Stanford University

International Relations

FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.

FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.

Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.

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>
Seminars

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
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Sino-Japanese Crisis (In)Stability in the East China Sea: A Tale of Two National Security Councils

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- This event is jointly sponsored by the China Program and the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) -

 

Since September 2012, frictions between Beijing and Tokyo over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea have become unprecedentedly unstable. Both China's military and paramilitary activity in the surrounding waters and airspace and Japan's fighter jet scrambles have reached all­-time highs. Recent public opinion polls in both countries record mutual antipathy at the highest level since leaders normalized bilateral diplomatic ties in the 1970s.

Especially under these volatile conditions, risk has surged. Even an accident stemming from a low­-level encounter could quickly escalate into a major crisis between the world's second­- and third­-largest economies (and would entrap the first-largest: the United States). This seminar examines the strengths and weaknesses of China's and Japan's crisis management mechanisms and the implications of nascent national security councils (established in late 2013) in both countries for crisis (in)stability in the East China Sea. It will also examine the prospects for, and obstacles to, more effective crisis management.

Beyond its contemporary policy relevance, the discussion will also engage issues with important implications for Chinese and Japanese foreign policy decision­making, political reforms, civil­ military relations, and U.S. relations with both countries.

 

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Adam P. LIFF is Assistant Professor of East Asian International Relations in Indiana University’s new School of Global and International Studies (SGIS/EALC Dept). At SGIS, Adam is also the founding director of the “East Asia and the World” speaker series, faculty affiliate at the Center on American and Global Security, and senior associate at the China Policy Research Institute. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, and a B.A. from Stanford University. Since 2014, Adam has been an associate-in-research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His research website is www.adampliff.com.

Professor Liff’s research and teaching focus on international relations and security studies—with a particular emphasis on contemporary security affairs in the Asia-Pacific region; the foreign relations of Japan and China; U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific (esp. U.S. security alliances); the continuing evolution of Japan’s postwar security policy profile; and the rise of China and its impact on its region and the world. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in The China Quarterly, International Security, Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Strategic Studies, Security Studies, and The Washington Quarterly, and has been cited widely in global media, including in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, and The Economist. Other recent publications include several book chapters in edited volumes and articles in policy journals and online, including in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest.

Professor Liff’s past academic research affiliations include the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the University of Virginia's Miller Center, the University of Tokyo's Institute of Social Science, Peking University's School of International Studies, the Stanford Center at PKU, and the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Law and Politics.

Adam P. Liff Assistant Professor of East Asian International Relations, Indiana University's new School of Global and International Studies
Seminars

The New Great Game: China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform

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China's rise has elicited envy, admiration, and fear among its neighbors. Although much has been written about this, previous coverage portrays events as determined almost entirely by Beijing. Such accounts minimize or ignore the other side of the equation: namely, what individuals, corporate actors, and governments in other countries do to attract, shape, exploit, or deflect Chinese involvement. The New Great Game analyzes and explains how Chinese policies and priorities interact with the goals and actions of other countries in the region.
 
To explore the reciprocal nature of relations between China and countries in South and Central Asia, The New Great Game employs numerous policy-relevant lenses: geography, culture, history, resource endowments, and levels of development. This volume seeks to discover what has happened during the three decades of China's rise and why it happened as it did, with the goal of deeper understanding of Chinese and other national priorities and policies and of discerning patterns among countries and issues.
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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.
Lois Oksenberg
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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

FSI scholars visit US Pacific Command Headquarters

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Seventeen faculty members and researchers from Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies were hosted at U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) Headquarters in Hawaii for an intensive orientation on Feb. 4-5. The visit aimed to advance collaboration and to offer a deeper understanding of USPACOM’s operations to Stanford scholars who study international security and Asia.

Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr., Commander of USPACOM, together with his commanders and staff, welcomed the delegation. Harris’s meeting with Stanford faculty is the second in recent months. The USPACOM visit and earlier speech at Stanford Center at Peking University are part of a series of activities driven by the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative. Led by Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, the Initiative seeks to provide constructive interaction between academic and governmental experts on the many and diverse security challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region.

“Engaging deeply in conversations with those who are on the frontlines is incredibly valuable,” said trip participant Coit Blacker, FSI senior fellow and professor of international studies. “This is especially true for academics who focus much of their attention thinking about the prospects for international peace and security but not necessarily considering their direct application on a military-level.”

