Scholar Talk: Scott Moore (Kentucky & Merton 2009) on 'China and the Global Future: The Case for Optimism'

China and the Global Future: The Case for Optimism

It has become almost an article of faith that China's rise is destined to produce confrontation, it not outright conflict, with the west. But there is hope amidst the gloom. China's transition to an innovation- and services-driven economy will require fundamental institutional and political reforms which are likely to produce greater convergence with those of the west. At the same time, global public goods like climate change mitigation and disease prevention remain powerful impetuses for multilateral cooperation, and the development of new technologies like autonomous weapons and gene editing call for a new phase of norm-creation to rival, if not exceed, that which produced the Geneva Conventions and other fundamental elements of the international order. This talk will lay out an optimistic scenario for China's role in the world, and explore how it might be given the greatest chance of coming to pass.

Scott Moore (Kentucky & Merton 2009)

A Director of the Penn Global China Program at the University of Pennsylvania, a new initiative focused on understanding emerging challenges facing China and the world, including climate change, artificial intelligence, and gene editing. Moore’s own research focuses on environmental issues, especially climate change and water scarcity. His first book, Subnational Hydropolitics: Conflict, Cooperation, and Institution-Building in Shared River Basins (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines how climate change and other pressures affect the likelihood of conflict over water within countries, and his other research and commentary has appeared in Nature, Foreign Affairs, The China Quarterly, and The New York Times among other outlets. Moore was previously a Young Professional with the World Bank Group and Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer for China at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked extensively on the Paris Agreement on climate change. Previously, Moore was Giorgio Ruffolo Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He holds DPhil and MSc degrees from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton, and an undergraduate degree from Princeton.