John Delury is an American East Asia scholar, with special interests in the history of China, U.S.-China relations and Korean peninsula affairs. He is professor of history at Yonsei University in Seoul. Background and education Delury trained at Yale University, receiving a B.A. (1997), M.A. (2003) and a Ph.D. in 2007, with all degrees in history. He is Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, South Korea. He had previously taught at Brown University, Columbia University and Peking University. He was the associate director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-Chinese relations. He is the author of Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China (Cornell, 2022) and co-author, with Orville Schell, of Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century (Random House, 2013). He is a frequent contributor to multiple journals and newspapers, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Global Asia, 38 North. and The New York Times. His career as a historian took a self-described detour when he visited South Korea for the first time in 2006 to meet his wife's family. His area of interest had been limited to modern Chinese history. After further visits to Korea, he joined the Yonsei faculty in 2010 and made Seoul his home base. His academic interests have since broadenend to include Korean peninsula studies, North and South; he has visited North Korea four times. He feels that his new interest in Korean affairs has broadened his views on China as well as U.S.-China relations. Views on China Delury states that knowledge of China's history is critical; without looking backward to grasp the forces at work for hundreds of years, it is not possible to know China today or its possible future trends. He posits that through China's recent history there is one constant: "the search for something, anything," that will restore China's greatness (fuqiang 富強, signifying “wealth and power”). China's challenge now is to reconcile its current success to its past sufferings, and relieve their historical sense of inferiority. Delury looks for historical parallels, such as the 1895 Gongche Shangshu movement, the 1919 May Fourth Movement, the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, and the 2014 Umbrella Movement, threads which can be strung together, to chart alternate trajectories for the competing visions of China's future political and social order; he opines there are no right