Part I: Asia in the World Series

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the world economy has gone through a set of stages, or cycles, each defined by its leading centers, its major technologies, and its most critical political conflicts. While technologies have progressed immensely some of the same patterns have been repeated. Though most economists do not seem to believe that there have been long term more or less regular cycles, thinking in terms of repetitive and therefore somewhat predictable and explainable changes can help us better model the past and get some sense of possible futures. Until now the dominant economies have all been Western. Will this continue? Why has Asia lagged, and are contemporary developments going to fundamentally change the nature and causes of success in the world economy?

Dan Chirot has authored books about social change, ethnic and nationalist conflicts, Eastern Europe, and tyranny. He co-authored Why Not Kill Them All? (Princeton Univeristy Press), about political mass murder and most recently he wrote a completely new, very revised edition of his book How Societies Change (Sage Publications).  He has edited or co-edited books on Leninism’s decline, entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, ethnopolitical warfare, the economic history of Eastern Europe, and memories of World War II.  He founded the journal East European Politics and Societies and has received help from, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations and from the US State Department. He has consulted for the US Government, the Ford Foundation, CARE, and other NGOs. In 2004/05 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace working on African conflicts. He earned his BA from Harvard and his PhD from Columbia.

The Korea Colloquium on History and Culture

Maritime security has become an increasingly salient point of friction in China-Japan relations. The focus has been small islands called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, islands that both countries claim but Japan controls. Besides the territorial claims, many issues are at play:  historical memory, geo-strategy, the quest for natural resources, domestic nationalisms, the capacity of governments to manage crises, and Tokyo’s and Beijing’s relationship with the United States. Richard Bush, author of The Perils of Proximity: China-Japan Security Relations will address the two countries growing rivalry in the maritime domain and the implications for the United States.

Richard C. Bush III is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, and holder of the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies.

Bush came to Brookings in July 2002, after serving almost five years as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the mechanism through which the United States Government conducts substantive relations with Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic relations.

Bush began his professional career in 1977 with the China Council of The Asia Society. From July 1983 to June 1995, we worked on the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, first on the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs (chair, Steve Solarz), and then the full committee (chair, Lee Hamilton). In July 1995, he became National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and a member of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analytic work of the intelligence committee. He left the NIC in September 1997 to become head of AIT.

Bush received his undergraduate education at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He did his graduate work in political science at Columbia University, getting an M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He is the author of a number of articles on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan, and of At Cross Purposes, a book of essays on the history of America’s relations with Taiwan (M. E. Sharpe, 2004). In July 2005, Brookings published Untying the Knot: Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait. In March 2007, through Wylie Publishers, Richard Bush and his Brookings colleague Michael O’Hanlon released A War Like No Other: The Truth About China’s Challenge to America. In 2010, Brookings published his Perils of Proximity: China-Japan Security Relations, which focused on growing tensions in the East China Sea. In January 2013, Brookings published his Uncharted Strait: The Future of China-Taiwan Relations

In the 1930s, with Japan’s expansions into the Asian continent, colonial Korean culture in general, and literature in particular, came to take important roles as both subject and object of such imperial expansions. This paper reexamines the colonizer and colonized binary by re-contextualizing the rise of translated texts packaged as ethnographic “colonial collections.”  In particular, this paper historicizes the ethnographic turn relegated to colonial culture by examining the rise of colonial collections as a manifestation of mass-produced objects of colonial kitsch at this time. The complex position of the colonial artist/writer cum (self-)ethnographer situated in between the colony and the metropole embodies an uncanny contact zone as the artist and work of art become reified as objects of imperial consumer fetishism.  In the colonial encounter, the artist as producer and the art object of his or her labor meld into indistinguishable and interchangeable forms, as producer and product of kitsch. In such relations of colonial alienation, cultural producers struggled to map out spaces as agents of artistic expression, while agency for the colonized artist often meant further alienation through self-ethnography or through mimicry of the colonizer’s racialized forms and discourses.

RSVP required at http://ceas.stanford.edu/events/rsvp.php

This talk is presented by the Greater China Business Club (GCBC) of Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford (ACSSS). 

In July 2013, a Ted Talk “A tale of two political systems” was posted, and was instantly viewed millions of times around the world. In the talk, Mr. Eric X. Li, a venture capitalist and a political scientist argued that the universality claim of Western democratic systems was going to be "morally challenged" by China.  

Do you agree? What do you think? Now you have the opportunity to discuss with Mr. Li face to face!

On Nov.6, Mr. Li will come to Stanford and talk with Professor Thomas Fingar on China’s Political System, its status, development, competitiveness and so on. Watch the Ted Talk and come to the event. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Eric X. Li is a political scientist and an active participant in the intellectual discourses on the re-emergence of China as a great power and its impact on the world.  His writings on comparative political governance and international relations have been widely published in leading publications such as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, and Huffington Post.  His most recent publications, The Life of the Party (Foreign Affairs, January/February, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138476/eric-x-li/the-life-of-the-party), Warring States (http://www.theasanforum.org/warring-states-the-coming-new-world-disorder/) and his talk at TED Global 2013 (http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems.html), have generated active debates around the globe.

Mr. Li is a native of Shanghai.  He received his B.A. in Economics from University of California, Berkeley, M.B.A. from Stanford Business School, and PhD from Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs.

Thomas Fingar is the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford during January to December 2009. 

From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2004–2005), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001–2003), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994–2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989–1994), and chief of the China Division (1986–1989). 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 (AB in government and history, 1968), and Stanford University (MA, 1969 and PhD, 1977 both in political science). His most recent book is Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford University Press, 2011).

Vietnamese diasporic relations affect and are affected by events inside Viet Nam.  In her recent book, Transnationalizing Viet Nam, Prof. Valverde explores these connections to convey a nuanced understanding of this globalized community.  She will argue that Vietnamese immigrant lives are inherently transnational.  Drawing on 250 interviews and nearly two decades of research, she will show how diasporic Vietnamese form virtual communities in cyberspace, organize social movements, find political representation, and engage in dissent—and how tensions based on generation, gender, class, and politics threaten to divide them.  Copies of the book will be available for sale.

Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She received her B.A. in Political Science and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teaching, research, and organizing interests include: Southeast Asian American history and contemporary issues, mixed race and gender theories, social movements, Fashionology, Aesthetics, Diaspora, and Transnationalism Studies. She authored Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora. Professor Valverde founded Viet Nam Women's Forum (1996-2006), a virtual community with hundreds of women internationally that mobilized for change in Viet Nam and abroad, and Fight the Tower (2013), a movement to resist and demand justice against discriminatory practices directed against women of color in the academy. Professor Valverde was a Luce Southeast Asian Studies Fellow at the Australian National University (2004), Rockefeller Fellow for Project Diaspora at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (2001-02), and a Fulbright Fellow in Viet Nam (1999). As a passionate advocate for the arts, she curated the exhibit Áo Dài: A Modern Design Coming of Age (2006) for the San Jose Museum of Quits and Textiles in partnership with Association for Viet Arts, and consults for the annual Áo Dài Festival held in San Jose, California (2011-present). She is currently co-curating an upcoming exhibit (2015) for the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of the end of the Second Indochina War.

Copies of Transnationalizing Viet Nam will be available for signing and sale by the author following her talk.

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