FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.
FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.
FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
This event is part of APARC’s 2022 Fall webinar series, Asian Perspectives on the US-China Competition.
The China Program brings Inaugural China Policy Fellow Laura Stone to provide on the ground views of what the U.S.-China competition means for the region. As Asia perspectives on U.S.-China competition and Chinese intentions in the region develop and change, Laura will give us insights into how Washington stakeholders’ understanding of these perspectives has shifted and evolved. In a complex iterative process, Chinese and U.S. actions — and the reactions from the countries and countries and entities in Asia — shape a dynamic policy process within the region.
Speaker
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Laura Stone joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as Visiting Scholar and Inaugural China Policy Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year. She was formerly the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Mongolia, the Director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs, and the Director of the Economic Policy Office in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. She served three tours in Beijing as well as tours in Bangkok, Tokyo, the Public Affairs Bureau, the Pentagon Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Most recently, she serves the U.S. Department of State as Deputy Coordinator for the Secretary's Office for COVID Response and Health Security. While at APARC, she will be conducting research with the China Program and Professor Jean Oi regarding contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.
Laura M. Stone joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) as Visiting Scholar and China Policy Fellow for the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years. She currently serves the U.S. Department of State, recently as Deputy Coordinator for the Secretary's Office for COVID Response and Health Security. While at APARC, she conducted research with the China Program and Professor Jean Oi regarding contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is pleased to invite applications for a suite of fellowships in contemporary Asia studies to begin fall quarter 2023.
The Center offers postdoctoral fellowships that promote multidisciplinary research on contemporary Japan and contemporary Asia broadly defined, inaugural postdoctoral fellowships and visiting scholar positions as part of the newly launched Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, and a fellowship for experts on Southeast Asia. Learn more about each opportunity and its eligibility and specific application requirements:
Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Japan
Hosted by the Japan Program at APARC, the fellowship supports research on contemporary Japan in a broad range of disciplines including political science, economics, sociology, law, policy studies, and international relations. Appointments are for one year beginning in fall quarter 2023. The application deadline is December 1, 2022.
Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Asia
APARC offers two postdoctoral fellowship positions to junior scholars for research and writing on contemporary Asia. The primary research areas focus on political, economic, or social change in the Asia-Pacific region (including Northeast, Southeast, and South Asia), or international relations and international political economy in the region. Appointments are for one year beginning in fall quarter 2023. The application deadline is December 1, 2022.
The Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL) is a new innovative policy lab housed at Shorenstein APARC under the directorship of Professor Gi-Wook Shin. The lab is committed to addressing Asia's emergent social, cultural, economic, and political challenges. The Lab's initial research focuses on two themes. The Talent Flows and Development research theme will examine how various forms of talent mobility and strategy have contributed to the developmental success of different nations in the Asia-Pacific region. The Nationalism and Racism theme will explore how nationalism and racism are intertwined to create various forms of exclusion and intolerance across the region.
SNAPL is offering two inaugural postdoctoral fellowships (two years in length) to begin fall quarter 2023. One fellowship will focus on “Talent Flows and Development,” and the other will focus on “Nationalism and Racism” in Asia. The deadline to apply for fall quarter admission is December 1, 2022. SNAPL is also offering two visiting fellow positions to researchers and professionals from Asia with a PhD or a substantial record of achievement related to the Lab's two research themes. These visiting scholar appointments are for one year, and the deadline to apply for fall quarter 2023 admission is March 1, 2023.
Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellowship on Southeast Asia
The Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford (LKC NUS-Stanford) Fellowship on Southeast Asia provides an expert on Southeast Asia the opportunity to conduct research on or related to contemporary Southeast Asia. Fellows spend three to four months at Stanford and two to four months at NUS. At Stanford, APARC's Southeast Asia Program hosts the fellowship. Appointments will begin and end within the period from September 1, 2023 to May 31, 2024. The application deadline is January 27, 2023.
The Center offers a suite of fellowships for Asia researchers to begin fall quarter 2023. These include postdoctoral fellowships on contemporary Japan and the Asia-Pacific region, inaugural postdoctoral fellowships and visiting scholar positions with the newly launched Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, and fellowships for experts on Southeast Asia.
With a population of 1.4 billion people in the midst of industrialization and urbanization, the role of China in tackling climate change will be critical to the success of human species in facing up to the world's greatest existential challenge. Based on the newly published book -- Climate Mitigation and Adaptation in China: Policy, Technology and Market, FU Jun will discuss the parameters, policies and prospects of China's role in meeting the global crisis. In particular, in light of the country's regional heterogeneity and aided by simulation modeling, he will discern the philosophical nuances between particular justice and general justice in Chinese strategic thinking toward equitable, inclusive and sustainable growth, and focus on how different sets of technologies -- low carbon, zero carbon, negative carbon, as well as institutional technology -- will likely configure in an adaptive and dynamic fashion in China's pathways toward carbon peak prior to 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060, and with implications for green financing and international cooperation.
