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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China's Harmonious Society colloquium series is co-sponsored by the Stanford China Program and the Center for East Asian Studies

Since 2006, the official doctrine of China's Communist Party calls for the creation of a "harmonious society" (HeXieSheHui). This policy, identified with the Hu Jintao leadership, acknowledges the new problems that have emerged as China continues its amazing economic growth. The economy is booming but so are tensions from rising inequality, environmental damage, health problems, diverse ethnicities, and attempts to break the "iron rice bowl." In this series of colloquia, leading authorities will discuss the causes of these tensions, their seriousness, and China's ability to solve these challenges.

A key issue in political economy concerns the accountability that governance structures impose on public officials and how elections and representative democracy influences the allocation of public resources. In this talk, Rozelle discusses a unique survey data set from 2450 randomly selected villages. The data describe China's recent progress in village governance reforms and its relationship to the provision of public goods in rural China between 1998 and 2004.

Rozelle and his colleagues examined two sets of questions using an empirical framework based on a theoretical model in which local governments must decide to allocate fiscal resources between public goods investments and other expenditures. They discovered--both in descriptive and econometric analyses--that when the village leader is elected, the provision of public goods rises (compared to the case when the leader is appointed by upper level officials). Thus, one may conclude that democratization--at least at the village level in rural China--appears to increase the quantity of public goods investment. Further, they find that when village leaders who had been elected are able to implement more public projects during their terms of office, they, as the incumbent, are more likely to be reelected.

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Encina Hall East, E404
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Helen F. Farnsworth Endowed Professorship
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Director of the Rural Education Action Program, Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
Faculty Affiliate at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
scott_rozelle_new_headshot.jpeg PhD

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Previously, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis and an assistant professor in Stanford’s Food Research Institute and department of economics. He currently is a member of several organizations, including the American Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, and the Association for Asian Studies. Rozelle also serves on the editorial boards of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the China Economic Review.

His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition.

Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. His book, Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, was published in 2020 by The University of Chicago Press. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. For the past 20 years, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the University of California's Agricultural Issues Center; and a member of Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

In recognition of his outstanding achievements, Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards, including the Friendship Award in 2008, the highest award given to a non-Chinese by the Premier; and the National Science and Technology Collaboration Award in 2009 for scientific achievement in collaborative research.

Faculty affiliate at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
Faculty Affiliate at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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Scott Rozelle Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Speaker Stanford University
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The Chinese Communist Party's 17th Congress held in October was yet another landmark event in shaping the future leadership and policy direction of China. It selected the next generation of leaders and defined broad policies for Hu Jintao's second term. The Congress had major implications for both domestic policies as well as China's relationship to the United States and the world.

Distinguished experts from the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center's China Program and UC San Diego will discuss the outcome of the party congress and the signposts it provides for the future. They will look at leadership trends, political succession, socio-economic policy and Chinese foreign policy. Professor Jean Oi will moderate.

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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, China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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; Professor of Political Science; Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Director, China Program Moderator Stanford University
Barry Naughton Professor of Chinese Economy; Sokwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs Speaker University of California, San Diego
Alice Lyman Miller Research Fellow, Hoover Institution; Editor, China Leadership Monitor Speaker
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Please join us on Thursday, November 1 for the launch of the Stanford China Program, a new program of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). With China at the forefront of so many contemporary issues, from economic growth to international security, scholars at Shorenstein APARC have developed the China Program in response to the increasing need to explore and explain dynamic changes taking place in China today. The Stanford China Program is composed of scholars who do their research on the ground, in the villages, company boardrooms and government institutions of China.

Our inaugural event, co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies, illustrates the catalytic role that the Stanford China Program intends to play. The panel discussion "Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation" will go beyond the headlines trumpeting China's spectacular growth. We will discuss the difficult questions facing China, about whether and how such a rapidly transforming nation will be able to manage the tensions that accompany growth at such a pace. Issues from growing income disparity to environmental damage and widening gaps between rural and urban China are forces that are tearing at the social fabric of China. Are these the signs of a system in crisis or, as the event title suggests, the necessary pains associated with growth?

These questions occupy not only scholars, but also policy makers and business leaders alike. The panelists will discuss a range of tensions and opportunities in contemporary China such as markets, governance, environment and social inequality. The panelists include:

  • Melanie Manion, Professor of Public Affairs and Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a specialist on issues of political governance in China.
  • Leonardo Ortolano, UPS Foundation Professor of Civil Engineering in Urban and Regional Planning at Stanford, who will speak on environmental issues.
  • Scott Rozelle, FSI Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at Shorenstein APARC and a leading expert on rural China.
  • Andrew G. Walder, Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor of Sociology at Stanford and Director Emeritus of Shorenstein APARC will moderate the panel discussion.

The event is scheduled to take place from 5:30 - 7:00 PM, Thursday November 1 in the Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall, 616 Serra Street. A light reception will follow the panel discussion. Full details can be found at the link below.

