A hot springs summit between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Russian President Vladimir Putin next week hopes to solve the 70-year-old dispute over an isolated string of islands that Russian and Japanese nationalists both claim as their own, according to Daniel Sneider, associate director for research at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Read the commentary piece in Foreign Policy here.

As a new U.S. administration assumes office next year, it will face numerous policy challenges in the Asia-Pacific, a region that accounts for nearly 60 percent of the world’s population and two-thirds of global output.

Despite tremendous gains over the past two decades, the Asia-Pacific region is now grappling with varied effects of globalization, chief among them, inequities of growth, migration and development and their implications for societies as some Asian economies slow alongside the United States and security challenges remain at the fore.

Seven scholars from Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) offered views on policy challenges in Asia and some possible directions for U.S.-Asia relations during the next administration.

View the scholars' commentary by scrolling down the page or click on the individual links below to jump to a certain topic.

U.S.-China relations

U.S.-Japan relations

North Korea

Southeast Asia and the South China Sea

Global governance

Population aging .

Trade

U.S.-China relations

By Thomas Fingar

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Alarmist predictions about China’s rise and America’s decline mischaracterize and overstate tensions in the relationship. There is little likelihood that the next U.S. administration will depart from the “hedged engagement” policies pursued by the last eight U.S. administrations. America’s domestic problems cannot be solved by blaming China or any other country. Indeed, they can best be addressed through policies that have contributed to peace, stability and prosperity.

Strains in U.S.-China relations require attention, not radical shifts in policy. China is not an enemy and the United States does not wish to make it one. Nor will or should the next administration resist changes to the status quo if change can better the rules-based international order that has served both countries well. Washington’s objective will be to improve the liberal international system, not to contain or constrain China’s role in that system.

The United States and China have too much at stake to allow relations to become dangerously adversarial, although that is unlikely to happen. But this is not a reason to be sanguine. In the years ahead, managing the relationship will be difficult because key pillars of the relationship are changing. For decades, the strongest source of support for stability in U.S.-China relations has been the U.S. business community, but Chinese actions have alienated this key group and it is now more likely to press for changes than for stability. A second change is occurring in China. As growth slows, Chinese citizens are pressing their government to make additional reforms and respond to perceived challenges to China’s sovereignty.

The next U.S. administration is more likely to continue and adapt current policies toward China and Asia more broadly than to pursue a significantly different approach. Those hoping for or fearing radical changes in U.S. policy will be disappointed..

Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow and former chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council. He leads a research project on China and the World that explores China’s relations with other countries.

U.S.-Japan relations

By Daniel Sneider

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Three consecutive terms held by the same party would certainly preserve the momentum behind the ‘pivot to Asia’ strategy of the last few years, especially on the security front. Still there are some dangers ahead. If Japan moves ahead to make a peace treaty with Russia, resolving the territorial issue and opening a flow of Japanese investment into Russia, that could be a source of tension. The new administration may also want to mend fences early with China, seeking cooperation on North Korea and avoiding tensions in Southeast Asia.

The big challenge, however, will be guiding the TPP through Congress. While there is a strong sentiment within policy circles in favor of rescuing the deal, perhaps through some kind of adjustment of the agreement, insiders believe that is highly unlikely. The Sanders-Warren wing of the Democratic party has been greatly strengthened by this election and they will be looking for any sign of retreat on TPP. Mrs. Clinton has an ambitious agenda of domestic policy initiatives – from college tuition and the minimum wage to immigration reform – on which she will need their support. One idea now circulating quietly in policy circles is to ‘save’ the TPP, especially its strategic importance, by separating off a bilateral Japan-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. Tokyo is said to be opposed to this but Washington may put pressure on for this option, leaving the door open to a full TPP down the road. .

Daniel Sneider is the associate director for research and a former foreign correspondent. He is the co-author of Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific Wars (Stanford University Press, 2016) and is currently writing about U.S.-Japan security issues.

North Korea

By Kathleen Stephens

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From an American foreign policy perspective, North Korea policy challenges will be inherited by the next president as “unfinished business,” unresolved despite a range of approaches spanning previous Republican and Democratic administrations. The first months in a new U.S. president’s term may create a small window to explore potential new openings. The new president should demonstrate at the outset that North Korea is high on the new administration’s priority list, with early, substantive exchanges with allies and key partners like China to affirm U.S. commitment to defense of its allies, a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and the vision agreed to at the Six-Party Talks in the September 2005 Joint Statement of Principles. Early messaging to Pyongyang is also key – clearly communicating the consequences of further testing or provocations, but at the same time signaling the readiness of the new administration to explore new diplomatic approaches. The appointment of a senior envoy, close to the president, could underscore the administration’s seriousness as well as help manage the difficult policy and political process in Washington itself.

