Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College.  He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.  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 its director of the China Program from 2003 to 2008.  He was an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University from 1992 to 1998.  He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University in 1991.

He is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994), China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 2006), China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (Harvard University Press, 2016) and The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China  (Harvard University Press, 2024). 

Dr. Pei is an opinion columnist for Bloomberg. His op-eds have been published in Project Syndicate, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Nikkei Asian Review and many other news outlets.