Drawing Lines in the Water: A Multimedia Presentation and Prognosis on the South China Sea
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Gregory Poling will begin with a multimedia presentation highlighting the most important aspects of the South China Sea disputes, including the competing legal claims, recent clashes, and the oil, fisheries, and trade interests that help feed the conflict. He will then examine recent actions by the various claimants and the motivations behind them, including the Philippines' recent decision to take China's claims to a UN arbitration tribunal. He will show why commentators have been too quick to dismiss Manila's case. During the Q&A he will field questions on any aspect of the disputes, including what they imply for Asia and US-Asian relations.
Gregory Poling’s work at CSIS includes managing projects focused on US foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific, especially in Southeast Asia. In addition to the South China Sea, his research interests include democratization in Southeast Asia and Asian multilateralism. Before joining CSIS he lived and worked in China as an English language teacher. He has an MA in international affairs from American University, earned his BA in history and philosophy at Saint Mary's College of Maryland, and has studied at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Gregory Poling
Research Associate, Sumitro Chair for Southeast Asia Studies
Speaker
Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC
Seminars
Uncertain Times Ahead: Changing Principles
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The world has undergone major drastic changes in the last two decades driven by several major factors, eg, explosion of human population and connectivity. Such changes seem further accelerated in recent years and it seems that our future becomes more uncertain and unpredictable. The Fukushima Nuclear Accident awakened us and led to creation of Independent Investigation Commission by the National Diet of Japan; The Commission Report revealed some of the fundamental issues of Japan’s nuclear policy. Meanwhile, multi-stakeholders’ engagement has become critical in various social affairs and in policy making domains within and across national boundaries, and has contributed in significant ways to affect the processes of addressing and impacting global agenda, such as climate change, food and water, energy, urbanization, biodiversity, human capital with shifting the balance of economy and power. In my view, the principles of our society may be changing quite fast heading somewhat differently from our conventional norm. The science community can and should contribute to these issues in nurturing future leaders, but in what way?
Kiyoshi Kurokawa is a graduate of University of Tokyo School of Medicine, trained in internal medicine and nephrology, in US 1969-84; Professor of Med, Dept Med ofUCLA Sch Med (79-84), Chair, Univ Tokyo Faculty of Med (89-96), Dean of Tokai Univ School of Med (96-02, President of Science Council of Japan (03-07), Science Advisor to Prime Minister (07-09), Board member of A*STAR (06-00), Bibliotheca Alexandria (04-08), Khalifa University (08- ), Okinawa Institute of Science and Tech (06- ), Global Science and Innovation Advisory Board of the Prime Minister of Malaysia (11-); President of Intl Soc Nephrology (97-99), Inst of Medicine of US Academies (92). Recently, chaired Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission by the National Diet of Japan (Dec 11-July 12). AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award (2012), ‘100 Top Global Thinkers 2012” of Foreign Policy.
Philippines Conference Room
Kiyoshi Kurokawa
MD, President
Speaker
Science Council of Japan (2003-06)
Seminars
The United Nations and a World in Transition
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United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented a free public talk at Stanford on Thursday, Jan. 17.
Ban, who is the eighth secretary-general of the UN, will speak about the UN's role in creating opportunities out of the challenges posed by today's rapidly transitioning world.
"Times of transition are times of profound opportunity," he recently said during his acceptance speech for the Seoul Peace Prize. "The decisions we make in this period will have an impact for generations to come.”
Ban's initiatives as UN secretary-general have focused on promoting sustainable development; empowering women; supporting countries in crisis or instability; generating new momentum on disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation; and strengthening the UN. Among his many activities as secretary-general, he has successfully raised major pledges and financing packages for aid and crisis response, established the agency UN Women, and introduced new measures to promote UN transparency and efficiency.
Ban was born in the Republic of Korea in 1944, and he served for 37 years with the ROK Foreign Ministry, in roles including that of minister of foreign affairs and trade, foreign policy adviser to the president, and chief national security adviser to the president. He took office as UN secretary-general in January 2007, and was re-elected for a second term by the UN General Assembly in June 2011. Ban will serve as secretary-general until December 2016.
