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Society

FSI researchers work to understand continuity and change in societies as they confront their problems and opportunities. This includes the implications of migration and human trafficking. What happens to a society when young girls exit the sex trade? How do groups moving between locations impact societies, economies, self-identity and citizenship? What are the ethnic challenges faced by an increasingly diverse European Union? From a policy perspective, scholars also work to investigate the consequences of security-related measures for society and its values.

The Europe Center reflects much of FSI’s agenda of investigating societies, serving as a forum for experts to research the cultures, religions and people of Europe. The Center sponsors several seminars and lectures, as well as visiting scholars.

Societal research also addresses issues of demography and aging, such as the social and economic challenges of providing health care for an aging population. How do older adults make decisions, and what societal tools need to be in place to ensure the resulting decisions are well-informed? FSI regularly brings in international scholars to look at these issues. They discuss how adults care for their older parents in rural China as well as the economic aspects of aging populations in China and India.

Rebuilding Trust: China-U.S. Relations

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Please note the venue is now the Bechtel Conference Center at Encina Hall.

This event is jointly sponsored by the China Program at at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

 

Geostrategic rivalry and economic interdependence coexist in uneasy balance between the U.S. and China. Ambassador Fu will identify key strands in U.S. perceptions of China, frequently marked by confusion and anxiety, and China’s perceptions of the U.S., riddled by the desire for closer cooperation and suspicions over U.S.’s exclusion of China. The speech will highlight the South China Sea issue and emphasize the harmful effects of negative perceptions and the importance of cooperation. Commentary will be provided by Dr. Thomas Fingar, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center Distinguished Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, after the speech.

 

Ambassador Fu Ying has been the Chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress of China since March 2013. She is also the Chairperson of the Academic Committee for China’s Institute of International Strategy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. From 1993 to 2000, she served successively as the Director, Counselor of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian Department and the Minister Counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Indonesia (1997). While serving as the head of the Asian Department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2000, she was instrumental in crafting China’s comprehensive strategic partnership with ASEAN and for launching the Six Party Talks with North Korea. She has served as China’s Ambassador to the Philippines (1998), Australia (2004) and to the United Kingdom (2007). From 2009 to 2013, she served as the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs for the P.R.C.

 

 

 

Dr. Thomas Fingar is the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. From 2005 to 2008, he served concurrently as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2004–2005), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001–2003), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994–2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989–1994), and chief of the China Division (1986–1989).

Chairperson, Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress, China; former PRC Ambassador to the Philippines, Australia, and the U.K.
Chairperson, Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress, China; former PRC Ambassador to the Philippines, Australia, and the U.K.
Fu Ying <i>Chairperson, Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress, China; former PRC Ambassador to the Philippines, Australia, and the U.K.</i> <i>Chairperson, Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress, China; former PRC Ambassador to the Philippines, Australia, and the U.K.</i> <i>Chairperson, Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress, China; former PRC Ambassador to the Philippines, Australia, and the U.K.</i>
Dr. Thomas Fingar <i>Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center Distinguished Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Universit</i>
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Xi'an summit explores China in transition

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More than fifty experts met in Xi’an, China, for an international academic conference on demographic change and social development last week. Several scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) spoke at the conference, including Karen Eggleston, Marcus Feldman, Jean Oi and Scott Rozelle.

The conference marked the 120th anniversary of Xi’an Jiaotong University’s founding and more than three decades of collaboration with Stanford scholars. Researchers at Xi’an Jiaotong University’s Institute for Population and Development Studies collaborate on policy-relevant research and educational activities with Stanford faculty at FSI as well as the Morrison Institute and Woods Institute.

For more information on FSI’s work in the areas of global health and medicine, please visit this page and the Asia Health Policy Program website.

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Open Sesame!: Alibaba and E-commerce in China

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We have reached venue capacity and can no longer accept RSVPs.

 

Half the world is on the Internet. By the end of June 2015, China recorded a total of 667 million Internet users. Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba Group’s giant e-commerce platforms, posted a record-breaking RMB 91.2 billion on Singles' Day, 2015; and Alibaba Group with its annual sales volume of RMB 3 trillion, has surpassed Walmart to become the world’s largest retail platform. Dr. Ming Zeng, Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba Group, will first give an insider’s account of how Alibaba was able to scale up its operations from Jack Ma’s humble operations into one of the world’s largest companies. He will further discuss how the Web technology is transforming China’s consumer and production economy.

 

Dr. Ming ZENG currently serves as Executive Vice President of Alibaba Group Holding Limited and Chief Strategy Officer of Alibaba Group. Dr. Zeng is also the founding Dean of Hupan University of Entrepreneurship, an educational institution founded in 2015 by Jack Ma and other business leaders in China. He is a frequent contributor to leading management journals and is the author of Dragons at Your Door: How Chinese Cost Innovation Is Disrupting Global Competition (2007). Dr. Zeng previously served as a faculty member at INSEAD from 1998 to 2002 then helped to found the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing, the first private business school in China. Dr. Zeng obtained his Ph.D. in International Business and Strategy from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998, and his Bachelor's degree in International Economics from Fudan University, China, in 1991.

