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Professor John Kincaid is a member of a small United States delegation traveling to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Jan. 16-23 for a symposium on comparative governance with the Counselors’ Office of China’s State Council.
Kincaid will speak about current patterns of U.S. federalism along with the U.S. Ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, Jr., who will speak about U.S. federalism from his perspective as former governor of Utah. The Counselors’ Office is the advisory body to the State Council, which is the cabinet body for the Premier of China. The U.S. delegation is sponsored by the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The symposium will be held in Sanya, Hainan Island, followed by meetings with other officials in Shenzhen.
Kincaid, Meyner Professor of Government and Public Service and director of Lafayette’s Robert B. and Helen S. Meyner Center for the Study of State and Local Government, was one of the first Americans to travel to the PRC after President Richard M. Nixon reopened relations in 1972.He spent a month in the PRC in August 1973.
An internationally recognized expert, Kincaid has lectured and consulted on issues of federalism, intergovernmental relations, constitutionalism, and regional and local governance in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Germany, India, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Maldives, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Kincaid served as executive director of the bipartisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations in Washington, D.C., from 1987-94.
He is the author of various works on federalism and intergovernmental relations and served from 1981-2005 as editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism, a quarterly scholarly journal with a worldwide readership. He serves as senior editor of the Global Dialogue on Federalism series, which is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. His books include Constitutional Origins, Structure, and Change in Federal Countries (2005), The Covenant Connection: From Federal Theology to Modern Federalism (2000), Competition among States and Local Governments: Efficiency and Equity in American Federalism (1991), and Political Culture, Public Policy and the American States (1981).