2017 is a presidential election year in South Korea, and looks poised to be a particularly difficult one. This will influence Pyongyang’s calculus, as will the still-unknown impact of continued international sanctions. The challenges posed by North Korea have grown greater with time, but there are few new, untried options acceptable to any new administration in Washington. Nonetheless, the new administration must explore what is possible diplomatically and take further steps to defend and deter as necessary. .

Kathleen Stephens is the William J. Perry Distinguished Fellow and former U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea. She is currently writing and researching on U.S. diplomacy in Korea.

Southeast Asia and the South China Sea

By Donald K. Emmerson

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A new U.S. administration will be inaugurated in January 2017. Unless it wishes to adapt to such outcomes, it should:

(1) renew its predecessor’s refusal to endorse any claim to sovereignty over all, most, or some of the South China Sea and/or its land features made by any of the six contending parties—Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam—pending the validation of such a claim under international law.

(2) strongly encourage all countries, including the contenders, to endorse and implement the authoritative interpretation of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) issued on July 12, 2016, by an UNCLOS-authorized court. Washington should also emphasize that it, too, will abide by the judgment, and will strive to ensure American ratification of UNCLOS.

(3) maintain its commitment to engage in publicly acknowledged freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea on a regular basis. Previous such FONOPs were conducted in October 2015 by the USS Lassen, in January 2016 by the USS Wilbur, in May 2016 by the USS Lawrence, and in October 2016 by the USS Decatur. The increasingly lengthy intervals between these trips, despite a defense official’s promise to conduct them twice every quarter, has encouraged doubts about precisely the commitment to freedom of navigation that they were meant to convey.

(4) announce what has hitherto been largely implicit: The FONOPs are not being done merely to brandish American naval prowess. Their purpose is to affirm a core geopolitical position, namely, that no single country, not the United States, nor China, nor anyone else, should exercise exclusive or exclusionary control over the South China Sea.

(5) brainstorm with Asian-Pacific and European counterparts a range of innovative ways of multilateralizing the South China Sea as a shared heritage of, and a resource for, its claimants and users alike. .

Donald K. Emmerson is a senior fellow emeritus and director of the Southeast Asia Program. He is currently editing a Stanford University Press book that examines China’s relations with Southeast Asia.

Global governance

By Phillip Y. Lipscy

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Global economic activity is increasingly shifting toward Asia – most forecasts suggest the region will account for about half of the global economy by the midpoint of the 21^st century. This shift is creating important incongruities within the global architecture of international organizations, such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which are a central element of the U.S.-based international order and remain heavily tilted toward the West in their formal structures, headquarter locations and personnel compositions. This status quo is a constant source of frustration for policymakers in the region, who seek greater voice consummate with their newfound international status. 

The next U.S. administration should prioritize reinvigoration of the global architecture.  One practical step is to move major international organizations toward multiple headquarter arrangements, which are now common in the private sector – this will mitigate the challenges of recruiting talented individuals willing to spend their careers in distant headquarters in the West. The United States should join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, created by China, to tie the institution more closely into the existing architecture, contribute to its success and send a signal that Asian contributions to international governance are welcome. The Asian rebalance should be continued and deepened, with an emphasis on institution-building that reassures our Asian counterparts that the United States will remain a Pacific power. .

Philip Y. Lipscy is an assistant professor of political science and the Thomas Rohlen Center Fellow. He is the author of the forthcoming book Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Population aging

By Karen Eggleston

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China’s recent announcement of a universal two-child policy restored an important dimension of choice, but it will not fundamentally change the trajectory of a shrinking working-age population and burgeoning share of elderly. China’s population aged 60 and older is projected to grow from nearly 15 percent today to 33 percent in 2050, at which time China’s population aged 80 and older will be larger than the current population of France. This triumph of longevity in China and other Asian countries, left unaddressed, will strain the fiscal integrity of public and private pension systems, while urbanization, technological change and income inequality interact with population aging by threatening the sustainability and perceived fairness of conventional financing for many social programs.

Investment in human capital and innovation in social and economic institutions will be central to addressing the demographic realities ahead. The next administration needs to support those investments as well as help to strengthen public health systems and primary care to control chronic disease and prepare for the next infectious disease pandemic, many of which historically have risen in Asia. .

Karen Eggleston is a senior fellow and director of the Asia Health Policy Program. She is the editor of the recently published book Policy Challenges from Demographic Change in China and India (Brookings Institution Press/Shorenstein APARC, 2016).

