China vs. Liberal Democracy | Munk Debates

Zhang Weiwei

"China’s model for fighting COVID-19 is based on the overall idea that people's lives matter most. The Western model is essentially about business and commercial interests."

Zhang Weiwei, a leading thinker from China, is a professor of international relations, director of the China Institute at Fudan University and a board member of China’s National Think Tanks Council. He holds a PhD in international relations from Geneva University and worked as a senior English interpreter for Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders in the mid-1980s.
 
Zhang has written extensively, in Chinese and English, on China’s political and economic reforms, the China model of development, China’s foreign policy and comparative political governance. He is a proponent of China’s emergence as a civilizational state, and one of the foremost analysts of China’s influence on the global stage.
 
He is the author of the best-selling and award-winning China Trilogy, comprised of The China Ripple, The China Wave and The China Horizon. English editions of the latter two were published in 2012 and 2016 respectively.
 
So far, Zhang’s work and life adventures have taken him to over 100 countries, and counting.

Timothy Garton Ash

"Some of the countries which have handled coronavirus best of all are democracies: South Korea, New Zealand, and most interestingly, Taiwan, a Chinese democracy."

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies, University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of ten books of contemporary history and political writing which have explored many facets of the history of Europe over the last half-century. They include The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, The File: A Personal History, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent, and Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name. He also writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian, which is widely syndicated, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, amongst other journals.

From 2001 to 2006, he was Director of the European Studies Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he now directs the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom. Its Free Speech Debate research project, built around the 13 language website freespeechdebate.com, contributed to the writing of his book Free Speech: Ten Principles For a Connected World. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, & Prague was recently reissued with a new chapter exploring the 30 years since 1989 in post-communist Europe. Prizes he has received for his writing include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Prix Européen de l'Essai and the George Orwell Prize. In 2017, he was awarded the International Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen, for services to European unity.