In the late 1990s, Keyu Jin got a taste of what she calls the West’s “simplistic understanding of life in China” while attending high school in New York. She had recently arrived from China, and classmates pestered her with questions: “When will China become a democracy?” “How do you wake up in the morning knowing that you can’t elect your own president?”

Years later, Jin – now an economics professor at the London School of Economics – set out to correct Western stereotypes of China in her 2023 book, The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism.

Foreign Policy