Seminar 35. Michael Tai: “What factors determine trust between states?: the case of US-China relations”

On Friday, November 11, 2022, the Department of International Relations and the International Laboratory on World Order Studies and the New Regionalism held the 35th session of the Eurasian Online Seminar.

Our guest was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and research associate at the Institute of China Studies of the University of Malaya Dr Michael Tai. The topic of his talk was “What factors determine trust between states?: the case of US-China relations”.

Dr Michael Tai is the author of US-China Relations in the 21st Century: A Question of Trust (Routledge 2015) and China and her Neighbors (Bloomsbury 2019) and book chapters and scholarly articles about China’s external relations. He taught at the University of Cambridge, the Belarusian State Economics University, the American University in Central Asia, and the Beijing Institute of Technology. He earned his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in engineering from Cornell University, MBA from the University of Cambridge, MA in theology from Regent College, and PhD in international relations from the University of Cambridge where he explored US-China relations in the areas of finance, climate policy and security.

Michael Tai has rich experience as a management consulting and later CEO of companies in the steel and public transportation sectors in Malaysia.  He is a contributor to the South China Morning Post, CGTN and The Diplomat.International relations theory seeks to explain causal and constitutive effects of international politics. Theories put forth by Western scholars such as Hans J. Morgenthau (1904-1980) and Edward H. Carr (1892-1982) are based largely on modern European experience and yet considered to be universally applicable. Michael Tai revisits this assumption with his current research focusing on China’s Warring States period (c. 476-221 BCE) with a view to develop a theory of international relations which may better explain China’s foreign policy.