Adam Webb is Resident Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University’s Hopkins-Nanjing Centre. He received his AB in Social Studies from Harvard and his PhD in Politics from Princeton. He was also a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and taught at Princeton and Harvard, before coming to Nanjing in 2008. He is the author of Beyond the Global Culture War (2006) and A Path of Our Own: An Andean Village and Tomorrow’s Economy of Values (2009). More recently, he has been exploring alternative views of global citizenship grounded in the great traditions, and the rise of social movements with broader transnational horizons in the Global South. These projects have brought him into contact with diverse political currents on the ground in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia
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China’s rising influence in recent years has attracted plenty of attention, and much speculation about its reach extending ever more deeply into distant corners of the globe. But most of that attention has focused on great-power competition between China and the West. Most of humanity lives neither in China nor in the West, and the demographic and economic weight of the Global South is likely to increase markedly in coming decades. On this shifting global landscape, how China engages with the societies of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia may be decisive in easing, or frustrating, its global rise. Adam Webb will offer a provocative perspective on the blind spots and mismatched values that increasingly may hamper Chinese soft power in the Global South, and therefore its future global influence.
