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.

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The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

Barry Naughton is an authority on the Chinese economy, with an emphasis on issues relating to industry, trade, finance, and China's transition to a market economy. Recent research focuses on regional economic growth in the People's Republic of China and the relationship between foreign trade and investment and regional growth. He is also completing a general textbook on the Chinese economy. Recently completed projects have focused on Chinese trade and technology, in particular, the relationship between the development of the electronics industry in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the growth of trade and investment among those economies. His book, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993, which was published in 1995, is a comprehensive study of China's development from a planned to a market economy that traces the distinctive strategy of transition followed by China, as well as China's superior growth performance. It received the Ohira Memorial Prize in 1996. Naughton is the author of numerous articles on the Chinese economy and is editor or co-editor of three other books: Reforming Asian Socialism: The Growth of Market Institutions, Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, and The China Circle: Economics and Technology in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Naughton joined IR/PS in 1988 and was named to the Sokwanlok Chair in Chinese International Affairs in 1998.

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Barry Naughton Sokwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies Speaker UC San Diego
Seminars
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The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

Professor Teiwes is a scholar with an international reputation in his main area of research, Chinese elite politics. He has written extensively on re-evaluations of Chinese Communist Party history, 1935-76, and is currently researching leadership politics in the post-Mao era. His wider areas of interest lie in Chinese politics more broadly, communist and post-communist systems, the international communist movement, and American foreign policy. He is the author of several works, including Politics and Purges in China (1979, 2nd ed. 1993), Politics at Mao's Court (1990), The Tragedy of Lin Biao (1996), China's Road to Disaster (1999), and The End of the Maoist Era (2007) (the latter three studies co-authored with Warren Sun).

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Frederick Teiwes Professor, Department of Government and International Relations Speaker University of Sydney, Australia
Seminars
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HONORABLE SURVIVOR cover 3x4sm
Lynne Joiner, author of Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America and the Persecution of John S. Service will discuss and read from her new book, available October 7, 2009.

John Stewart Service (3 August 1909 - 3 February 1999) was an American diplomat who served in the Foreign Service in China prior to and during World War II. Considered one of the State Department's "China Hands," he was an important member of the Dixie Mission to Yan'an. Service correctly predicted that the Communists would defeat the Nationalists in a civil war, but he and other diplomats were blamed for the "loss" of China in the domestic political turmoil following the 1949 Communist triumph in China. In the immediate postwar years, Service was indicted in the Amerasia Affair in 1945, of which a Grand Jury cleared him of wrongdoing.  In 1950 U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an attack against Service, which led to investigations of the reports Service wrote while stationed in China. Secretary of State Dean Acheson fired Service, but in 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered his reinstatement in a unanimous decision.

Notable reviews:

"Sometimes a writer can use one person's story to illuminate an entire piece of history, and that is what Lynne Joiner does in her engrossing and readable book. . . . This is both a solid addition to scholarship of the Cold War era and the moving, very personal story of the life of one man: brilliant, flawed, long suffering, and honorable indeed."

-Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa 

"Joiner ably tells the tragic story of a good American laid low by the basest kind of character assassination masquerading as anti-Communism. All one can say is: 'Read this book and weep!"

-Orville Schell, Director of the Center for US-China Relations, Asia Society.

"Jack Service's experiences in wartime China and postwar America are an exciting tale with important resonances for current foreign policy challenges in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Iran as well as U.S.-China relations. I can't wait to see the movie."

-Susan L. Shirk, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (1997-2000); currently Director, University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, U.C.-San Diego

‘This maelstrom of political intrigue, with Service at the center, is presented in well-documented and engaging detail. It is critical reading for anyone concerned with China policy and an instance of Congress and the FBI subverting justice."

-Richard H. Solomon, former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Relations; currently President of the U.S. Institute of Peace 

"Honorable Survivor is the gripping tale of one man's extraordinary life in wartime China and the Kafkaesque era of McCarthyism in America. Lynne Joiner does a masterful job of using new materials to illuminate how personal decisions, great historical forces, and the actions of vindictive and overzealous officials shaped developments in China, the United States, and U.S.-China relations in ways that have yet to be fully resolved."

-Thomas Fingar, former U.S. Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis; currently lecturer at Stanford University 

"Jack Service did not lose China.  On the contrary, he was a hero of the times. . . . This well-written and thoroughly researched book . . . helps us understand the machinations and failures of U.S.-China policy, on both the American and Chinese sides."

