Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow 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 director of its China Program from 2003 to 2008. He was an opinion columnist for Bloomberg (2023–2024), and he is the author of several books: “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). Pei received his Ph.D. in government at Harvard and taught at Princeton University from 1992 to 1998.