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies are co-sponsoring the event. Ban's talk, part of the Asia-Pacific Leaders Forum, will kick off a series of activities commemorating Shorenstein APARC's thirtieth anniversary.
Founded in 2005, Shorenstein APARC's Asia-Pacific Leaders Forum regularly convenes senior leaders from across Asia and the Pacific to exchange ideas on current political, economic, and social dynamics in the region.
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Dinkelspiel Auditorium
471 Lagunita Drive
Stanford Campus
Ban Ki-moon
Secretary-General of the United Nations
Speaker
Conferences
The Impact of Water Quality on Health and Youth Education in Rural China
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Providing people with safe drinking water is one of the most important health-related infrastructure programs in the world. The first part of our research investigates the effect of a major water quality improvement program in rural China on the health of adults and children. Using panel data covering about 4500 households from 1989 to 2006, we estimate the impact of introducing village-level access to water from water plants on various measures of health. The regression results imply that the illness incidence of adults decreased by 11 percent and their weight-for-height increased by 0.835 kg/m, and that children's weight-for-height and height itself both rose by 0.446 kg/m and 0.962 cm respectively, as a result of the program. And these estimates are quite stable across different robustness checks.
While the previous research has shown health benefit of safe drinking water program, we know little about the longer-term benefits such as education. The second part of our research examines the youth education benefits of this major drinking water infrastructure program. By employing a longitudinal dataset with around 12,000 individual observations aged between 16 and 25, we find that this health program has benefited their education substantially: increasing the grades of education completed by 0.9 years and their probabilities of graduating from a lower and upper middle schools by around 18 and 89 percent, respectively. These estimation results are robust to a host of robustness checks, such as controlling for educational policy and local resources (by including county-year fixed effects), village distance to schools, local labor market conditions, educational demand, instrumenting the water treatment dummy with topographic variables, among others. Our estimates suggest that this program is highly cost-effective.
Jing Zhang, an assistant professor, received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 2011, and joined Renmin University of China in the same year. Prior to that, she worked at the World Bank from 2010 to 2011. The focus of her research lies in health economics and public finance. Her publications include: “The Impact of Water Quality on Health: Evidence from the Drinking Water Infrastructure Program in Rural China,” Journal of Health Economics (2012) and “Soft Budget Constraints in China: Evidence from the Guangdong Hospital Industry,” International Journal of Healthcare Finance and Economics (2009).
Philippines Conference Room
Jing Zhang
Assistant Professor
Speaker
Renmin University of China
Seminars
Stanford’s Straub, Hecker explain North Korea’s plan to halt nuclear program
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North Korea’s agreement to curb its nuclear and weapons programs is welcome diplomatic news. But it stops far short of addressing the world’s concerns about the isolated and unstable dictatorship.
Stanford experts David Straub and Siegfried S. Hecker discuss Pyongyang’s deal with Washington that will allow nuclear inspectors into North Korea and deliver much-needed nutritional assistance to the impoverished country.
Straub is the associate director of the Korean Studies Program at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is a former State Department senior foreign service officer who worked for more than 12 years on Korean affairs. He travelled to North Korea in 2009 with former President Bill Clinton as part of a delegation to secure the release of two journalists from Current TV.
Hecker is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a senior fellow at FSI. Hecker has visited North Korea four times since 2004. During his last trip in 2010, he was shown a new light-water reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear center and a uranium enrichment facility.
What are some of the key factors that led North Korea to agree to this deal?
Straub: This year marks the 100th anniversary of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung’s birth, which the entire country will be celebrating April 15. The government has also said that this is the target year for North Korea to become a “strong and prosperous country.” Kim Jong Un is a brand-new leader, and presumably he and his advisors want to show that he is capable of feeding his people and at least managing the relationship with the United States.
How do you assess the agreement? Where does the moratorium put relations between the U.S. and North Korea?
