Dr. Nakai will talk about his research plan for the next year in China. A broad and open-ended question he has in mind is, "What is happening in the Chinese countryside these days?" He is interested in analyzing the roles of the county leaders in the pursuit of economic development. Despite its historical role as the most coherent subprovincial administrative unit, the county in China has not received much academic attention until recently. First, Dr. Nakai would like to add a case or two to the pioneering works by Jean Oi and Andrew Walder, and Marc Blecher and Vivienne Shue. Second, he would like to look into the county leaders' response to market economy. How do they respond to foreign trade, special economic zones, and private enterprises? Third, he hopes to bring some comparative perspectives to the study of the county. Would county leaders in Heilongjiang province, for example, behave like their colleagues in Guangdong or in Zhejiang? Are those county leaders different from local administrators in Japan? Dr. Nakai will discuss the implications of the preliminary analysis of a few counties in Heilongjiang province. Yoshi Nakai has been Senior Researcher at the Institute of Developing Economies since 1997. He graduated from Tohoku University (BL) and from Indiana University (MA). He studied Chinese language at Beijing University in 1981. He just completed his Ph.D. in comparative politics at the University of Michigan. His dissertation is about politics in Manchuria and is chaired by Mike Oksenberg. Dr. Nakai was lecturer at University of Michigan; researcher at the Japanese Consulate in Hong Kong from 1991 to1994; and senior researcher at the Japan Institute of International Affairs from 1994 to 1997. He is going to Beijing next year.

The story of South Asia is that of missed opportunities. Mr. Burki will take a look at South Asia in comparison to East Asia. Mr. Shahid Javed Burki started his career as a member of the Civil Service of Pakistan. He held various positions including Director of West Pakistan Rural Works Program, Economic Advisor to the Governor and Chief Economist of West Pakistan, and Economic Consultant to the Ministry of Commerce. In 1974, Mr. Burki joined the World Bank as Senior Economist in the Policy Planning Division. He was promoted to Division Chief of the Policy Planning and Program Review Department and later became Senior Economic and Policy Advisor in the Office of the Vice President of External Relations. After becoming the Director of the International Relations Department of that vice-presidency, he was appointed Director for China and Mongolia, helping to design and implement the World Bank's lending program in China - at one point the largest Bank-financed program in the world. Mr. Burki was appointed Vice President of the Latin America and Caribbean Region and worked in this position until his retirement in August, 1999. Upon leaving the Bank, Mr. Burki was invited to head the EMP-Financial Advisors, LLC, a consulting firm located in Washington, D.C. Mr. Shahid Javed Burki was educated at Government College, Lahore; Christ Church, Oxford University (where he was a Rhodes Scholar) and Harvard University (Kennedy School and Economics Department). He holds graduate degrees in Physics and Economics.

This talk explores the broader puzzles of the East Asian economic crisis through a focus on the Thai textile-garment industry. Once the leading Thai export, the textile industry weakened in the 1990's in the face of wage increases, regional competition and slackening demand. The goal of this talk is to explain the industry's past success, its failure to sustain that growth through technical upgrading, and its current responses to the crisis. The emphasis is on the political and institutional factors influencing industry performance. Rick Doner is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, his M.A. in Chinese Studies from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Doner's general research interest is comparative political economy of Southeast Asia. This current research covers political and institutional bases of Thai economic growth, comparative analysis of business associations in developing countries, flexible production in East Asia, and political economy of the hard disk drive industry in East Asia.

Nike products, soccer balls, carpets, orange juice, garments, coffee beans--Consumer activists, labor unions and students have launched boycotts and protests against imports that have allegedly been produced by some of the world's 250 million child workers. But exporting countries complain that the vast majority of child workers do not work in export industries, and throwing children out of work in the export sector will not solve the problem. What will really help child laborers? Will globalization help or hurt? Sarah L. Bachman is a visiting scholar at the Asia/Pacific Research Center. She was an editorial writer and reporter for the San Jose Mercury News from 1991-1997. Her work has won or shared awards from the World Hunger Media Awards, the World Affairs Council of Silicon Valley, the Overseas Press Club of America, and InterAction, the consortium of U.S. agencies providing emergency relief. Bachman's series of articles on international child labor (on the web at www.merccenter.com/archives/childlabor) were among the nation's first to point out that well intentioned efforts to end child labor sometimes helped--but also, sometimes harmed thousands of child workers. Her multi-media project - including writing, photography, a school curriculum and two Web sites- explores the benefits and drawbacks of efforts to end child labor.

Regulations on new drugs, drug prices, and other aspects of the Japan's pharmaceutical industry had in effect protected domestic manufacturers and kept them from inventing a truly innovative new drug. As the deregulation and the international harmonization of the drug market proceed, disintegrated Japanese drug makers will need to ally or integrate with partners in and out of the industry.

M&A will have a positive effect on the marketing, but not necessarily on the research. Possible increase of university TLO and spinouts in Japan can improve the access to the information in Japanese universities, but the access is open to both domestic and international companies. Alliances between drug makers and the local parties with an international competitive edge, such as electronics and precision mechanics, may produce a unique synthesis.

Atsuomi Obayashi is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center and associate professor at the Keio University Graduate School of Business Administration. His research topics include application of the game theory, the contract theory and economics of the R&D. He received his Ph. D. in public policy from the University of Chicago in 1996 and an LL.B. from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1983.

