From May 5 to 7, 2019, Yu Tiejun, Vice President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IISS), Peking University (PKU), attended on behalf of the IISS the Council of Councils annual conference in Washington.D.C. The conference is sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.

The conference is the eighth in the series of annual conferences, with participants from 28 think tanks in 24 countries. The Chinese think tanks attending the conference were the IISS and the Shanghai Institute for International Studies. The conference focused on six major themes: (1) What should the future world order look like? (2) managing global catastrophic risk: nuclear weapons; (3) confronting the challenges of a rapidly urbanizing world; (4) how do we ensure freedom has a future? (5) multilateral responses to a planetary environmental crisis; and (6) multilateral conflict management: Yemen. Four additional panel discussions were also held during the conference, including the release of the fifth “Council of Councils Report Card on International Cooperation”.

The Council of Councils is a global think tank network initiated by the United States Council on Foreign Relations. It aims to connect leading foreign policy institutes around the world in a common dialogue on the issues of global governance and multilateral cooperation. The Council of Councils draws on the best thinking from all over the world to find common ground on shared threats, build support for innovative ideas, and introduce remedies into the public debate and policymaking processes of member countries. The membership of the Council of Councils includes leading institutions from twenty-four countries, roughly tracking the composition of the Group of Twenty (G20). A list of member organizations is available on the Council of Councils roster page.