CWP alum Patricia Kim on the Sinica Podcast 'Taking Stock of Trump's Second-Term China Policy'

This week on Sinica, I speak with Patricia Kim, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, where she focuses on U.S. policy toward China and the broader Asia Pacific. One year into Donald Trump’s second term, Pattie and her colleague Joyce Yang have published a comprehensive Brookings assessment titled “Making America Great Again? Evaluating Trump’s China strategy at the one-year mark,” which examines whether the administration’s stated objectives on reindustrialization, AI leadership, strategic dependence, and global standing are actually being met. We discuss the paradox of Trump’s China policy (which is surprising consistency in goals despite the absence of a formal strategy document), with its mixed results on economic rebalancing and supply chain security, the troubling deterioration in U.S.-China diplomatic and military channels, and why the administration’s approach to allies and partners may be undermining its own objectives. Pattie brings analytical discipline and empirical rigor to debates that are often long on rhetoric and short on evidence, cutting through a lot of noise to assess what’s actually working, what isn’t, and where the strategy is running up against reality.

Brookings' Patricia Kim Takes Stock of Trump's Second-Term China Policy

Patricia M. Kim is a fellow at Brookings and holds a joint appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for Asia Policy Studies. She is an expert on Chinese foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and the politics and security of East Asia. At Brookings, she co-leads the Global China Project and the Brookings-CSIS Project on Advancing Collaboration in an Era of Strategic Competition.

Previously, Kim served as a senior China specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where she directed a project on U.S.-China strategic stability and served as the principal investigator for a major report on China’s growing footprint in Africa and the Middle East. She was also a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, International Security Program Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program at Princeton University.

Kim’s writing and analysis have been widely featured in prominent journals and media outlets such as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She frequently briefs U.S. government officials in her areas of expertise and has testified before the House Intelligence Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade.

Kim received her doctoral degree from the Department of Politics at Princeton University and her bachelor’s degree with highest distinction in political science and Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and proficient in Japanese. Kim is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

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