Is It Ethical To Cooperate With Chinese State Institutions To Secure Incremental Change?

Open to Debate

News, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As democratic governments, universities, and civil society organizations grapple with how to engage China, an ethical question persists: should cooperation with Chinese state institutions, which involve every industry from education to commerce, be pursued as a pathway to gradual, meaningful progress, or does such engagement ultimately legitimize repression and undermine fundamental freedoms? In partnership with the Human Rights Foundation, we debate: Is It Ethical to Cooperate with Chinese State Institutions to Secure Incremental Change? Arguing Yes: Joanna Chiu, Managing Partner of Nüora Global Advisors; Author of "China Unbound" Arguing No: Isaac Stone Fish, CEO and Founder of Strategy Risks Emmy award-winning journalist John Donvan moderates Join the conversation on Substack—share your perspective on this episode and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for curated insights from our debaters, moderators, and staff. Follow us on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and TikTok to stay connected with our mission and ongoing debates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:36.0	This is open to debate. I'm John Donva, and hi everybody.
0:39.1	Today's debate was produced at the Human Rights Foundation's Oslo Freedom Forum.
0:43.5	That's an international conference on human rights that takes place every year in Oslo, Norway.
0:48.4	It's a really special event.
0:50.5	And the debate we brought to their stage, which took place in the Oslo Concert Hall, was about China and about one of the most sticky questions facing the human rights community.
1:00.4	How do you deal with this massive authoritarian world power, China, whose track record on civil liberties and repression is by all accounts getting worse, not better?
1:10.4	So that's the ethical dilemma we took
1:12.3	to the stage, and that's how we framed it as a question of ethics. Let's get to it.
1:18.6	So we have two debaters today to argue this motion. Is it ethical to cooperate with Chinese state
1:24.5	institutions to secure incremental change? A note on some definitions.
1:28.8	When we refer to Chinese state institutions,
1:30.8	we are applying a broad brush.
1:33.3	So we are including the realms of education and investment
1:36.8	and joint research and trade and the arts,
1:40.4	essentially any aspect of life controlled
1:42.2	or influenced by the Chinese Communist Party,
1:44.1	which I think both of our debaters agree is pretty much or almost everything.
	...

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