FU Jun is Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at Peking University. He has authored, co-authored, and edited five books, including Institutions and Investments (Studies in International Economics, The University of Michigan Press), Pathways to Prosperity: A China Narrative in Metaheuristic Growth Theory (in Chinese, Peking University Press), and Climate Mitigation and Adaptation in China: Policy, Technology, and Market (Springer Nature). Graduated with Ph.D. from Harvard University, he is the first Chinese national to have been elected as Foreign Academician in 2020, together with Anthony Giddens and Jurgen Harbermas, by the Bologna Academy of Sciences in its time-honored history. Inter alia, he has been an invited reviewer for PNAS, served on the 11-Member Visiting Committee for Area Studies and International Programs across Harvard University, and on the Advisory Board of Economia Politica. Outside academia, he has served as Member of the Listing Committee of Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Executive Board Member of SOS Village (China), Vice Chair with A. Michael Spence as Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on New Growth Models, Board Member of Peking University Educational Foundation, and Advisor to the Chairman of the Executive Council of UNESCO.
As reports of leveled mosques, detention camps, and destroyed cultural and religious sites in China's Xinjiang province emerged in the mid-to-late 2010s, the world took notice of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) flagrant oppression of Uighur Muslims and other minorities. Under the Xi Jinping administration, the Xinjiang region in northwestern China has experienced what is perhaps the greatest period of cultural assimilation since the Cultural Revolution. This massive state repression represents a primary research focus for Dr. James Millward, Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, who joined both APARC's China Program and the Stanford History Department as a visiting scholar for winter quarter 2022.
Millward's specialties include the Qing empire, the silk road, and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. In addition to his numerous academic publications on these topics, he follows and comments on current issues regarding Xinjiang, the Uyghurs and other Xinjiang indigenous peoples, PRC ethnicity policy, and Chinese politics more generally. We caught up with Millward to discuss his work and experience at Stanford this past winter quarter. Listen to the conversation:
Millward emphasizes the importance of documenting the scope and scale of the crisis in Xinjiang. "What's happened in the last four or five years in Xinjiang is of great global importance and interest to people," he says, and although it is still early to write the history of this period of repression, "it's important at least to try and get an organized draft of it down and to try to begin to interpret rather than just narrate the litany of things going on: the camps, the digital surveillance, forced labor, birth depressions, and try and put it all into some kind of framework where we can understand it."
China’s crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang is part of aggressive intolerance of cultural and political diversity that is emerging as a central feature of Xi Jinping’s tenure, explains Millward. The shift in the CCP's assimilationist policies constitutes a complete "reversal of what had been an earlier approach to diversity in China," which allowed for 56 different nationalities to have regional autonomy. His aim is to "point out a really aggressive assimilating thrust under the Xi Jinping regime [...] and then also to look more clearly at settler colonialism in Xinjiang."
In this talk, Millward explains how PRC assimilationist policies, if most extreme in Xinjiang, are related to the broader Zhonghua-izing campaign against religion and non-Mandarin language and perhaps even to intensified control over Hong Kong and efforts to intimidate Taiwan.
U.S.-China Cooperation Amid Strained Ties
The Xinjiang crisis has affected how the United States views China, bringing an unexpected unity to the usually-polarized American foreign policy arena. "The Xinjiang issue has contributed to the broad-spectrum feeling in the American political sphere that engagement with China has failed," notes Millward. The parallels between China's repression of minorities and some of the worst events in the 20th century in Europe "have brought together the political sides in America and rallied them around a much stronger anti-China stance," he says.
From Millward's perspective, however, it is not only possible but also necessary for the United States to act on Xinjiang and press China on its human rights record while cooperating with China on other issues. "This is the art of diplomacy, you have to compartmentalize and deal with different issues, particularly with two countries as large as the United States and China." In Millward's view, areas pertinent to U.S.-China collaboration are varied and transcend global challenges such as climate change or pandemics. Those are simplistic dichotomies," he says. "We have 300,000 Chinese students in our universities and we welcome them and learn a lot from them [...] We benefit from Chinese expertise in all sorts of ways."
Millward spent a productive winter quarter at APARC. Returning to Stanford as a visiting scholar provided him a unique opportunity to reconnect with his past on The Farm and survey all that has changed in the years since he completed his doctorate under the tutelage of the late Professor Harold Kahn. "The trailer park where I lived as a first-year graduate student is no more, and I couldn't even find the footprint of where it was."
An Uncomfortable Friendship: Understanding China’s Position on the Russia-Ukraine War and Its Implications for Great Power Competition
On WBUR’s "On Point" and Fox 2 KTVU, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro shares insights about China's alignment with Russia and the worldwide implications of its calculus on Ukraine.
Bargaining Behind Closed Doors: Why China’s Local Government Debt Is Not a Local Problem
New research in 'The China Journal' by APARC’s Jean Oi and colleagues suggests that the roots of China’s massive local government debt problem lie in secretive financing institutions offered as quid pro quo to localities to sustain their incentive for local state-led growth after 1994
APARC Visiting Scholar James Millward discusses PRC ethnicity policy, China's crackdown on Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang province, and the implications of the Xinjiang crisis for U.S. China strategy and China's international relations.