 

 

Duncan Clark is the Chairman of BDA China, a consultancy he founded in Beijing in 1994 after four years as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley in London and Hong Kong. BDA China is an advisory firm serving investors in China’s technology and consumer sectors, employing over 100 mainland Chinese professionals in Beijing. An early advisor to leading Chinese Internet entrepreneurs, Mr. Clark is also the author of Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built (2016), an insider’s look at China’s e-commerce and technology giant and its founder Jack Ma.

 

 

 

This event is off the record.

 

Ming Zeng Chief Strategy Officer, Alibaba Group
Duncan Clark (moderator) Moderator BDA China, Author of Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built
Seminars

Cloaks and Veils: Countervisualizing Cigarette Factories In and Outside of China

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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. I argue that a corporate impulse to hide from public health measures, including those of tobacco control, is not the only force to be reckoned with here. Cigarette factory legibility has been coproduced by multiple processes inherent to many forms of manufacturing. Cigarette makers, moreover, do not always run from global tobacco control. Nor have they been avoiding all other manifestations of biopolitics. Rather, in various ways, cigarette makers have been embracing biopolitical logics, conditioning them, and even using them to manage factory legibility. Suggestive of maneuvers outlined by Butler (2009) and Povinelli (2011) such as “norms of recognizability” and “arts of disguise,” cigarette factory concealment foregrounds the role of infrastructural obfuscation in the making of what Berlant (2007) calls “slow death.” Special focus on manufacturing in China illustrates important variations in the public optics of cigarette factories. The terms cloak and veil connote these variations. Whereas tactics currently obscuring cigarette manufacturing facilities generally skew toward an aesthetic of the opaque cloak in much of the world, there are norms of recognizability and arts of disguise applied to many factories across China that are more akin to a diaphanous, playful veil. I conclude with a discussion of how this article’s focus on factory legibility gestures toward novel forms of intervention for advocates working at tackling tobacco today, offering them an alternative political imaginary in what is one of the world’s most important areas of public policy making.

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Matthew Kohrman
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"China Daily" features Stanford research efforts in Zouping

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China Daily has featured a longstanding Stanford research project described as instrumental towards the normalization of U.S. relations with China during the Carter administration.

Led by late professor Michel Oksenberg, a China expert who also served on the U.S. National Security Council, the project sought to examine the workings of the local government, economy and social structure of Zouping, a county in northern China. Between 1987 and 1991, the project brought more than eighty U.S. academics to that area.

According to the Daily, it was “one of the most important academic exchanges of the 1980s,” which offered a symbol of reform and “helped the world gain greater and deeper understanding of China’s growing role on the global stage.”

Jean Oi, director of the China Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, was part of the cohort that traveled with Oksenberg, and has since revisited the area with her students to continue research efforts.

The full article can be accessed below.

 

APARC Event: 2018 Oksenberg Conference on Zouping County Research

Publication: Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County

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Michel Oksenberg (center) meets with young people in China.
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From Weibo to Weixin: Social Media and China’s “New Normal”

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Please note the new time: 5:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

The new social media—especially Weibo and Weixin—has profoundly changed the landscape of Chinese society in recent years. Drawing on personal observations and a sociological perspective, I highlight the key features of the new social media, the public space they have created and altered, the huge social divides they have revealed, and the challenges and implications they present for China’s political future. These issues are illustrated through a series of episodes in Weibo and Weixin in recent years.


Xueguang ZHOU is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology and a senior fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His main area of research is institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, Chinese organizations and management, the Chinese bureaucracy, and governance in China.

 

Professor Zhou currently conducts research on the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He works with students and colleagues to conduct participatory observations of government behaviors in policy implementation, bureaucratic bargaining, and incentive designs. He examines patterns of personnel flow among government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy. He also studies the historical origins of the Chinese bureaucracy.


 

This event is off the record.

Xueguang Zhou Stanford University
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China's New Normal

In the NYTimes, Andrew Walder talks China under Mao

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Stanford sociologist Andrew Walder spoke with Ian Johnson of the New York Times about his new book, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed. Featured in a Q&A, Walder argues that Mao Zedong led Communist China based more on a simplistic understanding of Stalinist ideology than on a new vision. Walder also compares Mao and current president Xi Jinping.

Of Xi, "He’s adopting some of the symbolism of Mao in the Cultural Revolution," Walder said.

"What Xi is about is unity and stability and economic development, and that’s not what Mao was about. Mao was willing to throw things to the wind. He was willing to gamble. He never thought things could happen if it was orderly. He thought disorder was the midwife of progress. Xi is completely different."

The article can be accessed on the New York Times website.

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A guard stands next to a portrait of Mao Zedong.
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