Historian Stephen Kotkin explains how the West got China and the CCP wrong (Hoover Institution)

This video presents edited clips from an interview with Professor Stephen Kotkin, one of America’s preeminent historians, academic and author. Kotkin has been a professor of history and International Affairs at Princeton since 1989, and is a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. The interview— entitled “Five Questions for Stephen Kotkin” — was conducted in January, 2022 by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution, and touched on a range of topics, including Russia, Putin and Ukraine. This video has edited out the parts of the original one hour interview to include only the segments pertaining to China. Topics include: the lessons the CCP and Xi Jinping learned from the collapse of the USSR, how the West got it wrong in assuming China would liberalize politically with economic growth and integration into global economy, the biggest threat to communist systems and their monopoly on power, and more. To buy Stephen Kotkin’s books (and Kindle e-book or audio versions), click the