Taylor Fravel decodes China’s foreign policy
Taylor Fravel Photo: Dominick Reuter When Taylor Fravel was a teenager, his father, an engineer for Bechtel, accepted a job in Taiwan. It turned out to be a significant career move for both of them. Up until that point, the younger Fravel had barely been outside of his native Michigan. After two years as a high school student in the Far East, though, he was engrossed by the new culture and society he had seen, and determined to learn more about it. “For me it was a really transformative experience,” says Fravel, who began to learn the language in Chinese-speaking Taiwan while attending an American school. “I came back fascinated with that part of the world and had a very strong desire to learn Chinese more formally.” Today, Fravel is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and a member of the Security Studies Program at MIT, with...