Trade

By Yong Suk Lee

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Anti-globalization sentiment has ballooned in the past two years, particularly in regions affected by the import competition from and outsourcing to Asia. However, some firms and workers have benefited from increasing trade openness. The U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement of 2012, for example, led to substantial growth in exports in the agricultural, automotive and pharmaceutical sectors. Yet, there are winners and losers from trade agreements. Using an economist’s hypothetical perspective, one would assume firms and workers in the losing industry move to the exporting sector and take advantage of the gains from trade. In reality, adjustment across industries and regions from such movements are slow. Put simply, a furniture worker in North Carolina who lost a job due to import competition cannot easily assume a new job in the booming high-tech industry in California. They would require high-income mobility and a different skill set.

Trade policy needs to focus on facilitating the transition of workers to different industries and better train students to prepare for potential mobility in the future. Trade policy will also be vital in determining how international commerce is shaped. As cross-border e-commerce increases, it will be in the interest of the United States to participate in and lead negotiations that determine future trade rules. The Trans-Pacific Partnership should not simply be abandoned. The next administration should educate both policymakers and the public about the effects of trade openness and the economic and strategic importance of trade agreements for the U.S. economy.

Yong Suk Lee is the SK Center Fellow and deputy director of Korea Program. He leads a research project focused on Korean education, entrepreneurship and economic development.

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Stanford professor Andrew Walder has been awarded the Founder’s Prize from the journal Social Science History for his paper, “Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1971.” The journal’s editorial board selects one recipient annually for exemplary scholarly work.

Using data from 2,213 historical county and city annals, the paper charts the breadth of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, its evolution through time and the repression through which state structures were rebuilt in the post-Mao era.

Walder, who is a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director emeritus of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, has long studied the sources of conflict, stability and change in communist regimes. He recently published China under Mao, a book that explores the rise and fall of Mao Zedong’s radical socialism.

South Korea is facing a number of challenges. Not unlike other advanced economies in Asia, the country is confronted with a declining working-age population, reduction in birth rates, and risk of long-term stagnation.

A team of Stanford researchers at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), in collaboration with other scholars from around the world, is increasingly thinking about those challenges and is working on a number of research initiatives that explore potential solutions in leveraging benefits from globalization.

The researchers propose that Korea can extract value from two major movements of people – outflows of its own population (diaspora) and inflows of foreigners (immigrants and visitors), all of whom hold the capacity to build social capital – a network of people who have established trust and in turn spread ideas and resources across borders.

Engaging diaspora

Emigration is traditionally viewed as a loss of human capital – ‘brain drain’ – movement of skills out of one country and into another, but Stanford professor Gi-Wook Shin and Koret Fellow Joon Nak Choi support an alternative view of outward flows of citizens.

Shin and Choi suggest that people who leave their countries of origin but never return can still provide value to their home country through ‘brain linkage,’ which advocates that there is economic opportunity in cross-national connections despite a lack of physical presence. This concept is a focus of their research which was recently published in the book Global Talent: Skilled Labor and Mobility in Korea.

“What we’re trying to do is to extend the thinking – to not just look at potential losses of having your people go abroad but also the potential gains,” Choi said. “Previous studies have found that if you have more of these relationships or ‘brain linkages,’ you have more trade and more flow of innovations between countries.”

People who stay in a host country become participants in the local economy and often conduct influential activities such as starting companies, providing advice and sitting on boards of directors, Choi said, and these transactions enact flows of resources from home country to host country and vice versa.

Choi, who outside of his fellowship is an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said that this way of thinking pulls away from a zero-sum view of the world and instead sees it as “more globalized, cosmopolitan and diffuse.”

He leads a research project with Shin focused on global talent and cultural movement in East Asia, and over the past quarter, taught a graduate seminar on the Korean development model.

“Cross-national ties are harder to establish than those that are geographically close, but they provide invaluable means of sharing information and brokering cooperation that may otherwise be impossible on other levels,” said Shin, who is also the director of Shorenstein APARC. “In many ways, social ties can be a good strategy to gain a competitive edge. This is an area we endeavor to better understand through our research efforts on Korea.”

Shin has described his own identity of being a part of the very system they are studying. He grew up in Korea, arrived in the United States as a graduate student and has since stayed for three decades and frequently engages the academic and policy communities in Korea.

One cross-national initiative that he recently started is a collaborative study between scholars at Shorenstein APARC and Kyung Hee University in Seoul. The two-year study evaluates the social capital impact of a master’s degree program at the Korean university that trains select government officials from developing countries.

