Minxin Pei

Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. In 2019 he was the inaugural Library of Congress Chair on U.S.-China Relations. Prior to joining Claremont McKenna College in 2009, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as its director of the China Program from 2003 to 2008. He was an opinion columnist for Bloomberg (2023-2024) and the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (1994); China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (2006); China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016); The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China (2024); and The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (2025).

Minxin received his Ph.D. in government at Harvard and taught at Princeton University (1992-1997). He is the recipient of the National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the Robert McNamara Fellowship of the World Bank, and the Olin Faculty Fellowship. His op-eds and columns have appeared in the New York Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, FT, Nikkei Asian Review, Project Syndicate, the Economist, Bloomberg, and many other publications.