The 2020 ACPS annual conference was a great success. We held it online and that format allowed us to offer additional programming to our normal research panels.
In addition to six research panels, we offered four workshops on fieldwork strategies, machine learning, experimental research design, and survey design. We hosted three mentoring groups comprised of beginning scholars, junior scholars, and senior scholars matched by research area. Finally, we provided three keynote speeches by Jessica Chen Weiss on Sino-US relations after Covid, Taylor Fravel on maritime politics in the South China Sea, and Ezra Vogel on Dengist Thought in Xi’s China. The conference was hosted by Middlebury College, and even though we were not able to gather together on campus, the Middlebury Institute’s Translation & Interpretation graduate program provided simultaneous interpretation of most events in several languages in addition to Chinese. Each event garnered approximately 30 participants (in addition to the panelists or presenters), including many new members.