APARC_China Program_Publications

During the past eight months of the global COVID pandemic, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been active in promoting China’s claims in the South China Sea.  This essay evaluates PLA statements, military exercises and operations, and deployment of relevant platforms and weapons in the South China Sea during this period. I leverage Chinese-language sources in addition to my own operational knowledge from over a decade of military experience to provide greater context for these activities.

To explore how business leaders and entrepreneurs in China responded to the COVID-19 lockdown and how they’re planning for the future, the China Program conducted a survey in coordination with the Stanford Center at Peking University and Stanford Business School alumni Christopher Thomas and Xue (Xander) Wu.

To explore how business leaders and entrepreneurs in China responded to the COVID-19 lockdown and how they’re planning for the future, the China Program conducted a survey in coordination with the Stanford Center at Peking University and Stanford Business School alumni Christopher Thomas and Xue (Xander) Wu.

Explore our series of multimedia interviews and Q&As with the contributors to this volume: 

The easy phases of China’s quest for wealth and power are over. After forty years, every one of a set of favorable conditions has diminished or vanished, and China’s future, neither inevitable nor immutable, will be shaped by the policy choices of party leaders facing at least eleven difficult challenges, including the novel coronavirus. 

By May 1966, just seventeen years after its founding, the People’s Republic of China had become one of the most powerfully centralized states in modern history. But that summer everything changed. Mao Zedong called for students to attack intellectuals and officials who allegedly lacked commitment to revolutionary principles. Rebels responded by toppling local governments across the country, ushering in nearly two years of conflict that in places came close to civil war and resulted in nearly 1.6 million dead.

Ties between individuals and institutions in the United States and the People’s Republic of China have become broader, deeper, and stronger during the four decades since the establishment of formal diplomatic relations in 1979 and the relationship can no longer be described as fragile. However, it also cannot yet be considered a normal relationship, at least not from the perspective of American citizens, companies, and commentators on international affairs. The relationship between the two largest economies and military powers has many asymmetries.

In a new article for Contemporary American Review, Shorenstein APARC Distinguished Fellow Thomas Fingar examines how, twenty-five years after the demise of the Soviet Union, Americans are still struggling to understand and adjust to the costs and consequences of success. Since 1991, diplomats, military professionals, and others showed an inclination towards the same approach to international affairs that brought success in the Cold War. The result was a foreign policy both stable and predictable. Under the Trump administration, however, this no longer appears to be the case.
 

Health insurance holds the promise of improving population health and survival and protecting people from catastrophic health spending. Yet evidence from lower- and middle-income countries on the impact of health insurance is limited. We investigated whether insurance expansion reduced adult mortality in rural China, taking advantage of differences across Chinese counties in the timing of the introduction of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS).

President Donald Trump's ominous threat to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea succeeded at least in garnering the attention of not only Kim Jong Un but the globe. The vague assertion of readiness to carry out a preventive attack on North Korea, even to use nuclear weapons, roiled stock markets, sent Japanese to look for bomb shelters and prompted alarmed warnings against the use of force from both foes and allies, including South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The piece is available in Chinese, English and Japanese.

The most dangerous impact of North Korea’s long-range missile test this past week may not have been the one in the Sea of Japan, felt in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo. It was in Moscow where Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin locked arms in a united front on how to respond to the growing North Korea crisis. The target of this front was not, however, North Korea. It was the United States, who the Sino-Russian axis accused of pursuing a military “buildup” in the region.

This is a chapter in the second edition of The National Security Enterprise, a book edited by Roger Z. George and Harvey Rishikof that provides practitioners' insights into the operation, missions, and organizational cultures of the principal national security agencies and other institutions that shape the U.S. national security decision-making process.

The 2018 federal budget proposed by the White House would shrink critical tools—of diplomacy, development work and peacemaking—that can reduce the civil wars abroad that threaten U.S. interests and global stability. Forthcoming research for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences shows that these tools can be effective and cheaper than the military forces upon which we must rely when those wars flare into immediate threats. The international system for mediating and keeping peace in such conflicts must be strengthened and updated—not abandoned.

The same institutions that enabled China’s massive urbanization and spurred its economic growth now require further reform and innovation.

Uneasy Partnerships presents the analysis and insights of practitioners and scholars who have shaped and examined China's interactions with key Northeast Asian partners. Using the same empirical approach employed in the companion volume, The New Great Game (Stanford University Press, 2016), this new text analyzes the perceptions, priorities, and policies of China and its partners to explain why dyadic relationships evolved as they have during China's "rise."

Admirers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are impressed with the fact that it continues to exist and that an outright war has never broken out between its members. Also often praised is the value to the region of promoting cooperation through the consensual process known as the ‘ASEAN Way’. If ASEAN is a talk shop, these observers say, talking is at least better than fighting.

Scholars at Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies assess the strategic situation in East Asia to be unsettled, unstable, and drifting in ways unfavorable for American interests. These developments are worrisome to countries in the region, most of which want the United States to reduce uncertainty about American intentions by taking early and effective steps to clarify and solidify U.S. engagement. In the absence of such steps, they will seek to reduce uncertainty and protect their own interests in ways that reduce U.S.

In an analysis piece for CSIS, Shorenstein APARC Distinguished Fellow Thomas Fingar examines the geopolitical, economic and developmental considerations of Xi Jinping's call for China and the states of Central Asia to build a modern-day "Silk Road."

No nation is free from the charge that it has a less-than-complete view of the past. History is not simply about recording past events—it is often contested, negotiated, and reshaped over time. Debate over the history of World War II in Asia remains surprisingly intense, and Divergent Memories examines the opinions of powerful individuals to pinpoint the sources of conflict: from Japanese colonialism in Korea and atrocities in China to the American decision to use atomic weapons against Japan.

In this article, I consider what a casual observer can see of a notorious product’s primary place of fabrication. Few products have been criticized in recent years more than cigarettes. Meanwhile, around the world, the factories manufacturing cigarettes rarely come under scrutiny. What have been the optics helping these key links in the cigarette supply chain to be overlooked? What has prompted such optics to be adopted and to what effect? I address these questions using a comparative approach and drawing upon new mapping techniques, fieldwork, and social theory.

Accounts of the tumultuous initial phase of the Cultural Revolution portray party-state cadres primarily as targets of a popular insurgency. Cadres in Party and government organs in fact were themselves in widespread rebellion against their superiors after October 1966, and rebel cadres were a major force in the national wave of power seizures that destroyed the civilian state in early 1967.

China and India account for nearly 36% of the world’s population. The two countries are expected to see an unprecedented, accelerated rate in elderly populations, a shift that has already begun and will continue in the years ahead as life expectancy continues to increase and fertility to decrease or remain below replacement levels. Examining demographic changes can offer a unique opportunity to enrich the theoretical and empirical understanding of the economic aspects of population ageing. This special issue of the Journal of the Economics of Ageing, coedited by David E. Bloom, the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at Harvard University, and Karen Eggleston, a Center Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, is a diverse collection of micro- and macro-economic research on ageing in China and India. This introduction, co-written by Bloom and Eggleston, provides background context to demographic trends in China and India, connections between demographic and economic changes and possible behavioral and policy responses. The introduction also gives a preview of the main contributions of the 10 articles featured in the special issue, which cover topics such as the impact of non-communicable diseases in China and India, how parents’ expectations of co-residence with their children affects educational outcomes, and the prevention of cognitive decline in China.

A version of this paper, "Security Challenges in a Turbulent World: Fewer Enemies, More Challenges, and Greater Anxiety," delivered at the International Areas Studies Symposium at the University of Okalhoma, on Feb. 26, 2015, is also available in English by clicking here.