At present, the tobacco industry produces some six trillion cigarettes worldwide every year. Six trillion cigarettes per annum, each ready to release smoke filled with highly addictive nicotine and powerful carcinogens. A third of all these sticks were produced in China last year. In 2011, the world’s largest cigarette maker by volume, the China National Tobacco Corporation, contributed an all-time high of U.S. $214 billion in profits and taxes to the Chinese government, up 22 percent year-on-year. Currently the greatest cause of preventable death in the world, the cigarette is likely to kill ten times as many people in the 21st century as it did in the 20th century, epidemiologists tell us, with China bearing the largest burden. Until now, much global health research and intervention has focused with limited success on the cigarette consumer—addressing how one or another variable prompts people to take up or quit smoking, whether the cue for the consumer is biological, psychological, spatial, financial or symbolic. What though of the industrial sources of tobacco-related diseases? Where are the six trillion cigarettes that are released into circulation each year manufactured? Where are they rolled, wrapped, and boxed for shipment? This presentation will introduce the Cigarette Citadels Project, an innovative application of participatory GIS. With special attention given to China’s network of cigarette factories, Matthew Kohrman will explain how the Cigarette Citadels Project not only reveals conceptual roadblocks in public health policy but also lacuna in social theory pertaining to the state and the politics of life.

Matthew Kohrman joined Stanford’s faculty in 1999. His research and writing bring multiple methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, examines links between the emergence of a state-sponsored disability-advocacy organization and the lives of Chinese men who have trouble walking. In recent years, Kohrman has been conducting research projects aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking and production. These projects expand upon analytical themes of Kohrman’s disability research and engage in novel ways techniques of public health.

This event is part of the China's Looming Challenges series. 

**Due to space restrictions, this event has reached capacity and we will no longer be taking RSVPs. Everyone is still welcome to attend but please plan to arrive early as seating is on a first come, first serve basis.**

Under the Hu-Wen leadership, China announced a shift in its development policy from a policy program that mainly emphasizes economic growth to one that pursues a “harmonious society.” The harmonious society program was a response to rapid increases in inequality during the 1990s, and its aim has been to ensure that the benefits from growth are widely shared.    

In recent years have the benefits from growth been widely shared? Has income inequality increased or decreased during the Hu-Wen era?

Drawing on recent findings from the China Household Income Project, a collaborative survey research project monitoring changes in incomes and inequality, Professor Terry Sicular will discuss recent trends in inequality and poverty in China. 

Terry Sicular is professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario. She received her doctorate at Yale and has taught at Stanford and Harvard. She is a specialist on the Chinese economy, speaks Mandarin, and has been studying and travelling to China for more than 30 years. Her recent research examines incomes and inequality in China, as well as related topics such as educational attainment and its intergenerational transmission, and the impact of housing reforms on household income and wealth. She has published widely in scholarly journals and books, and is as a contributor to and co-editor of Inequality and Public Policy, published by Cambridge University Press (2008). She has served as a consultant to international donor organizations, and is a leader in the ongoing, China Household Income Project, a collaborative research project that conducts a nationwide household survey and monitors trends in China’s incomes and inequality.

This event is part of the China's Looming Challenges series. 

The team of leaders who will take the helm in China beginning next year—the so-called “Fifth Generation”—will be better educated, have greater exposure to the outside world, and extensive experience implementing policies that have facilitated sustained economic growth and growing international influence. They may view issues somewhat differently than their predecessors but have risen to the top by going along to get ahead and are unlikely to propose radical policy initiatives.  But they must confront a growing number of challenges fueled by China’s past success and recent behavior and will be constrained by structural features of the Chinese system and integration into the global market.

Thomas Fingar is the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). In 2009, he was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at FSI. From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

This event is part of the China's Looming Challenges series. 

**Due to space restrictions, this event has reached capacity and we will no longer be taking RSVPs. Please plan to arrive early as seating is on a first come, first serve basis.**

Since 2008 China's banks have made loans that approach 30% of GDP each year. The central bank has used a broader measure of credit, total societal financing, that suggests credit extended in 2011 may exceed 40% of the country's GDP. It is inevitable that such profligate lending will result in significant amounts of problem loans.  The international market is well aware of this and Chinese bank shares have been hit hard for most of this year. How will these bad loans be managed? More importantly, why has the government once again used China's ostensibly commercial banks as if they were policy banks and what are the implications of this for China's economy going forward?

Carl E. Walter worked in China and its financial sector for the past 20 years and actively participated in many of the country’s financial reform efforts. While at Credit Suisse First Boston he played a major role in China’s groundbreaking first overseas IPO in 1992, as well as the first primary listing of a state-owned enterprise on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. He was a member of senior management at China International Capital Corporation, China’s first and most successful joint venture investment bank where he supported a number of significant domestic and international stock and bond underwritings for major Chinese corporations. More recently at JPMorgan he was China Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer of its banking subsidiary. During this time Carl helped build a pioneering domestic security, risk and currency trading operation.

A long time resident of Beijing before his recent return to the United States, Carl is fluent in Mandarin and holds a PhD from Stanford University and a graduate certificate from Peking University. He is the co-author of Red Capitalism: the fragile financial foundations of China’s extraordinary rise as well as Privatizing China: inside China’s stock markets. 

This event is part of the China's Looming Challenges series. 

Europe dominated the 19th century. The 20th century saw the rise of the United States. Will the 21st century be "the Chinese Century"? Using a series of Harvard Business School Cases, this lecture will explore production, consumption, and education for China's new middle class, and think about China's future, in the light of its past.

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He serves as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Chairman of the Harvard China Fund.

A historian of modern China, Professor Kirby's work examines China's business, economic, and political development in an international context. He has written on the evolution of modern Chinese business (state-owned and private); Chinese corporate law and company structure; the history of freedom in China; the international socialist economy of the 1950s; relations across the Taiwan Strait; and China's relations with Europe and America. His current projects include case studies of contemporary Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States.

This talk is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS).