The New Cold War: Navigating US-China Strategic Competition

Dr. Seong-Hyon Lee is a Senior Fellow at the George H.W. Bush Foundation for US-China Relations and an Associate of the Harvard University Asia Center. His research focuses on US-China relations, Chinese domestic and foreign policy, and East Asian geopolitics, with a particular emphasis on the great power competition's impact on the Korean peninsula. Lee's analysis is uniquely informed by over a decade of on-the-ground experience, having lived in Beijing for 11 years. He earned his PhD from Tsinghua University, where he was the sole international student in his cohort, and is fluent in English, Korean, and Chinese. Lee's work is dedicated to bridging academic insight with practical policy. As a former China Director at a leading Seoul-based think tank, he has provided direct briefings to senior decision-makers, including South Korean presidential candidates, ranking lawmakers, US government specialists, and at US Congressional seminars. He has delivered invited lectures at venues including the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the US Indo-Pacific Command, Harvard Kennedy School, and Stanford University, and has provided analysis on C-SPAN. He is the author of two books on great power competition, most recently The New Cold War (2025), and is the Korean translator of the 2024 Harvard University Press biography of Zhou Enlai.