I look forward to welcoming you to this inaugural event and to future activities of the Stanford China Program at Shorenstein APARC.

Sincerely,

Jean C. Oi
William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics
Professor of Political Science
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director, Stanford China Program

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The articles in this volume directly or indirectly examine central tenets of neoliberalism: interference with market mechanisms is the cause of poor economic performance, and returning to market fundamentalism will restore prosperity. Despite these bold claims, scholars have not examined the extent to which neoliberal policies result in positive outcomes or whether economic successes are explained by neoliberalism. This volume of Research in Political Sociology assesses these neoliberal claims. The introductory article compares classical liberalism to neoliberalism, and summarizes the political-legal changes in corporations? environment and the redistribution of income and wealth from the mid-1970s to the present in the United States. The first part of this volume examines the effects of neoliberal policies on higher education in the state of Missouri and workers? health in Canada, and whether neoliberalism can explain changes in social service provisions and economic development initiatives by local US governments. The second part of this volume examines how the politics of neoliberal reforms affected polices of racial redress in Fuji and Tanzania, and the capacity of neoliberalism to explain economic development and change in the organization of business enterprises in China and India. Together, these articles find little support for the claims of neoliberalism, which suggests that liberalism is better understood as an ideology than as a theory.

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Elsevier JAI Press in "Politics and Neoliberalism: Structure, Process and Outcome"
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Jean C. Oi
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The purpose of this executive summary is to provide a concise statement about what we have learned about investment into China's rural environment. The overall purpose is to help the Bank understand what is happening in rural China, what farmer's are thinking about the current trends and what they are hoping will happen in the future (if they had a say). One of the most important questions is answer what should the role of the state be.

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Scott Rozelle
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The dynamics of a global economy is being reshaped by the economic emergence of two Asian giants, China and India. How the world's two most populous countries manage globalization as they pursue economic reform and liberalization will impact significantly their societies, the rest of Asia, and the world.

This book brings together articles by first rate scholars of China and India to share and discuss their research findings in four areas: Challenges, Opportunities and Responses to Globalization; Social Security and Governance; National Security in the age of Globalization; and Ethnicity and Identity in the New World.

The book includes an opening address by Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, from his speech on Managing Globalization: Lessons from China and India, delivered at the official opening of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy on 4 April 2005.

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World Scientific Publishing Co in "India-China: Managing Globalization"
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Jean C. Oi
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981-256-462-4
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Gradual change has been a hallmark of the Chinese reform experience, and China's success in its sequential approach makes it unique among the former command economies. Since 1979, with the inception of the continuing era of reform, the Chinese economy has flourished. Growth has averaged nine percent a year, and China is now a trillion dollar economy. China has become a major trading power and the predominant target among developing countries for foreign direct investment. Despite all this, China remains poor and the reform process unfinished.

This book takes its defining theme from Deng Xiaopeng's famous metaphor for gradual reform: "feeling the stones to cross the river." How far has China progressed in fording the river? The experts who contributed to this volume tackle many aspects of that question, assessing Chinese progress in policy reform, priorities for further reform, and the research still needed to inform policymakers' decisions.

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Stanford University Press in "How Far Across the River? Chinese Policy Reform at the Millennium"
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Jean C. Oi
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0804747660
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The overall goal of our paper is to explore this question of how China's policy will likely respond as the nation enters the WTO. Specifically, we will have three objectives. First, we briefly review China's existing agriculture policy and past performance of China's agriculture and how it has changed during the past 20 years of reform. Next, we examine the main features of the agreement that China must adhere to as they enter WTO. Finally, we consider a number of possible ways that policy makers may respond, primarily focusing on the national government's viewpoint.

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Scott Rozelle
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China and the World Trade Organization

On balance, will the nation's accession to WTO help or hurt rural residents? How will they affect rural incomes? Who in the rural economy will get hurt? Are there some in the rural economy who will be insulated from the effects of WTO?

The general goal of our essay will be to begin the discussion of these critical questions. In particular, we will attempt to meet this broad goal by pursuing three sets of objectives. First, we will examine the record of rural incomes, in general, and then focus on how employment may be affected by China's accession to WTO.

Second, we will attempt to understand how WTO will affect the agriculture sector, in particular. To do so, we will provide measures of the distortions in China's agricultural sector at a time immediately prior to the nation's accession to WTO and seek to assess how well integrated China's markets are in order to understand which areas of the country and which segments of the farming population will likely be isolated from or affected by the changes that WTO will bring. Ultimately, with a knowledge of the size and magnitude of the impacts, researchers will be better able to begin working on understanding how the policies that WTO will impose on China will change the gap between the domestic and international price and affect imports and exports, domestic production and production, prices, income and poverty.

Third, we will examine the policy options that the government has available to them in the wake of WTO.

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

(650) 723-2843 (650) 725-9401
0
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, China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University
Faculty Affiliate at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
Date Label
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