Intuitively, reputation matters in daily life. Thus, it is unsurprising that scholars and statesmen have long held that reputation must also matter in international relations (IR) since Pericles. Yet, while reputation, especially reputation for resolve in (international) conflict, has enjoyed renewed attention in the past decade or so, few in-depth studies of reputation in (international) cooperation exist, other than a few studies on reputation in alliance and treaty compliance. Professor Shiping Tang takes a first step toward a preliminary theory of reputation in cooperation-building and provides some preliminary evidence that reputation in international cooperation can form and have effect, drawing from a diverse literature, including reputation in conflict and cooperation, trust and trustworthiness in sociology and social theory, and trust and cooperation in international relations and other areas. Professor Tang’s contributions are three-fold: conceptual, theoretical and empirical. He then connects with trustworthiness as reputation with US-China relations.

Professor Shiping Tang is a Distinguished Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. He also holds a ‘Chang-Jiang/Cheung Kong Scholar’ Distinguished Professorship from the Chinese Ministry of Education, the highest honour a social scientist can hold in China.

Professor Tang has a very broad research interest and has published widely. He has published five single-authored volumes so far. His more recent two books include: The Institutional Foundation of Economic Development (Princeton University Press, 2022) and On Social Evolution: Phenomenon and Paradigm (Routledge, 2020).