Please note that this registration is for the livestream attendance option. By selecting this option you will be emailed a link to join the online broadcast; you will NOT receive a ticket for admission to the Lebanon Opera House.

Series presented in conjunction with the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.

China and the United States employ different approaches and strategies in their efforts to win hearts and minds. Factors such as cultural context, political climate, and individual perspectives play significant roles in shaping public opinion, which can be influenced by various factors, and perceptions can change over time.

Bruce Stokes is a visiting senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. He is currently directing GMF’s work on war insurance for Ukrainian reconstruction.

In 2022, he co-authored GMF’s Designing Ukraine’s Recovery in the Spirit of the Marshall Plan and served as the senior editor of GMF’s 2022 Transatlantic Trends public opinion survey. From 2019-2021 he was the executive director of GMF’s Transatlantic Task Force and author of its final recommendations.

Previously, Stokes was the director of Global Economic Attitudes at the Pew Research Center in Washington, DC, where he helped create and authored many of Pew’s global surveys, including many on China. For 23 years he was the international economics correspondent for the National Journal.  He is also a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a member, and currently an associate fellow at Chatham House in London.

In 1987-1989, Stokes was a Japan Society Fellow, living in and reporting from Japan, In 1997, he was a member of President Clinton's Commission on United States-Pacific Trade and Investment Policy and he wrote its final report, "Building American Prosperity in the 21st Century."

He is co-author of the book America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked (Times Books, 2006), and author of numerous German Marshall Fund and Council on Foreign Relations publications on international trade.

Stokes is a graduate of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Maria Repnikova is an expert on Chinese political communication, an Associate Professor in Global Communication, and the inaugural William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. This year, she is also a non-residential Wilson China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She has written widely on China's media politics, including propaganda, critical journalism, digital nationalism, and soft power. Dr. Repnikova is the author of the award-winning book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge 2017), as well as the recent, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge Global China Element Series). Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic, amongst other outlets. Other than working on China, Repnikova does comparative work on information politics in China and Russia. Most recently, she has been researching and completing a monograph on Chinese soft power in Africa, with a focus on Ethiopia. Dr. Repnikova holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In the past, she was a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2020-2021), a visiting fellow at the African Studies Center at Beijing University (2019), and a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication (2014-2016).