-Victor Hao Li, former President, East-West Center, Honolulu, and former Shelton Professor of International Law, Stanford Law School

Lynne Joiner is an Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, news anchor, and documentary filmmaker. Her work has included assignments for CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR, Christian Science Monitor Radio, Newsweek, and Los Angeles Times Magazine. She lives in San Francisco, California.

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Lynne Joiner Media Consultant Speaker Shanghi International TV Channel
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A Workshop in honor of Professor Michel Oksenberg
Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Stanford China Program

We continue to honor the legacy of Professor Michel Oksenberg (1938-2001), a core faculty member of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and one of the country's leading authorities on China and on U.S.-China relations. Professor Oksenberg was one of the most powerful voices advocating a consistent and thoughtful policy of American engagement with China, and with Asia more broadly. The annual Shorenstein APARC Oksenberg Lecture has recognized distinguished individuals who have carried on this legacy of advancing understanding between the United States and China, and the nations of the Asia-Pacific region.

This year, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China and a time of global economic crisis, Shorenstein APARC is broadening the Oksenberg Lecture to a full afternoon workshop to examine the future of US-China relations and China's new role in this turbulent world.  Invited speakers are experts who have had deep experience in the academic, business, and policy worlds.

Agenda:

1:00 Welcoming remarks from Ambassador Michael Armacost, Acting Director, Shorenstein APARC
1:15-3:30 Can China Save the Global Economy?

Moderator:

Jean Oi - William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics, Stanford University

Panelists:

  • Barry Naughton - Professor of Chinese Economy and So Kwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs, Graduate school of International Relations/Political Science at UC San Diego
  • Carl Walter - Managing Director of JPMorgan and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase Bank China Co Ltd. and a long-time resident of China.
  • David Hale - Founder, David Hale Global Economics, formerly Global Chief Economist for the Zurich Financial Services Group
  • Lyric Hughes Hale - founder of China Online and President of David Hale Global Economics
3:45-5:45 The Group of Two: The Future of U.S.-China Relations

Moderator:

John Lewis - William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, Emeritus; CISAC Faculty Member; FSI Senior Fellow, by courtesy

Panelists:

  • Susan Shirk - Professor of political science at UC San Diego, Director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for  East Asia and Pacific Affairs. 
  • Ambassador Stapleton Roy - Vice Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., Chairman of the Hopkins-Nanjing Advisory Council, former U.S. Ambassador to the PRC.
  • Thomas J. Christensen - Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Bechtel Conference Center

Shorenstein APARC Encina Hall Stanford University
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Visiting Scholar at APARC, 2021-2022
Visiting Scholar at APARC, 2012-2013
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Carl Walter joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as visiting scholar with the China Program for the 2021-2022 academic year. Prior to coming to APARC, he served as independent, non-executive Director at the China Construction Bank. He was also previously a visiting scholar with APARC during the winter and spring terms of the 2012–13 academic year after a career in banking spent largely in China. 

His research interests focus on China's financial system and its impact on financial and political organizations. During his time at Shorenstein APARC Walter will continue his book project on how fiscal reforms in China have impacted the banking system, the overall economy and the prospect for financial reform going forward.

Walter has contributed articles to publications including Caijing, the Wall Street Journal and the China Quarterly. He is also the co-author of Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundations of China's Extraordinary Rise (2012) and Privatizing China: Inside China's Stock Markets (2005).

Walter lived and worked in Beijing from 1991 to 2011, first as an investment banker involved in the earliest SOE restructurings and overseas public listings, then as chief operation officer of China's first joint venture investment bank, China International Capital Corporation. Over the last ten years he was JPMorgan's China chief operating officer as well as chief executive officer of its China banking subsidiary.

Walter holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University, a certificate of advanced study from Peking University and a BA in Russian Studies from Princeton University.

Carl Walter Managing Director of JPMorgan and Chief Executive Officer Speaker JPMorgan Chase Bank China Co Ltd.
Barry Naughton Professor of Chinese Economy and So Kwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs Speaker Graduate school of International Relations/Political Science at UC San Diego
Lyric Hughes Hale Founder of China Online and President Speaker David Hale Global Economics
David Hale Founder, David Hale Global Economics Speaker formerly Global Chief Economist for the Zurich Financial Services Group
Susan Shirk Professor of political science at UC San Diego Speaker Director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs
Ambassador Stapleton Roy Vice Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., Chairman of the Hopkins-Nanjing Advisory Council Speaker former U.S. Ambassador to the PRC
Thomas J. Christensen Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University Speaker former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-26044

(650) 723-2843 (650) 725-9401
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics
jean_oi_headshot.jpg PhD

Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Professor Oi is also the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University.

A PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, Oi first taught at Lehigh University and later in the Department of Government at Harvard University before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997.

Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on political economy and the process of reform in transitional systems. Oi has written extensively on China's rural politics and political economy. Her State and Peasant in Contemporary China (University of California Press, 1989) examined the core of rural politics in the Mao period—the struggle over the distribution of the grain harvest—and the clientelistic politics that ensued. Her Rural China Takes Off (University of California Press, 1999 and Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 1999) examines the property rights necessary for growth and coined the term “local state corporatism" to describe local-state-led growth that has been the cornerstone of China’s development model. 

She has edited a number of conference volumes on key issues in China’s reforms. The first was Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation (Brookings Institution Press, 2010), co-edited with Scott Rozelle and Xueguang Zhou, which examined the earlier phases of reform. Most recently, she co-edited with Thomas Fingar, Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future (Stanford University Press, 2020). The volume examines the difficult choices and tradeoffs that China leaders face after forty years of reform, when the economy has slowed and the population is aging, and with increasing demand for and costs of education, healthcare, elder care, and other social benefits.

Oi also works on the politics of corporate restructuring, with a focus on the incentives and institutional constraints of state actors. She has published three edited volumes related to this topic: one on China, Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform (Shorenstein APARC, 2011); one on Korea, co-edited with Byung-Kook Kim and Eun Mee Kim, Adapt, Fragment, Transform: Corporate Restructuring and System Reform in Korea (Shorenstein APARC, 2012); and a third on Japan, Syncretism: The Politics of Economic Restructuring and System Reform in Japan, co-edited with Kenji E. Kushida and Kay Shimizu (Brookings Institution, 2013). Other more recent articles include “Creating Corporate Groups to Strengthen China’s State-Owned Enterprises,” with Zhang Xiaowen, in Kjeld Erik Brodsgard, ed., Globalization and Public Sector Reform in China (Routledge, 2014) and "Unpacking the Patterns of Corporate Restructuring during China's SOE Reform," co-authored with Xiaojun Li, Economic and Political Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2018.

Oi continues her research on rural finance and local governance in China. She has done collaborative work with scholars in China, including conducting fieldwork on the organization of rural communities, the provision of public goods, and the fiscal pressures of rapid urbanization. This research is brought together in a co-edited volume, Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization (Brookings Institution Shorenstein APARC Series, 2017), with Karen Eggleston and Wang Yiming. Included in this volume is her “Institutional Challenges in Providing Affordable Housing in the People’s Republic of China,” with Niny Khor. 

As a member of the research team who began studying in the late 1980s one county in China, Oi with Steven Goldstein provides a window on China’s dramatic change over the decades in Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County (Stanford University Press, 2018). This volume assesses the later phases of reform and asks how this rural county has been able to manage governance with seemingly unchanged political institutions when the economy and society have transformed beyond recognition. The findings reveal a process of adaptive governance and institutional agility in the way that institutions actually operate, even as their outward appearances remain seemingly unchanged.

Selected Multimedia

Director of the China Program
Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University
Faculty Affiliate at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
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Jean C. Oi William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics Moderator Stanford University
John W. Lewis William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, Emeritus; CISAC Faculty Member; FSI Senior Fellow, by courtesy Moderator Stanford University
Conferences
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A group of writers and academics in China in recent years have come to be known as the "New Left." But the range of views encompassed under this rubric is broad and seemingly contradictory. Many are critical of the inequality that has come from the market reforms; some seem to look fondly back on the Maoist system and even the Cultural Revolution, while others hold very different views, preferring to call themselves "critical intellectuals," who see a "Chinese alternative" to a neoliberal market economy. This panel will explore the range of views within this group loosely termed the "New Left," to understand what exactly the "New Left" is. How are these "New Left" views different from the Old Left? What are the implications of these views for China's political and economic reforms? Discussing these issues are Wang Hui, a central figure in the "New Left" in China, and David Kelly, a leading Western scholar on the subject.

Wang Hui is professor of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University and guest professor at Nankai University. In May 2008, he was named one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine. His essays, commentary, and teaching examine the paradoxes of social change in modern and contemporary China. He was editor-in-chief of Dushu, China's leading intellectual journal.

David Kelly is Professor of Chinese Politics at the China Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney. Professor Kelly's work ranges widely across Chinese politics: intellectual history, especially of Marxism and liberalism; political sociology, mainly of intellectuals, urban homeowners and migrant workers; and public policy, focusing on the dilemmas of governance under turbulent current conditions.