This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.
The fundamental reason for the extreme leverage today in China’s banks, enterprises and the state itself is found in the decentralized fiscal arrangements of highly self-reliant local governments. This problem has been compounded by the excessive stimulus lending over the past decade. As a result Beijing has promoted the creation of an extensive shadow banking system designed to protect the stability of the major state banks. Stepping back this has led to the state’s growing leverage. This presentation focuses on the impact of the shadow banking system on the state’s finances and compares the costs of China’s response to the global financial crisis with the US response.
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Carl Walter joins 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.
The Shorenstein APARC Predoctoral Fellowship supports Stanford students working within a broad range of topics related to contemporary Asia. APARC is now accepting applications for the 2022-23 Predoctoral Fellowship. Up to three fellowships are available to Ph.D. candidates who have completed all fieldwork and are nearing the completion of their dissertation. Applications are due by April 15, 2022.
The Center will give priority to candidates who are prepared to finish their degree by the end of the 2022-23 academic year.
This opportunity is open to current Stanford students only.
APARC offers a stipend of $37,230 for the 2022-23 academic year, plus Stanford's Terminal Graduate Registration (TGR) fee for three quarters. We expect fellows to remain in residence at the Center throughout the year and to participate in Center activities.
Call for Stanford Student Applications: APARC Hiring 2022 Summer Research Assistants
To support Stanford students working in the area of contemporary Asia, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center is offering research assistant positions for summer 2022. The deadline for submitting applications and letters of recommendation is March 1, 2022.
2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award Open to Nomination Entries
Sponsored by Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the annual award recognizes outstanding journalists and journalism organizations for excellence in coverage of the Asia-Pacific region. News editors, publishers, scholars, and organizations focused on Asia research and analysis are invited to submit nominations for the 2022 award through February 15.
Shorenstein APARC invites highly motivated and dedicated undergraduate- and graduate-level students to join our team as paid research assistant interns for the duration of the summer 2022 quarter. The research assistants work with assigned APARC faculty members on projects focused on contemporary Asia, studying varied issues related to the politics, economies, populations, security, foreign policies, and international relations of the countries of the Asia-Pacific region.
All research assistant positions are open to current Stanford students only.
Apply Now
APARC is now accepting applications for our summer 2022 RA positions. The deadline for submitting applications and letters of recommendation is March 1, 2022.
All summer research assistant positions will be on campus for eight weeks. The hourly pay rate is $17 for undergraduate students, $25 for graduate students.
Decisions regarding the options for telecommuting work will be made closer to the appointment start dates in accordance with the evolving COVID-19 situation and the University's recommendations.
II. Fill out the online application form for summer 2022, including the above two attachments, and submit the complete form.
III. Arrange for a letter of recommendation from a faculty to be sent directly to Shorenstein APARC. Please note: the faculty members should email their letters directly to Kristen Lee at kllee@stanford.edu.
We will consider only applications that include all supporting documents.
2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award Open to Nomination Entries
Sponsored by Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the annual award recognizes outstanding journalists and journalism organizations for excellence in coverage of the Asia-Pacific region. News editors, publishers, scholars, and organizations focused on Asia research and analysis are invited to submit nominations for the 2022 award through February 15.
To support Stanford students working in the area of contemporary Asia, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center is offering research assistant positions for summer 2022. The deadline for submitting applications and letters of recommendation is March 1, 2022.
This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk.
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.
In China, market institutions are still being developed and private owned enterprises need help to overcome obstacles arising from the imperfection of market institutions. Such help can come from various levels of the government or state-owned enterprises. It is believed that such help is more likely if a major shareholder of the private enterprise has formed a joint venture with a state shareholder, either directly or indirectly. In this talk, Bai Chong-en will discuss ownership connections among state and private investors (ultimate shareholders) and their changes overtime. He will also examine the relationship between the degree of such connection and some important characteristics of the investors. His model suggests that such connections have played an important role in the growth of the private sector.
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BAI Chong-En is the Mansfield Freeman Chair Professor and dean of the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University. He is also the director of both the National Institute for Fiscal Studies of Tsinghua University and the Institute for State-Owned Enterprises of Tsinghua University. He earned his PhD degree in economics from Harvard University. His research areas include institutional economics, economic growth and development, public economics, finance, corporate governance, and Chinese economy.
BAI is a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the “14th Five-Year Plan” National Development Planning Expert Committee, the Chinese Economists 50 Forum, the China Finance 40 Forum, and Chinainfo 100. He was a member of the monetary policy committee of the People’s Bank of China from 2015 to 2018. He served as Adjunct Vice-President of Beijing State-Owned Assets Management Co., Ltd. from August 2011 to December 2012. He was a non-resident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution from 2006 to 2007.
China’s spectacular growth over the last 40 years has slowed but remains strong, leading the world in economic recovery after the global financial crisis, and even in the current COVID-19 pandemic after a devasting blow early in 2020. Yet, a number of worrying developments have emerged, most recently the troubles that China’s second largest property development company, the Evergrande Group, have suffered.
FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