Hecker: The moratorium demonstrates that North Korea is once again interested in diplomacy with the United States. The fact that they are willing to halt the nuclear operations at Yongbyon, especially the uranium enrichment activities, is a big step in the right direction. I believe the U.S. now wants to achieve a permanent halt to all nuclear weapons activities in North Korea, then roll them back, and eventually achieve complete, verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
Straub: There is no perfect deal when it comes to North Korea, but overall I think it is worth giving this one a chance. It will probably slow down the pace of nuclear and missile development in North Korea. In addition, it will give us time to explore whether there is any prospect that the new leadership in North Korea may be willing to take a different, more positive approach toward the United States and South Korea than its predecessors. If history is a guide, the likeliest outcome is that after a period of several months to a few years the six-party talks will again break down, after which North Korea will create a new crisis.
How hopeful are you that this will lead to the capping of North Korea's nuclear capabilities and perhaps even its ultimate denuclearization?
Hecker: My advice to our government since November 2010, when I was shown the Yongbyon centrifuge facility, was to take immediate action so that the nuclear situation does not get worse. I advocated three no’s: no more bombs, no better bombs and no exports. The current agreement will limit the number of bombs because the Yongbyon nuclear facilities will observe a moratorium. We are still not certain of what they can produce at an undisclosed site, but I believe it is limited. The nuclear testing and missile launch moratorium will constrain the sophistication of their nuclear weapons. Denuclearization is important, but it remains a more distant goal.
Why does the United States call this “important, but limited progress”?
Straub: It is significant, in part, because since North Korea threw out international nuclear inspectors in 2009 there has been no outside monitoring of what is going on at the Yongbyon facility. But most of the things North Korea has agreed to could be reversed at will. Apart from the nuclear tests, the suspension of North Korean nuclear activities applies only to Yongbyon. Dr. Hecker and other experts have concluded there is no way North Korea could have constructed its uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon so soon after the departure of international inspectors if had not already had another facility elsewhere. The agreement also does not address a number of non-nuclear issues, such as North Korea’s military attacks on South Korea in 2010. For there eventually to be lasting progress on the Korean Peninsula—including a resolution of the nuclear issue—there will have to be great improvement in relations between North and South Korea.
Based on what your 2010 visit to the Yongbyon nuclear facility, how much progress could they have made in terms of uranium enrichment?
Hecker: They told me they just brought up the centrifuge facility a week before we arrived in November 2010. They may have perfected the operations and produced some low enriched uranium feed material for the light-water reactor they are constructing (which is still at least a couple of years away from completion). It is also possible that they are still struggling to make the centrifuge facility work smoothly. It is very important to have the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors get into the facility to see what progress has been made and to get a measure of how sophisticated their operations are. The North, in my opinion, still has only four to eight primitive plutonium bombs. I don’t believe they have the confidence to put a warhead small enough to fit on one of their missiles. We have little information on whether they have made highly enriched uranium or have tried to build a bomb fueled with highly enriched uranium.
What does this agreement say, if anything, about the new North Korean leadership?
Hecker: From what I know, this was pretty much the deal worked out the week before Kim Jong Il’s death. I think it’s a good sign; Kim Jong Un appears to be in control as indicated by the fact that he is able to offer up a similar deal even with his father gone.
Straub: This deal suggests that there is a great deal of continuity in North Korea’s leadership. The substance of this agreement is actually quite consistent with North Korean policies and priorities over the last 20 years. While there is no evidence to suggest that Kim Jong Un will adopt major new policies, there is always at least the possibility he might eventually.
The deal includes the provision of 240,000 metric tons of “nutritional assistance” to North Korea. What does the country’s food situation look like right now?
Straub: There is no doubt that many ordinary North Koreans are going hungry. The United States has termed this “nutritional assistance” to distinguish it from “food aid,” because officials are concerned that the provisions of bulk grain – especially rice – might be siphoned off by the North Korean elite. The U.S. government had said earlier that nutritional assistance would not involve bulk grain, and that it would be targeted toward especially vulnerable groups, such as lactating mothers, children, and the elderly.
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