Internet use in China has recently grown at a tremendous pace, and today there are more than 17 million users. In this talk, Harwit examines government control over the physical data pipelines and network content. He explores the management and revenue flows from the information highway, and political efforts to regulate the content that appears on Chinese computer screens. He also analyzes the post-WTO role foreign companies may have in the network's future development. He concludes that, though the telecommunications bureaucracy is keen to extract monetary profit from the Internet, political drive for control over content is muted by schizophrenic government policy, user self-censorship and, in the short run, user demographics. Eric Harwit is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii, and a visiting scholar at Stanford's Asia / Pacific Research Center for the 2000-2001 academic year. A 1984 graduate of Cornell University, he received a diploma from the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing in 1990, and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. Professor Harwit is the author of China's Automobile Industry (M.E. Sharpe, 1995), and several other articles on industrial and economic development in Asia. He is currently writing a book about the politics of telecommunication in China, and has a Fulbright research grant to conduct a study of telecommunications in rural China in mid-2001.

Few will dispute that the essence of our times can be conveyed by two simple words: " Global" and "Change". Economies, technologies, information, media, culture, and indeed security issues have been vastly internationalized and transformed in the incredibly short period of the half century following World War II . The world is being consumed by the forces of change driven by the engines of technology and geoeconomics. Economic change and technological development, like wars or sports, are usually not beneficial to all. Progress only benefits those groups of nations that are able to take advantage of newer methods of science, just as they damage those that are less prepared technologically, culturally, and politically to respond to change. Only societies free of rigid doctrinal orthodoxy and possessing attributes such as the freedoms to inquire, dispute, and experiment; a belief in the possibilities of improvement; a concern for the practical rather than the abstract; and rationalism that defies mandarin codes, religious dogmas, and traditional folklore, are likely to prosper in the new millennium. In any case, we must look with caution into the future. History teaches us that the only thing we can be certain of is that we will be surprised; our vision may well turn out to be distorted and myopic, our best guesses will often be wrong and we are likely to be disappointed in our expectations. We can only be certain of continuing conflict on a technology-driven planet with concurrent dwindling resources and increasing population.

In 1975Ð76 the fall of Saigon was followed by national reunification and the establishment of the Socialist Republic. Access to the Mekong Delta was widely expected to facilitate rapid neo-Stalinist industrialization and the appearance of a powerful military threat to capitalist SEA. But this did not happen. By 1981 partial reforms had permitted all state enterprises to operate in markets and some degree of agricultural decollectivisation. In the second half of the 1980s there was a clear de-Stalinization of everyday life. And by 1989Ð90 a recognizable market economy had emerged. Since then the Vietnamese Communist Party has, with some success, negotiated a major opening-up of the country to foreign contacts. Vietnam has joined ASEAN, and has seen the emergence of land, labor, and capital markets, and the confused processes by which classes form. Fundamental economic and political change has therefore occurred. Growth has been rather fast and the use of state violence minimal. Politically, for the still-Leninist VCP, the shift from Plan to Market has been a great success. What is the political economy basis for this? Despite emergent capitalist classes and a market economy, the political economy of "post-transition" Vietnam is heavily marked by its recent history, and remains very different from other ASEAN members. Notwithstanding revolutionary change, dualities common to both the traditional and modern political economies have offered great potential for political restructuring. In this sense "development doctrines" are perhaps less exotic and more indigenous than elsewhere in SEA. This facilitates relatively harmonious political adaptation and is the key to understanding change. For example, wide rural land access, with a collective tinge in the most densely populated areas, has a strong and pervasive effect upon the macro political economy. "Voice and exit" are enhanced. Thus we see rather high levels of migration, and risk bearing be farmers. Rural GDP has grown fast through the 1990s. Also, real wages in urban areas tend to be higher and the labor regime less brittle. What are the political implications of such a land regime? At the end of the day, one reason for the lack of extensive state violence against the population seems to be that the party/state has sufficient sources of support and power for tense economic issues in the rural areas to be fought out without property rights needing violence to enforce them. These issues are fought out locally (within cooperatives and communes) and in macro contexts (access to world markets). But in the rural areas the state does not, apparently, need to support particular economic interests for its survival. One reason for this is that the "land issue" has been addressed through the adaptation of socialist models, so that large-scale land property is not (yet?) a major issue. Dominant groups in the rural areas do not depend upon land access for their incomes. Adam Fforde is a development economist. He holds an Oxford MA (Engineering Science and Economics), a London MSc (Economics) and a Cambridge PhD (Economics). He studied Vietnamese in Hanoi during 1978/79 and was a visiting scholar at the National Economics University (Hanoi) in 1985Ð86. He lived in Vietnam from 1987 to 1992 while working as an advisor to the Swedish aid program, and in Australia from 1992 to 1999, where he was a visiting fellow at the ANU and Chairman of Aduki Pty Ltd (Consultants). He is now senior fellow at the SEA Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. He has published on topics including the economic development of north Vietnam prior to 1975, agricultural cooperatives, and the transition from plan to market. He is currently working on class formation and the emergence of factor markets in the 1990s, industrial reform since the early 1960s, and Vietnamese development doctrine.