pacificpower.foreignpolicy.comThe Pacific Power Index

Toggle navigation Pacific Power Index Media & Internet Corporations Culture & Entertainment Education Finance Military & Government From moguls to migrants, Harvard to Huawei: 50 people shaping the future of the U.S.-China relationship. By Tea Leaf Nation Staff | Portraits by Joel Kimmel | Icons by Elias Stein The world’s most important relationship isn’t the superpower showdown most analysts would have you believe. It’s a constantly shifting, symbiotic relationship shaped by millions of people, not just officials in Washington and Beijing. They range from the mayor of Wichita, Kansas to a hacker in Shanghai; from a self-described Berkeley hippie” who defends modern Chinese communism to the Beijing-based inventor of e-cigarettes; and from an American casino magnate reshaping China’s version of Las Vegas to an unsung migrant worker in the gritty town of Dongguan. But Foreign Policy’s inaugural Pacific Power Index is not a list of the 50 most powerful individuals in the U.S.-China relationship. Instead, it is a story about the power of that nexus itself, and its ability to impact American and Chinese lives. Each person recognized here has been profoundly shaped by the intersections — sometimes the collisions — of these two great powers. Taken together, their 50 stories illuminate the vast architecture that links the two countries, a largely invisible series of bridges spanning the realms of business, government, finance, military, media, and academia. Media & Internet The web’s power to connect people across vast geographical distances enables environmental activists like Peggy Liu and Ma Jun to pressure officials, and even Western companies, into doing more. It allows pro-Communist Party voices like the baby-faced nationalist blogger Zhou Xiaoping to find an audience on distant shores. And it allows curious Americans and Chinese a real-time look into the other’s public discourse. But the Internet’s disdain for borders terrifies the Chinese government, which continues to cling to the Marxist-Leninist notion that the press must serve only state interests. Authorities ruthlessly censor unfavorable coverage, effectively expel troublesome foreign journalists , and constantly patrol the (widely reviled) Great Firewall of censorship. The wall blocks "netizens," as China’s tens of millions of Internet-savvy youth are known, from easily accessing foreign sites like Facebook and Twitter, denying Americans and Chinese a shared digital public square. But the blockade is riddled with gaps. Wildly popular native web platforms like Weibo and WeChat — with about 167 million and 468 million monthly active users, respectively — allow investigative American reports like those on the family wealth of party leaders to leak back in to the mainland. Truth has a way of going viral. Eric X. Li ChinaYuan Li ChinaMelissa Chan United StatesZhou Xiaoping ChinaLu Wei ChinaJoshua Wong ChinaMa Jun ChinaPeggy Liu ChinaJessica Beinecke United StatesKim Lee ChinaBill Bishop ChinaXiao Qiang United StatesCorporations Since economic reforms began in late 1978 under then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, many of China’s now 1.3 billion energetic and passionate citizens have embraced doing business the capitalist way with gusto, resourcefulness, and a distinct Chinese flair. With the fast rise of Chinese companies and an exploding class of Chinese nouveaux riches, it’s sometimes hard to tell at this point whether American or Chinese society is the more corporatized. The hundreds of billions of dollars in transactions the bilateral relationship generates each year have touched every facet of life in both countries. American conglomerate DuPont exports feed for pigs in Hunan, where the villages are emptied of young farmhands who have become the migrant workers who assemble iPhones for export to North Carolina. Chinese-made telecom switches process (and perhaps snoop on) orders sent to e-commerce behemoth Alibaba from an American (or is that Chinese?) ThinkPad set on a dinner table in Oakland. White-collar wage slaves in Shanghai shake off the morning cobwebs by lining up for Starbucks coffee, while workers in Tucson churn out cheap solar panels for distant Chinese bosses. Sun Yafang ChinaSheldon Adelson United StatesJack Ma ChinaChristine Lu United StatesRobert Tong United StatesThe Migrant Worker ChinaLi Hejun ChinaBelinda Wong ChinaYang Yuanqing ChinaWilliam Niebur ChinaZhang Jianqiu ChinaCulture & Entertainment Unlocking the immense artistic potential implicit in the space where two great nations meet requires first transcending the divide between two devilishly different languages — hence the crucial role of prolific translators like Howard Goldblatt and Internet-age language deejays like Jessica Beinecke . There will someday be a great work — or pop phenomenon — that captures the imagination of both peoples while drawing deeply from both cultures. And perhaps that day isn’t far away — Hollywood is certainly hoping to crack the code first. But for that to happen, Chinese cultural gatekeepers like China Film Group Chairman La Peikang will have to do more than embrace Western culture on its own merits; they will have to recognize that their own censorship hinders the flowering of a modern Chinese culture capable of achieving global resonance. Until that time, American pop culture will continue to exert a curiously powerful hold in China, from pirated DVDs of Hollywood blockbusters traded on the streets to the smooth jazz of Seattle-born saxophonist Kenny G. Yep: He’s still big in China. Jinqing Caroline Cai ChinaHan Li ChinaThe Anonymous Christian Missionary ChinaLa Peikang ChinaKobe Bryant United StatesKenny G United StatesHoward Goldblatt United StatesEducation It’s hard to imagine U.S. President Barack Obama sending his daughters to enroll at Beijing’s elite Peking University. (Oh, how the Tea Party would pounce.) But the reverse already happened: In 2010, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s daughter, Xi Mingze, enrolled as an undergraduate student at Harvard , a brand name that hundreds of millions of Chinese — even those living in rural whistle-stops — would instantly recognize. The younger Xi joins a massive influx of Chinese students who, over the past decade, have penetrated deep into the U.S. ivory tower, from the dormitories of Stanford and MIT to the classrooms and mess halls of elite prep schools like Exeter and Deerfield. In the 2013-2014 school year alone, nearly 275,000 Chinese came stateside to study. Although more than 100,000 American students have done the reverse as of 2014, the relationship remains mostly one-sided. That’s partly because U.S. education is valued in China for allowing students more freedom and creativity, as well as a leg up in job searches. The trend isn’t entirely new, however: In 1854, a Guangdong native named Yung Wing graduated from Yale and returned to China to play a key part in its modernization. Ever since, education has traditionally provided a relative safe haven for the bilateral relationship, even when military and political ties strain. But that might be changing due to accusations , some legitimate, that Chinese applicants are cheating their way into U.S. institutions of higher learning. Meanwhile, China’s own soft-power education initiative has gone over like a lead balloon. Its government-funded Confucius Institutes, which teach language and culture at over 400 institutions worldwide, suffered a withering critique in June when an open letter from the American Association of University Professors argued that the institutes are allowed to ignore academic freedom.” Anthony Saich United StatesXu Lin ChinaStephen Schwarzman United StatesZhang Xin ChinaKelly Yang ChinaRichard Levin United StatesAndrea Pasinetti ChinaYu Minhong ChinaFinance If he were alive today, Mao Zedong would surely condemn modern China’s culture of lucre-lust — but even the ruthlessly doctrinaire Communist Party chairman might crack a smile at the ability of Chinese cash to...