five years. However, our scholarly mission cannot wait. With existing talent on campus and established partnerships with colleagues in China, we are already deeply engaged in several key research efforts.

China and the Development of Technologies for Global Energy Sustainability

China and the Development of Technologies for Global Energy Sustainability

Watson Institute director Edward Steinfeld and Brown postdoc Jonas Nahm, in collaboration with engineering faculty, are exploring the process by which Chinese, American and European companies engage in collaborative innovation and product development in the energy technology domain. How do firms work with – and learn from – one another? How do the capabilities of firms relate to the social institutions and public policies of their respective home countries? How can firm-level collaboration be understood in the context of other phenomena such as geopolitical rivalry, trade wars, accusations of intellectual property theft and commercial competition?

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Comparative “Gilded Ages”: China, India, and the United States

Comparative 'Gilded Ages': China, India, and the United States

Brown faculty members Ashutosh Varshney, James Morone and Edward Steinfeld co-direct a research program on rapid industrialization and rapid urbanization in the contemporary experiences of China and India, and the historical (late 19th century) experience of the United States. The research, using the urban municipality as the level of analysis, examines comparative patterns of business-government relations, public goods provision, government accountability and social stability. To what extent can we discern common experiences across the three national cases and two major time periods? To what extent are outcomes influenced by institutions of governance, cultural factors, or technological advancements?

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Sex Work, Labor Migration, and Human Trafficking and Global China

As Director of the Human Trafficking Research Cluster at Brown's Ruth J Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Elena Shih's research explores issues of gender, sex, labor, and migration in myriad contexts. Since 2004, Shih has worked on the China-Myanmar border exploring how regional anti-trafficking initiatives map onto infrastructural development--including the Belt and Road Initiative--in Ruili City. Between 2020-2022, Shih worked with the Federation of Garment Worker's Myanmar, the country's first feminist labor union, using op-ed workshops as a way to document the precipitous rise of worker organizing in Myanmar's garment industry, and subsequent repression throughout Covid-19 and the military coup. In North America, Shih works closely with Red Canary Song (RCS), a grassroots collective of migrant Asian sex workers and massage workers. As a member of RCS Chinese outreach team, Shih's research documents how the policing of Asian massage work as a site of human trafficking stems from structural anti-Asian racism as well as state and humanitarian violence. Op-eds about her work advocating for the power of worker organizing and decriminalization of unlicensed massage appear in the New York Times, Al Jazeera and Providence Journal.

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China’s Key Bilateral Relationships

China Initiative director Lyle Goldstein is leading an effort to explore the foundational links that undergird contemporary Chinese foreign policy. A major part of this effort is devoted to probing the emergent China-Russia relationship and its meaning for the future of world order and for U.S. national security. This project investigates China-Russia cooperation in a variety of contexts, including in the Arctic, Northeast Asia, Central Asia, and throughout the wide expanse of the Global South. Other extremely noteworthy bilateral relationships in this investigation include China’s ties to Australia, Japan, India, Indonesia, and South Korea. The effort asks how these vital relationships can help shape a regional order conducive to stability and peace.

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Digital Surveillance and Collective Action in China

China has long been portrayed as epitomizing digital Big Brother among journalists and policymakers, but rigorous studies examining whether and how digital surveillance impacts collective action in China are limited. Key questions remain: are these surveillance techniques really useful in the first place? Will technology replace human security agents, or do they complement each other? What unique roles do different digital technologies (e.g., AI, big data) play in surveillance? And how does China's surveillance situation compare in the global context? To answer these questions, Professor Zhang has constructed innovative datasets using computational social science methods. Zhang applied deep learning algorithms to identify 130,000 protest events from Chinese social media and constructed global surveillance camera density measures from 17 million street view images. These datasets enable Zhang to empirically investigate the causal connection between digital surveillance and collective action in China.

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