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Wang Hui Distinguished Practitioner and Visiting Professor, Center for East Asian Studies Speaker Stanford University
David Kelly Professor Speaker University of Technology Sydney
Seminars

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C-327
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 723-9149 (650) 723-6530
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Shorenstein APARC Fellow
Affiliated Scholar at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
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Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009.

From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Fingar is a graduate of Cornell University (A.B. in Government and History, 1968), and Stanford University (M.A., 1969 and Ph.D., 1977 both in political science). His most recent books are From Mandate to Blueprint: Lessons from Intelligence Reform (Stanford University Press, 2021), Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford University Press, 2011), The New Great Game: China and South and Central Asia in the Era of Reform, editor (Stanford University Press, 2016), Uneasy Partnerships: China and Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, 2017), and Fateful Decisions: Choices that will Shape China’s Future, co-edited with Jean Oi (Stanford, 2020). His most recent article is, "The Role of Intelligence in Countering Illicit Nuclear-Related Procurement,” in Matthew Bunn, Martin B. Malin, William C. Potter, and Leonard S Spector, eds., Preventing Black Market Trade in Nuclear Technology (Cambridge, 2018)."

Selected Multimedia

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This talk is an overview of the changing role of foreign investment in Chinese workplaces. Foreign investment inflows helped transform the Chinese industrial landscape in the 1990s. As ownership has become blurred and increasingly mixed between domestic-foreign and public-private in China, preferential policies and laws for foreign-invested firms have diminished. A more level playing field has raised the stakes for foreign business and led to their increased participation in national debates on labor legislation and legal protections for workers. This talk will focus on this new role for foreign investors and how it is changing Chinese laws and the Chinese workplace.

Professor Gallagher studies Chinese politics, law and society, and comparative politics. She is currently working on two projects. The first, funded by a Fulbright Research Award and the National Science Foundation, examines the development of rule of law in China by examining the dynamics of legal mobilization of Chinese workers. "The Rule of Law in China: If They Build It, Who Will Come?" focuses on the demand-side of rule of law through an exploration of legal aid plaintiffs in Shanghai, a four-city household survey on legal knowledge, attitude, and practice, and in-depth case analysis of labor disputes. The second project examines labor standards and practices in four Chinese regions. One goal is to find if there are diffusion effects in legislation, court behavior, and labor practices across different regions. Another goal is to look for evidence of a "race to the bottom" in labor standards and social welfare not between China and other competing economies, but within China's own domestic economy.

This talk is part of the Stanford China Program Winter 2009 China Seminar Series titled "30 Years of Reform and Opening in China: How Far from the Cage?"

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Mary E. Gallagher Associate Professor of Political Science Speaker University of Michigan
Seminars
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A central element of Deng Xiaoping's political reforms initiated during the 1980s was to reform the ways that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) related to other national institutions (the state and military), sectors of society, and the Party itself.  While there have been significant ups and downs over the past thirty years, many elements of Deng's original vision for Party reform have been carried out and continue to be pursued. As a result, today's Chinese Communist Party is a stronger institution that has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and other communist party-states worldwide. Yet, it faces new challenges, to which it must adapt. Professor Shambaugh's lecture will assess the CCP's adaptations and reforms over the past three decades.

David Shambaugh has been Professor of Political Science & International Affairs in the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University since 1996.  He directed the Elliott School's Sigur Center for Asian Studies from 1996-98, and since that time has been the founding Director of the China Policy Program.  He has also been a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program and Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution since 1998.  In 2008 he was also appointed an Honorary Research Professor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Before joining the faculty at George Washington, he previously taught at the University of London's School of Oriental & African Studies (1987-1996), served as Editor of The China Quarterly (1991-1996), and directed the Asia Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1986-87).  He received his B.A. in East Asian Studies from the Elliott School at George Washington, an M.A. in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins SAIS, and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan.  Professor Shambaugh has published widely-having authored or edited 25 books, approximately 200 articles and book chapters, and 100 opinion-editorials and book reviews.  He is a frequent commentator on Chinese and Asian affairs in the international media, sits on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals, and has served as a consultant to various governments, research institutes, and private corporations. 

This talk is part of the Stanford China Program Winter 2009 China Seminar Series titled "30 Years of Reform in China: How Far from the Cage?"

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David Shambaugh Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the China Policy Program Speaker the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University
Seminars
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