At the invitation of China Foreign Affairs University（CFAU), Prof. YU Keping, the University Chair Professor and Dean of the School of Government, Peking University, former Deputy Director of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, gave a lecture entitled “Populism in the Process of Globalization” at CFAU Shahe campus on 10 May 2017.  Many students and faculty members attended the lecture, which was chaired by Prof. GAO Fei, Assistant President of CFAU.

By showing the audience a number of photographs, Prof. YU demonstrated the recent spread of populism in major countries across the world.  After reviewing recent literature, Prof. YU emphasized that the trend of populism has drawn great academic interest for many years.  According to Yu, populism is not only a type of trend within politics, but is also a pattern of social movements and political tactics.  Having reexamined three major populist movements dating back more than a century, Prof. YU summarized the characteristics of current populist movements and concluded that populism, if not taken carefully, will harm economic growth, undermine social solidarity and eventually lead to extreme nationalism.

In light of the possible negative impacts of populism on politics, economic development, and social governance, Prof. YU provided eight suggestions to prevent a society from falling into the trap of populism: (1) maintaining dynamic balance among government, market, and society to avoid failure of any one of the three; (2) safeguarding social equity and justice with a fair distribution of social welfare and elimination of income polarization; (3) expanding the channels of citizens’ participation in public affairs to fully reflect people’s will; (4) institutionalizing proper social mobility among different classes; (5) further developing consultative democracy; (6) upholding “rule of law” as the bottom line of state governance; (7) building social consensus with sufficient efforts; (8) improving the governance of cyberspace with various of approaches.

After Prof. Yu finished his talk, he answered questions from the audience and shared his thoughts and ideas about the possible interconnections and/or correlations between populism and anti-globalization, populism and neo-liberal order, as well as populism and Chinese political developments .