# David M. Lampton

David M. Lampton (born 1946) is the George and Sadie Hyman Professor and director of China studies emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and former chairman of The Asia Foundation.

## Career

In 1976, Lampton was an early American visitor to China as part of scientific exchanges between the two countries and people's diplomacy.$^{:76}$ At the time, exchanges with social scientists had been fraught, and Lampton substituted for an anthropologist who was more politically sensitive since the anthropologist had been expelled from China in 1950.$^{:76–80}$ Lampton was regarded as politically safe and viewed as a young expert on China's health care system.$^{:79}$
From 1988 to 1997, Lampton was president of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. From May 1998 to May 2006, he also was affiliated with The Nixon Center (now the Center for the National Interest) as the founding director of its Chinese Studies Program. Prior to 1988, Dr. Lampton was founding director of the China Policy Program at the American Enterprise Institute and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University where he started his academic career in 1974. After serving as Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University's Asia-Pacific Research Center (2019-2020), he returned to SAIS where he is Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute. In 2020, with co-authors Selina Ho and Cheng-Chwee Kuik, he published Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese Power in Southeast Asia (University of California Press), on PRC high-speed rail construction in eight Southeast Asian states.
Lampton specializes in Chinese domestic politics, leadership, U.S.-China relations, and Chinese foreign policy. He is the author of The Three Faces of Chinese Power: Might, Money, and Minds (2008), which won Honorable Mention in the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award competition for 2009. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. He has an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies, is an Honorary Senior Fellow of the American Studies Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and was a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins. On June 17, 2010, The National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars awarded Lampton the inaugural Scalapino Prize, an award established in honor of Asia scholar Robert A. Scalapino. Presented at the 2010 Asia Policy Assembly in Washington, D.C., the award was given to Lampton in recognition of his contributions to America's understanding of the vast changes underway in Asia. He is the recipient of a 2011 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio "Residency Award." His book, Following the Leader: Ruling China, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping, was published in January 2014 and a second edition in 2020, both published by University of California Press.
Lampton is a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Executive Committee and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He served on the board of trustees of Colorado College from 1999 to 2013 and now is a life trustee. He also serves on the advisory boards of the National Bureau of Asian Research and US-China Education Trust. He served as enlisted and commissioned officer of the U.S. Army Reserve, was a fireman at Stanford University, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Eta Sigma academic honorary societies.
On February 27, 2014, Lampton was part of a panel discussion sponsored by the US-Asia Institute entitled "Sino-Japan Dynamics and Implications for The U.S.-Japan Alliance." His May 2015 speech at The Carter Center is often cited as the earliest serious warning that U.S.-China relations were in serious decline--"The Tipping Point".
In January 2015, Lampton was named the most influential China watcher by the Institute of International Relations at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. Researchers chose him after assessing the credentials of 158 China experts.
In July 2019, Lampton was among the signers of an open letter to the Donald Trump administration and United States Congress which argued that efforts by the United States government to isolate China would weaken "those Chinese intent on developing a more humane and tolerant society."$^{:189}$