Gallagher travels to China for Track Two Dialogue on US, China, and Global Economy
Pardee Professor and GDP Center Director, Kevin P. Gallagher, spent a week in China in January to participate in the U.S.-China Global Economic Order (GEO) Dialogue, a track two dialogue between ex-officials and experts from the United States and China on the global economic order. Now in its 11th year, the group is chaired by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Peterson Institute for International Economics in the US and the Shanghai Institute for International Studies and the CASS Institute for World Economics and Politics. In addition to grappling with some of the biggest challenges between governments on trade, finance, and international financial institutions, the group met with CEOs of US companies in China and visited a Chinese AI company.
During his trip, Gallagher gave two talks, one being on his new book, China and the International Economic Order at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, where he spoke to the country’s leading international relations scholars and policy advisors to the government. Pulling from key points in the book, he discussed how China has been able to meet many of its objectives in the global economic governance regime that many other countries at similar levels of income have not been able to obtain. Gallagher pondered whether they were too successful, so much so that they have generated pushback from US hegemony. The Chinese participants were pleasantly surprised, perhaps shocked, to hear a balanced analysis from a US research institution.
Additionally, he gave a second talk on the new US National Security Strategy and its potential impacts on the economies in Latin America at the BRICS-led New Development Bank. Gallagher noted that the new strategy sees LAC countries solely through a security lens and that could threaten their economic development pathways unless they leverage themselves strategically. US strategy now sees oil, gas, minerals and ports as strategic assets that need to be developed, and largely by US investors. This echoes the extractivist development model that plagued the hemisphere for centuries. He shared strategies on how to leverage US interest to their advantage based on historical examples.
Kevin P. Gallagher is a professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and the director of the Boston University Global Development Policy Center (GDP Center). He serves as the lead expert on Multilateral Development Bank Reform to the Brazilian Presidency of the G20. Additionally, he is a member of the Task Force on Climate, Development and the International Monetary Fund and a co-chair of the Debt Relief for a Green and Inclusive Recovery Project. Gallagher is the author or co-author of eight books, including China and the Global Economic Order (Cambridge University Press, 2025), The Case for a New Bretton Woods (Wiley, 2021), and The China Triangle: Latin America’s China Boom and the Fate of the Washington Consensus (Oxford University Press, 2016). To know more about his scholarly work and achievements, visit his faculty profile.