Experts & Speakers Faculty Profile
Scott Kennedy
Interests:
Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, government-business relationsEducation:
- M.A. in International Relations at Johns Hopkins University
- Ph.D. in Political Science at George Washington University, 2002
Background:
Professor Scott Kennedy's interest in East Asia comes from two sources; the first is his interest in world affairs in general, and the second is his family's experience in the region. His grandmother was stationed in Macau for the Christian Science Monitor in the early 1970s and his uncle has lived in Japan for most of the past 40 years. Further prompted by my grandfather, an engineer who had traveled to Asia, he tried a Chinese language course my second year in college. But it was a semester in Beijing in 1988 - meeting average Chinese, riding on trains, and bicycling down Changan Avenue through Tiananmen Square - that sealed his fate as someone who wanted to make China a part of my career.
Since then, Kennedy's research interests have focused in on two areas, both of which cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. The first is political economy. His dissertation, which he is currently revising into a book, examined to what extent economic factors affect the ways in which companies lobby the government and if that in turn shapes which companies have the greatest influence over public policy. My favorite part of the project were the interviews, an exhilarating experience and an invaluable tool given the potential weaknesses of macro quantitative data in China.
He is interested in questions of foreign policy and U.S.-East Asian relations. He recently edited a book, China Cross Talk, on the American debate over China policy since normalization. His interest in U.S.-East Asian relations derives partly from my time at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