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Top: (Left) The Stanford delegation watches a demonstration of a 2-minute drill. / (Right) Karen Eggleston boards a UH-60 Blackhawk helpcopter enroute to the Lightning Academy with her colleagues. Bottom: The delegation takes a group photo on-site.

On the first day, FSI scholars spoke with military officers about the command’s strategies and challenges it faces, such as population aging and sovereignty disputes over the South China Sea. Discussions were followed with a tour of USS Michael Murphy, a guided missile destroyer which routinely conducts operations in the Western Pacific including the South China Sea.

Karen Eggleston, FSI senior fellow and director of the Asia Health Policy Program, was one of the discussants on the USPACOM trip. Her research focuses on health policy in Asia, specifically the effects of demographic change and urbanization.

“As a health economist, the visit yielded for me a behind-the-scenes sense of how members of the military respond to pandemics and humanitarian situations, and of the ongoing dialogue with their counterparts in Asian nations,” Eggleston said. “I think that kind of military-to-military engagement provides an area rich with questions and best practices that could in some ways be shared as a model among other nations.”

Other activities on the first day included a briefing by the U.S. Pacific Fleet command, informal presentations and dialogue between the Stanford participants and the USPACOM staff, and working with senior leaders of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces command.

On the second day, the group visited the U.S. Army’s installation at Schofield Barracks. There, they observed a command post simulation and field exercise including units of the 25th Infantry Division. Graduates from the U.S. Army’s jungle survival training school also shared their impressions of applying lessons in the field. Researchers from the Asia-Pacific Center for Strategic Studies (APCSS) joined the Stanford delegation later in the day. Both sides discussed research outcomes and avenues for future exchanges. The day concluded with an extensive tour of USS Mississippi, a Virginia-class attack submarine. FSI has long engaged military officers through a senior military fellows program. Started in 2009 by the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the program remains active today with five fellows conducting research at Stanford.

Lt. Col. Jose Sumangil, a 2015-16 U.S. Air Force Senior Military Fellow, participated in the Stanford delegation at USPACOM.

“The trip was an excellent opportunity to showcase how the U.S. ‘rebalance to Asia’ strategy is implemented on a day-to-day basis – for example, providing a look into the decision-making process that could occur should a situation arise in the South China Sea,” Sumangil said. “It’s incredibly important to build this kind of understanding among experts studying Asia, and I think we helped do that here.”

USPACOM is one of the largest U.S. military commands with four major service components (U.S. Pacific Fleet, U.S. Pacific Air Forces, U.S. Army Pacific, U.S. Marine Forces); it is tasked with protecting U.S. people and interests, and enhancing stability in the Asia-Pacific Region.

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A Stanford delegation of 17 faculty members and researchers visited U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) Headquarters in Hawaii, Feb. 4-5, 2016.
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Does Money Matter? Education Enrollment and Attainment in Rural China

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In 2006, the Chinese Government introduced a massive block grant program for rural compulsory education, similar to that of Title I grant in the United States. Central government provided block grants with add-on requirement to provincial governments based on total number of pupils, average per pupil spending in that province, and a cost-sharing plan that favors the economically backward provinces. Provincial governments then distributed the grants along with its own share to county government using a similar formula to cover school operating expenditures, free tuitions, and conditional cash transfers for boarding students.

 

While there have been plenty research on whether the program has buttressed the financing of rural education or crowded out local financing, little is known about its effects on the enrollment and education attainment of rural children after a decade  (Shi, 2012; Chyi & Zhou, 2014; Lü, 2014). This paper fills this glaring gap by using matched household survey data and county school expenditure data between 2000-2011 that were made available to researchers for the first time.

 

Our identification strategies are composed of three parts. First, we take advantage of the exogenous variation in the rates of cost-sharing in the two-step allocation process of the block grants to estimate “Intention to Treatment” effects of the whole program. Secondly, we compare counties receiving different proportion of subsidies from central government in a difference-in-difference framework. Thirdly, we use the IV-DID strategy that instruments the county-level education spending with the exogenous variation in the planned allocation of the grants.

