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Arthur Waldron is an academic, a historian, a China scholar, and a China hawk. He and many of his ideas have been associated with the so-called Blue Team, an informal group that presses for China policy that emphasizes military deterrence over diplomatic and economic engagement.

Waldron is the University of Pennsylvania's Lauder Professor of International Relations, as well as vice president of the International Assessment and Strategy Center. He has ties to numerous other think tanks, including the Center for Security Policy, the Project for the New American Century, the Jamestown Foundation, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Waldron was part of the China Futures Panel, convened by congressional Republicans in 2000 "to examine charges of bias in the CIA assessments of China," and led by Gen. John Tilelli (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2005). The panel reported that it felt the agency had an "institutional predisposition" toward China. In February 2001, Waldron was appointed by Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) to the China Security Review Commission to participate in a congressionally mandated survey of the "national security implications of the economic relationship between the United States and China."

The commission's July 2002 report included a chapter on the "Additional Views of Commissioners," in which Waldron asserted that increases in Chinese military spending were "aimed at excluding the United States from Asia, and establishing the ability to threaten and coerce neighboring states ranging from Mongolia to Japan to India." Waldron also wrote: "Only democratic change can transform China into a genuine friend of the United States and her allies." (In a dissenting view, commissioner William A. Reinsch, undersecretary of commerce during the Clinton administration, criticized Waldron and his fellow commissioners for "consistently impl[ying] the Chinese deserve blame for acting in their own interest rather than ours.")

For many years, Waldron has advocated "regime change" in China. As the Washington Post wrote in 2000: "Waldron bluntly asserts that American interests would be better served if China's communist leaders were displaced. 'I worry that if China continues on its current trend, which is repressing at home and building up . armaments, that becomes very dangerous. I agree with people who think regime change is key to a really stable peace'" (Washington Post, February 22, 2000).

In an October 2005 speech given in Taiwan at the World Forum for Democratization in Asia, Waldron reiterated the idea that China should turn to democracy: " With respect to China's headlong military buildup, I would develop the argument that it is the product not of any real external threat, but rather of an internal need to invoke security to justify autocratic rule. I would note how the buildup is increasing tension and distrust in the region, which harms China not least, and note that a democratic China would be a far better neighbor . China's apparent economic success combined with dictatorship has given new life and hope to the world's dictatorships and their apologists, while harming the movement for world democracy."

Waldron steadfastly asserts that the Chinese government is a dictatorial regime that is aggressive and unstable. In a May 2006 article entitled "The Pentagon's Latest China Report," Waldron wrote: "China is developing a formidable military force that makes no sense at all unless one assumes that a 'grab for power' of some sort is its rationale." Waldron's argument that the current regime is unstable hinges on his analysis of China's stymied democratic movement and its economy. He maintains that the domestic pressures to democratize that surfaced in 1989 at Tiananmen Square have spurred China to assume more aggressive foreign policies in an attempt to quell dissent at home, and he perceives the calls for self-rule in Hong Kong and Taiwan as fissures in the Communist monolith. According to Waldron, reform on the periphery is a harbinger of change in the center (Orbis, Spring 2004).

Waldron attributes China's economic growth to its state-sponsored investment and distorted official statistics, rather than to economic liberalization, as many other scholars do. He criticizes mainstream Sinologists and policymakers for attempting to encourage stability in a fundamentally dysfunctional government.

Because of his stance on China, Waldron has been associated with the Blue Team, a network of politicians, congressional staffers, journalists, lobbyists, and thinkers who push for a hard line from Washington on China-related issues. Individuals associated with the Blue Team include William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard; Richard Fischer of the Jamestown Foundation; Pentagon adviser Michael Pillsbury; and Bill Gertz of the Washington Times. Waldron has published several books as well as articles, letters, and opinion pieces. One of his venues is the Letters to the Editor section of the Financial Times (London), which in the first seven months of 2006 alone published six letters from the professor, mostly about China, but also on Israel. Other past outlets for Waldron's work include Orbis, the magazine of right-wing think tank Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Commentary, the magazine helmed for many years by neoconservative Norman Podhoretz that is published by the American Jewish Committee.