China at a crossroads

Jyrki Kallio is a Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, and holds the Title of Docent in International Relations and Chinese Studies at the University of Lapland. His research foci include Chinese political culture and foreign policy, and regional issues in East Asia. He has a special interest in the instrumentalisation of traditional schools of thought in East Asian politics. In addition to his research, Kallio has translated classical Chinese philosophy and prose.

Kallio received the J.A. Hollo Prize for his translation work in 2015, and his latest monograph, Xunzi: Statecraft from Ancient China, was published by Gaudeamus in 2025. Previously, he served in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland as a diplomat. He holds degrees of M.Soc.Sc in International Relations and PhD in Chinese Society Studies.

Lauri Paltemaa is Professor of East Asian Contemporary History and Politics, the Director of the Centre for East Asian Studies (CEAS) and the Vice-Director of the Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History, and Political Science at the University of Turku. He is also the Chair of the Finnish University Network of Asian Studies (Asianet). He has graduated with MA and doctoral degrees from the University of Turku (Doctor in Social Sciences 2006). During his graduate studies, he also studied at the University of New South Wales (UNSW, Australia) and Renmin University (Beijing, China). Prof. Paltemaa is a Docent of Chinese Contemporary History in University of Turku. His research interests include Chinese politics, governance, disaster management and overseas humanitarian aid, history of the Western and East Asian relations, as well as Chinese and East Asian contemporary and economic history.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Master’s Programme in Area and Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki. Trained as a political scientist, she studies China’s global role — how China projects power through initiatives, institutions, and infrastructure, and how states, societies, and diasporas, particularly small and middle powers, perceive, negotiate, and at times resist that power. Her research spans the Belt and Road Initiative and China’s other global initiatives, great-power competition and hybrid threats, ethnopolitics and transnational mobilization, the Taiwan question, and the global production of knowledge about China. Grounded in political science and international relations, her work draws on area studies, sociology, and cultural studies through long-standing interdisciplinary collaborations.

Dr Mikael Mattlin is a Research Professor in the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA), where he heads the Center on Global Orders and China (CORD). In 2024, he served as the acting Director and acting Deputy Director of FIIA. Prior to joining FIIA, Mattlin has performed duties as Professor of Political Science at the University of Turku, and Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki. He holds the Title of Docent in Political Science, especially East Asian Politics, from the University of Turku. Prof. Mattlin has in recent years led research projects funded by the Research Council of Finland, Business Finland and MATINE. He has published in leading academic journals in a broad range of fields, including international relations, political science, communication, simulations and games, area studies, and educational science.

Tuuli Koivu is a passionate follower of the world economy. She never gets bored when analyzing the complex relationships between monetary policy, financial sector and economic growth. At Nordea, she concentrates on monitoring developments in the Euro area and the ECB monetary policy. Tuuli Koivu holds a PhD in Economics and she has a long background studying both advanced and emerging economies at the Bank of Finland and the European Central Bank. She has a deep interest on the Chinese economy on which she did full-time research for almost a decade. Her doctoral thesis was about China’s monetary policy.

Emilian Kavalski is Professor of International Relations at Tampere University and Book Series Editor of Routledge’s Rethinking Asia and International Relations series. His research examines China’s global roles, the growing prominence of post-Western (especially, Asian) normative orders and how they confront, compliment, and transform established traditions, practices, and institutions of international interactions, and the ways in which digital infrastructures reshape power, sovereignty, and world order. He has held the inaugural NAWA Chair Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland) and the Li Dak Sum Chair in China-Eurasia Relations at the University of Nottingham Ningbo (China), where he founded the Global Institute for Silk Roads Studies. Emilian has more than 20 years of experience of working in Australia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, Poland, and the UK. His policy commentary has appeared in Politico, War on the Rocks, The National Interest, The Conversation, and the South China Morning Post.

Elina Sinkkonen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and holds the Title of Docent in East Asian Studies, specifically East Asian Politics, at the University of Turku. Her research interests include great power relations, authoritarian regimes, regional security in East Asia, Chinese nationalism, public opinion issues in China and domestic-foreign policy nexus in IR theory. Sinkkonen’s ongoing research focuses on technology in the great power struggle and more precisely understanding China’s innovation ecosystem, technological advancement, tech financing, and regulation. Technology theme relates to two externally funded projects.

Sinkkonen’s work has been published in Political Psychology, Democratization, The China Quarterly, The Pacific Review, European Review of International Studies and European Foreign Affairs Review, among others. She received her doctorate from the University of Oxford at the Department of Politics and International Relations. Her co-edited book on the new roles of women in Chinese society won the 2016 Kanava prize, which is given to the best Finnish book in the fields of politics, society, economics, history or culture.