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An international cohort including many researchers from Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center have been conducting group interviews with international students at Korean and Japanese universities to better understand their motivations to stay or go following their completion of a degree or non-degree program at Korean universities. Their initial results reveal that gaps in cross-cultural understanding and opportunities cause feelings of disassociation, but recent internationalization efforts are helping to address those gaps and support innovation, knowledge sharing and local economic growth. An op-ed on the topic authored by Stanford professor Gi-Wook Shin and Yonsei University associate professor Rennie Moon can be viewed here. Credit: Flickr/SUNY – Korea/crop and brightness applied

Harnessing foreign skilled labor

Globalization has also led to migration of people to regions that lack an adequate supply of skilled workers in their labor force. This new infusion of people is an opportunity to bridge the gap, according to the researchers.

“In order to be successful, countries need a large talented labor pool to invest in,” said Yong Suk Lee, the SK Center Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and affiliate of the Korea Program. “Innovation is not something like a technology ladder which has a more obvious and strategic trajectory, it’s more about investing in people and taking risks on their ideas.”

Korea currently has a shortage of ‘global talent’ – individuals who hold skills valuable in the international marketplace. Yet, Korea is well positioned to reduce the shortage.

The country produces a vast amount of skilled college graduates. Nearly 70 percent of Koreans between the age of 25 and 34 have the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. Korea has the highest percentage of young adults with a tertiary education among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Another study found that the foreign student population in Korea has risen by 13 percent in the past five years.

Universities are moving to “internationalize” in seeking to both recruit faculty and students from abroad and to retain them as skilled workers in the domestic labor force. A new book published by Shorenstein APARC Internationalizing Higher Education in Korea: Challenges and Opportunities in Comparative Perspective assesses efforts by institutions in Korea, China, Japan, Singapore and the United States through nine separately authored chapters.

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Shin and Yonsei University associate professor Rennie Moon, who served as book editors and chapter authors, found that Korea has on average more outbound students (students who leave Korea to study elsewhere) than inbound students (international students who come to Korea to study). The figure above compares five countries and finds that Korea and China are more outbound-driven while Singapore, Japan and the United States are more inbound-driven.

“For most national and private universities in Korea, internationalization is more inbound-oriented—attracting foreign students, especially from China and Southeast Asia,” said Yeon-Cheon Oh, president of Ulsan University and former Koret Fellow at Shorenstein APARC who co-edited Internationalizing Higher Education in Korea. “In many ways, it’s about filling up students numbers. There needs to be a balance in inbound and outbound student numbers in order for internationalization to have an optimal effect.”

International students that do come to Korea are on average not staying long after graduation, though. The researchers identify reasons being difficulty in adapting to the local culture, inability to attain dual citizenship, language barriers, and low wages in comparison to that of native Koreans; in short – it is not easy to assimilate fully.

These and other barriers facing foreigners in Korea are a focus of a broader research project led by Shin and Moon that aims to propose functional steps for policymakers striving to internationalize their countries and to shift the discourse on diversity.

Developing a narrative

The Korean government has expanded efforts to recruit foreign students to study at Korean universities – many of which now rank in the top 200 worldwide – but addressing education promotion is only one area.

“The challenge is to propose a pathway that rallies around a general narrative,” Lee said, citing a need for internationalization to be coordinated across immigration policy, labor standards, and social safety nets.

An international group of experts in Korean affairs gathered at Stanford earlier this year at the Koret Workshop to address the challenge of creating a cohesive narrative, focused on Korea as the case study. The Koret Foundation of San Francisco funds the workshop and fellowship in its mission to support scholarly solutions to community problems and to create societal and policy change in the Bay Area and beyond.

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The Koret Workshop brings together an international panel of experts on Korean affairs at Stanford. From 2015-2016, the workshops focused on higher education, globalization and innovation in Korea. Above, Michelle Hsieh (far right) speaks during a question and answer session following her presentation on Korean and Taiwanese small and medium enterprises, next to her is former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea Kathleen Stephens, Stanford consulting professor Richard Dasher, former U.S. foreign affairs official David Straub, and Korea University professor Myeong Hyeon Cho.

The interdisciplinary nature of the workshop was an important aspect, according to Lee, and Michelle Hsieh, one of 27 participants of the conference that covered a range of areas from entrepreneurship to export promotion policies in Korea.

“The workshop demonstrated how internationalization of higher education – and academic research in general – can be achieved by constructing cross-cutting ties,” said Hsieh, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Shorenstein APARC from 2006-07 and is now an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

“Participating in the workshop made me realize I really miss the lively and rigorous discussions at Shorenstein APARC, where researchers are interdisciplinary with diverse backgrounds yet focused on a common research interest,” Hsieh said. “I think debate and discussion in that kind of setting can illuminate a completely different take.”

The workshop will result in a book that features multiple areas and policy directions for Korea’s development. The lessons included are also envisioned to apply to other emerging countries facing similar trends of demographic change and economic slowdown. Shorenstein APARC expects to publish the book next year.