Peter Mattis

Peter Mattis is President of The Jamestown Foundation, a position he began in Fall 2023. He returns to the foundation after having served as editor of China Brief from 2011 to 2013 and as a fellow in the China program from 2013 to 2018.

Most recently, Mr. Mattis was Senior Fellow with the U.S. House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party on loan from the Special Competitive Studies Project where he served as Director for Intelligence. From 2019 to 2021, he served as the Senate-appointed staff director of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) where he was a part of the legislative team that passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, Tibetan Policy and Support Act, and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. He began his government career as a counterintelligence analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he earned exceptional performance awards for analytic leadership and community support.

Mr. Mattis has written and spoken widely about the Chinese Government and Communist Party’s politics, foreign policy, internal security, intelligence, and political influence activities – including testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, House Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and the European Parliament. Mr. Mattis’ writing and commentary have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, Sydney Morning Herald, Studies in Intelligence, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, War on the Rocks, and The National Interest. He also has been quoted in major media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Washington Post, The Economist, BBC, The Guardian, and Süddeutsche Zeitung. Mattis is the author of Analyzing the Chinese Military: A Review Essay and Resource Guide on the People’s Liberation Army (2015) and co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer (2019)—both of which he wrote while a Jamestown fellow. He is a graduate of the University of Washington and Georgetown University.