Experts

Aynne Kokas

Fast Facts

  • Director, UVA East Asia Center
  • Non-resident scholar, Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy
  • Member, Council on Foreign Relations
  • Fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program
  • Expertise on U.S.-China relations, cybersecurity, media industry

Areas Of Expertise

  • Foreign Affairs
  • Asia
  • Domestic Affairs
  • Media and the Press
  • Science and Technology

Aynne Kokas is the C.K. Yen Professor at the Miller Center, director of UVA's East Asia Center, and a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. Kokas’ research examines Sino-U.S. media and technology relations. Her award-winning book Trafficking Data: How China Is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, October 2022) argues that exploitative Silicon Valley data governance practices help China build infrastructures for global control. Her award-winning first book Hollywood Made in China (University of California Press, 2017) argues that Chinese investment and regulations have transformed the U.S. commercial media industry, most prominently in the case of media conglomerates’ leverage of global commercial brands. 

Kokas is a non-resident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow in the National Committee on United States-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program.

She was a Fulbright Scholar at East China Normal University and has received fellowships from the Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Japan’s Abe Fellowship, and other international organizations. Her writing and commentary have appeared globally in more than 50 countries and 15 languages. In the United States, her research and writing appear regularly in media outlets including CNBC, NPR’s MarketplaceThe Washington Post, and Wired. She has testified before the Senate Finance Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congressional-Executive Commission on China, and the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Aynne Kokas News Feed

Last Friday afternoon, just as President Joe Biden was boarding Marine One for a weekend at Camp David, a reporter yelled out a question: “On Covid misinformation, what is your message to platforms like Facebook?” Above the din of the helicopter, Biden responded with his quintessential frankness: “They’re killing people.” His comment didn’t come out of nowhere.
Aynne Kokas The Wire China
The Chinese Communist Party was founded in July 1921 as a small, revolutionary group that hoped to impose a foreign ideology—Marxism-Leninism—on a vast, weak, poor agrarian nation. In July 2021, the CCP hopes to use its 100th anniversary to convince China, and the world, that it is the only organization qualified to lead a powerful, wealthy, ambitious superpower. How Xi Jinping and his propaganda ministries tell the story of the past hundred years, and how that experience be understood, speaks volumes about the CCP’s goals and values as it looks to its future. Please join three of the world’s leading scholars of Chinese propaganda and media—all of whom have recently conducted research as Wilson Fellows—for a detailed analysis of how the CCP sees, and sells, its leadership of China after 100 years.
Aynne Kokas Wilson Center
Miller Center senior fellow Aynne Kokas is interviewed.
Aynne Kokas South China Morning Post
Aynne Kokas, author of 'Hollywood Made in China' and senior faculty fellow at Miller Center, joins Cheddar to discuss the relationship between Hollywood and China.
Aynne Kokas Cheddar News
Media studies expert Aynne Kokas, on actor John Cena's apology for referring to Taiwan as a separate country.
Aynne Kokas Need to Know Podcast
China and the US are sharp rivals on digital matters, seeking to exclude each other's influence in their home territories while projecting their own influence globally. Europe positions itself as an autonomous actor. It aims to follow a 'middle path', illustrated by some EU countries' continued use of Chinese communications hardware despite US pressure to stop. The EU wants to compartmentalise disputes with China: maintaining the EU's core values while also ensuring trade and investment survives despite China's search for digital autonomy. But the EU needs to address questions about whether its desire for an autonomous relationship with China is sustainable if the US and Chinese digital economies become more segregated. How will this trend impact the EU's relations with other countries? And how will the EU's digital sector remain relevant in the scale of the US and China's investments in emerging technology?
Aynne Kokas Centre for European Reform