 

Dr. Wei HA is currently Research Professor in Education Policy and Leadership at the Graduate School of Education and a faculty associate at the Institute of Education Economics at Peking University. Prior to joining the Peking University, he worked as policy specialists at UNICEF and UNDP for seven years in the United States and Africa. During his doctoral study at the Harvard University, he also served as a consultant at the World Bank. He has conducted research in a wide-range of fields including education economics, public health, migration, and development economics. His current research focuses on the impact evaluation of key national education policies in China such as the Rural Compulsory Education Finance Reform, and China’s efforts to build “World Class Universities” through the 211 and 985 Projects. He also examines the interaction between education and major social transformations in China such as the massive labor retrenchments at State-Owned Enterprises in the late 1990s and rising housing prices in urban China. Dr. Ha received a dual BA in Economics and Political Science and MA in Education Economics from Peking University and his PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University.

 

This event is cosponsored by the Rural Education Action Program (REAP).

Does Money Matter? The Effects of Block Grants on Education Enrollment and Attainment in Rural China
Wei HA Education Policy and Leadership at the Graduate School of Education and Institute of Education Economics at Peking University
Seminars

The Failure of Political Institutionalization in China

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Less than four years after Mao Zedong’s death, Deng Xiaoping declared that China needed to move away from an “over-concentration of power” by an individual leader to establish a more institutionalized system of governance. Xi Jinping’s ascension to power in 2013 promised a new era of reform of the Communist Party of China (CCP), specifically intended to preserve the party’s power.  Rather than addressing governance issues, however, Xi’s actions, such as the anti-corruption campaign, have served to concentrate power in his hands, showing the weakness of political institutionalization in China after decades of collective leadership.  While decision-making processes continue to be a black box, by reclaiming the CCP’s authority over policy-making, and by chairing CCP small leading groups, Xi appears to have moved China back to Mao-style personalistic rule.   The puzzles that remain are how personalistic authoritarian rule has returned to a country characterized by a growing middle class and a modern open market economy; and what this reversion to personalistic leadership tells us about the ambiguities of institutions in communist ruling parties.  

 

Susan Shirk is the Chair of the 21st Century China Program and Research Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California - San Diego. She is also director emeritus of the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). Susan Shirk first visited China in 1971 and has been teaching, researching and engaging China diplomatically ever since. 

From 1997-2000, Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia.

In 1993, she founded, and continues to lead, the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), a Track II forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the U.S., Japan, China, Russia, South Korea and North Korea.

Shirk's publications include her books, China:  Fragile Superpower; How China Opened Its Door: The Political Success of the PRC's Foreign Trade and Investment Reforms; The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China; Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China; and her edited book, Changing Media, Changing China.

Shirk served as a member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, the Board of Governors for the East-West Center (Hawaii), the Board of Trustees of the U.S.-Japan Foundation, and the Board of Directors of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. She is a member of the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and an emeritus member of the Aspen Strategy Group. Dr. Shirk received her BA in Political Science from Mount Holyoke College, her MA in Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

This event is off the record.

Feb 19, 2016 Event Flyer
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Susan Shirk, UC San Diego
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China's New Normal

An Anatomy of Chinese Crony Capitalism: How Officials and Businessmen Collude

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For scholars of corruption, the ferocious anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping since the end of 2012 has provided a wealth of fresh evidence of corruption in the Chinese body politic and economy.  The revelations from media accounts and court documents suggest that crony capitalism -- defined by the incestuous relationship between government officials and private businessmen -- has penetrated key Chinese political institutions and economic sectors.  Based on detailed examinations of 50 high-profile cases, many of them prosecuted in the last three years, this study investigates the institutional origins of crony capitalism, identifies principal modes of collusion between political and economic elites, and analyzes its behavioral patterns.  The insights from this study imply that Xi's anti-corruption drive will have only limited success if it does not treat the causes of corruption in contemporary China.

 

Minxin PEI is the Tom and Margot Pritzker '72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow and Director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies. Dr. Pei’s areas expertise includes China, Comparative Politics, Pacific Rim, U.S./Asia Relations, and U.S./China Relations. Dr. Pei’s published work includes China’s Transition: The limits of developmental autocracy (Harvard University Press, 2006), and From Reform to Revolution: The demise of communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994).

 

This event is off the record.

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Minxin Pei Claremont McKenna College
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