Professor Yu Keping will systematically survey the dominant processes and key issues of China’s governance changes over the last 30 years since reform. His talk will summarize the major achievements and the ongoing problems of this 30 year long process. It will offer a brief analysis of the underlying reasons for these reforms and the main characteristics of China’s governance model. After enumerating an array of factual evidence, Yu will show that the drive behind China’s governance reforms stems from unitary governance to pluralist governance, centralization to decentralization, rule of man to rule of law, regulatory government to service oriented government, and from internal party democracy to the people’s democracy.

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Dr. YU Keping is the Deputy President of the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau (CCTB), and the founding Director of the China Center for Global Governance and Development (CCGGD). He also serves as Prof. and Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations at Peking University, and Prof. and Director of the Institute of Political Development at Tsinghua University. He was a visiting professor or senior fellow at many top universities, including Harvard University, Duke University in the US and Free University in Berlin. His fields of expertise include political philosophy, comparative politics, globalization, civil society, governance and politics in China. Among his many books are Governance and Rule of Law in China (ed., Brill, 2012) and Democracy Is A Good Thing (Brookings, 2010).  As a leading intellectual in China, Professor Yu was selected as one of the “30 most influential figures in the past 30 years since the reform in China” in 2008 and ranked 19 in “2011 Global Top 100 Thinkers” by Foreign Policy in the US.

Faculty and students of Peking University have been at the forefront of China’s modern history.  The social impact of the university has been enormous.  Its educational philosophy needs to continually evolve, especially as China has developed in the last few decades at historically unprecedented rates.  President Wang will discuss these changes, how the university copes with new challenges, and how the globalization of Peking University fits into his vision for the future.

Wang Enge was appointed President of Peking University in 2013. He obtained his B.S. and M.S. in theoretical physics from Liaoning University in 1982 and 1985 respectively and received his Ph.D. from Peking University in 1990. He served as Director of the Institute of Physics (CAS) (1999-2007), Founding Director of the International Center for Quantum Structures (2000), Director of the Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics (2004-2009), CAS Deputy Secretary-General (2008-2009), and Executive President of CAS Graduate University (2008-2009).  President Wang is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), as well as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Physics (UK). He has been a JSPS professor of Tohoku University (Japan), an AvH Scholar of Fritz-Haber Institute der MPG (Germany), a KITP Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA), a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), a Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Italy), and a GCEP Scholar at Stanford University.

A reception will follow immediately afer this talk

Il Rae Cho, "Preparing Financially for Aging and Retirement"

Recently, many issues related to aging have become more serious in both economic and social aspects all over the world.  Aging is something that nobody can avoid or neglect. However, most people tend to consider the issue of aging and retirement less serious than needed in real situations.  The lack of preparation for retirement may cause an economic turmoil to an individual's retirement life and national finance for social security.  In this presentation, Cho will show the current situations about aging and retirement and will offer practical solutions.

Yong Je Kim, "Next Generation Multimedia - What Will That Be?

Can you imagine the future TV and mobile phone?  What will they look like?

Only a few years ago, the main feature of a mobile phone was to make simple voice calls.  Today, we can do so much more - watch drama shows, sports and movies; take pictures and send them anywhere; and stay up-to-date checking the news and stock information of all countries in real time.  Through social media, we can share our opinion with many people regardless of location.  We can purchase goods or buy tickets for a concert simply using our mobile phones - without needing actual money or credit cards.  At the same time, TVs are getting smarter - providing useful functions like online shopping, remote video calls and watching movies without going to the movie theater. 

There are many technologies to enable these improvements, but the key technology is multimedia.  In this presentation, Kim will introduce some noticeable multimedia components and their progress, including examples of possible future TV and mobile phones. 

A tremendous amount of radioactive products were discharged as a result of the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, which resulted in radioactive contamination of the plant and surrounding areas. While geographical distribution of radioactive iodine, tellurium, and cesium in the surface soils was smoothly (but not always systematically) widespread all over the region, health risk information by the government, media, and other organizations is most likely to be given in terms of administrative boundaries (cf. prefectures, municipalities, etc.) and/or distance from the radiation source.

This paper estimates the effect of such health risk information rather than the actual health risks of radiation on land and other prices in different locations. We find that the prefecture and municipality border effects – but not the distance effect from the nuclear power plant – are significantly related to a reduction in land and other prices after the accident. This shows that people responded to health risk information based on administrative boundaries rather than the actual health risk of radiation after the disaster. Although health risk information based on prefecture and municipality boundaries has an obvious advantage of distilling large and complex risk information into a simple one, the government, media, and other organizations need to recognize and carefully examine the potential of misclassifying non-contaminated areas into contaminated prefectures. Doing so will avoid unintentional consequences to the region’s economy.

Hiroaki Matsuura is currently Departmental Lecturer in the Economy of Japan in the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow of St. Antony’s College. His main interests are health economics and demography, with a special interest in the relation between laws and population health. Hiroaki received his B.A. in Economics from Keio University, M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago, M.S. in Project Management from Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Sc.D. in Global Health and Population (Economics track) from Harvard University’s School of Public Health. In the past, he was affiliated with Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences, Human Rights in Development, and Takemi Program in International Health at Harvard University. He also worked as a research assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His doctoral dissertation research explores a right to health or to health care in national constitutions of 157 countries and state constitutions of the 50 U.S. states and estimates the impact of introducing (or removing) a right to health or to health care into national and state constitutions on health system and population health outcomes. His most recent article, “The Right to Health in Japan: Challenges of a Super Aging Society and Implication from Its 2011 Public Health Emergency” (with Eriko Sase) will be appeared on “Advancing the Human Right to Health”, edited by José M. Zuniga, Stephen P. Marks, and Lawrence O. Gostin, Oxford University Press, 2013. 

The territorial dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands now threatens to be the trigger for a deeper conflict between the two powerful Asian neighbors. This dispute has its origins in the postwar U.S. policy toward Japan, the decision to maintain the occupation of Okinawa and the Senkaku Islands under American administration, and the reversion of that territory to Japanese sovereignty. Dr. Eldridge, who has done extensive research on these issues and has published widely, including a new book on the origins of U.S. policy, will discuss his writings on Okinawa, Amami, Ogasawara/Iwo Jima, and the Senkakus to date and introduce research topics for the future.

Robert D. Eldridge is a visiting researcher at Okinawa International University’s Institute of Law and Politics, and a former tenured associate professor at Osaka University's Graduate School of International Public Policy. Eldridge earned his PhD in 1999 from Kobe University and is the author, editor, and translator of more than two dozen books on U.S.-Japan relations, Okinawan history, and Japanese politics and diplomacy, including several titles to be published in 2013: An Inoffensive Rearmament: The Making of the Postwar Japanese Army (Naval Institute Press); Japan’s Backroom Politics (Lexington); Iwo Jima and Ogasawara in U.S.-Japan Relations: American Strategy, Japanese Territory, and the Islanders In-between (Marine Corps University Press); and The Origins of U.S. Policy in the East China Sea Islands Dispute: Okinawa’s Reversion and the Senkaku Islands (Routledge).