Professional Affiliation

Fellow and Director of the Brookings China Strategy Initiative and Fellow at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center.

Expert Bio

Rush Doshi is fellow and director of the Brookings China Strategy Initiative as well as a fellow at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center. His research focuses primarily on Chinese grand strategy. As director of the Brookings China Strategy Initiative, Doshi leads an effort that acquires, digitizes, and analyzes Mandarin-language open sources and studies Chinese behavior to understand the country’s grand strategy. At the Paul Tsai China Center, Doshi manages a project that seeks to audit and improve U.S.-China crisis management mechanisms. Previously, Doshi was a member of the Asia Policy Working Group for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a Fulbright Fellow in China. Doshi’s research has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, International Organization, and the Washington Quarterly, among other publications. Doshi received his doctorate from Harvard University, his bachelor’s from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, and is proficient in Mandarin.

Wilson Center Project

China’s ‘New Frontiers:’ The Changing Geopolitics of Space, the Poles, and the Deep Sea

Project Summary

This project focuses on the varied fringes of international order that China now groups together as “new frontiers”: space, the poles, and the deep sea. It focuses on variation in China’s legal positions in these domains; China’s motivations and activities across them; and how China’s interactions with the United States might shape the future of the global commons. These relatively ungoverned spaces, once somewhat walled off from serious great power competition by technological limitations and U.S.-backed norms, are seen in Beijing and increasingly Washington as sites for sovereignty claims and rivalry and now risk being transformed from a global commons into contested spaces. Despite reasons for skepticism about the cost-effective exploitation of these domains, fears of missing out on first-mover advantages are nonetheless driving state behavior. The “new frontiers” therefore constitute an important test case for whether the intensification of great power competition will overwhelm the necessity of rules-based governance.