Early returns suggest that it may not be business as usual in state-society relations, with the Party-state being compelled to respond to an increasingly discontented and vocal society, and that a partial loosening of the tight censorship in media and culture may also be forthcoming. Indicators include changes in CCTV programming—e.g., a more interesting evening news report and the broadcast of the previously banned film V for Vendetta—media coverage of sensitive issues ranging from air pollution to the work of rights lawyers, and the relatively “enlightened” resolution of the Southern Weekend crisis, among other recent developments. What are we to make of these changes and, more importantly, how have these changes been received within China, for example on the ubiquitous and increasingly important Chinese microblogs?

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Stanley Rosen is a professor of political science at USC specializing in Chinese politics and society and was the director of the East Asian Studies Center at USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from 2005–2011. He studied Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong and has traveled to mainland China over 40 times over the last 30 years. His courses range from Chinese politics and Chinese film to political change in Asia, East Asian societies, comparative politics theory, and politics and film in comparative perspective. The author or editor of eight books and many articles, he has written on such topics as the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese legal system, public opinion, youth, gender, human rights, and film and the media. He is the co-editor of Chinese Education and Society and a frequent guest editor of other translation journals. His most recent books include Chinese Politics: State, Society and the Market [Routledge, 2010 (co-edited with Peter Hays Gries)] and Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema [Hong Kong University Press, 2010 (co-edited with Ying Zhu)]. Other ongoing projects include a study of the changing attitudes and behavior of Chinese youth, and a study of Hollywood films in China and the prospects for Chinese films on the international market, particularly in the United States.

In addition to his academic activities at USC, Professor Rosen has escorted eleven delegations to China for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (including American university presidents, professional associations, and Fulbright groups), and consulted for the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, the Los Angeles Public Defenders Office and a number of private corporations, film companies, law firms and U.S. government agencies.

In this talk, Professor Han will examine the implications for the Zainichi (people of Korean ethnicity who have lived in Japan since the colonial period) of choosing between identifying themselves as either Chōsen or Kankoku for Japan's alien registration purposes. Chōsen is a historic name for Korea now also used by North Korea in its official name, while Kankoku, which also means Korea, refers to the Republic of Korea (South Korea). 

Young-Hae Han is a visiting professor at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for the 2012–13 academic year. She is also a professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University (SNU). Her research and education focuses on contemporary Japanese society. She has conducted field research on Japanese grassroots social movements in cities such as Kawasaki, Kunidachi, Kobe, Yamagata, Kanazawa, and Oita. After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, she organized a team and conducted research in the damaged area. Han is also involved in researching another topic that is of great interest to her: ethnic minorities in contemporary Japan. For this topic, her research has been focused on the identity issues of Zainichi Koreans, particularly on the changing relationship of the Zainichi with their "homeland" in the post-cold war period.

Han served as the director of the Institute for Japanese Studies at SNU from 2006 to 2012 before she joined Shorenstein APARC. She also served as the chair of the Exchange Committee of KSA-AJS at the Korean Sociological Association from 2008 to 2011.

Han is the author of numerous publications, such as the books: Understanding Contemporary Japanese Society (in Korean); Japanese Community and Grassroots Social Movements (in Korean); Multi-Cultural Japan and Identity Politics (co-author, in Korean). Her recent publications include Institutionalization of East Asian Studies and New Dilemmas: With a Focus on Japanese Studies (in English); New Relationship between Zainichi Koreans and the Homeland: Through the Journeys of the Former 'Chosen Nationals' Living in Korea (in Japanese); The Meaning of 'Seikatsu' (Life) in the Citizens' Movement in Contemporary Japan (in Korean); and The Inheritance of the Korean Dance and Identity in the Ethnic Korean Community (in Korean).  

North Korea, arguably the most isolated country in the world, poses unique challenges for journalists. Access to the country is severely limited and even when a journalist is able to gain entry, the secretive and repressive nature of the state significantly limits what can be learned. Still, despite these difficult conditions, the realities of North Korean life are increasingly finding their way into various media, from newspaper reporting and on-line media to thinly fictionalized accounts.

This panel will take a multi-faceted look at the coverage of North Korea through the journalist (represented by 2012 Shorenstein Journalism Award winner Barbara Demick), the editor, the development/relief worker, and the novelist.

Panelists include:

Barbara Demick, has been Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times since 2008. She has focused on human trafficking, corruption, and minorities, as well as North Korea. Demick is the author of two books -- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood. Her work has won awards from the Asia Society, the Overseas Press Club, the American Academy of Diplomacy, among others. Her North Korea book, which has been translated into more than 20 languages, recently won the International Book Award on Human Rights. She is a graduate of Yale and taught a seminar on coverage of repressive regimes at Princeton University. She lives in Beijing with her son Nicholas.

Susan Chira, was named assistant managing editor for news for the New York Times in September 2011. Previously, she had served as foreign editor (since January 2004), and as editorial director of book development (since September 2002). Before that, Chira was the editor of the "Week in Review" section at the Times (since October 1999), after having served as deputy foreign editor of the newspaper (since February 1997). Earlier, she served in a variety of reporting positions including national education correspondent, Tokyo correspondent (from October 1984 until February 1989), metropolitan reporter in the Albany and Stamford bureaus, and reporter for the "Business Day" section.
 

Katharina Zellweger, a Pantech Fellow, joined the Korean Studies Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center after five years of living in Pyongyang where she has served as the North Korea country director for the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Through her SDC and earlier work, she has witnessed modest economic and social changes not visible to most North Korea observers. Her research at the Center has drawn on her over 15 years of humanitarian work in North Korea and explore how aid intervention can stimulate positive sustainable change there

 

Adam Johnson is an associate professor of English, with emphasis in creative writing, at Stanford University. A Whiting Writers’ Award winner, his fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, Playboy, Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us, which won a California Book Award. His novel The Orphan Master's Son, a novel set in North Korea, has just been published by Random House. His books have been translated into sixteen languages. Johnson was a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.

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).

Asian universities are rising in world university rankings, with schools in emerging Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea recently making strong gains. Six universities in South Korea alone placed among the top 400 in the world in the 2012 Times Higher Education rankings. Competition within Asia is also intensifying. 

The shift of relative economic power from the West to the East suggests that Asian universities will continue their ascendancy, but progress brings with it growing pains. In his talk, Dr. Jeong, president of one of Korea’s premier universities, will discuss the pressures that Korean universities face and their efforts to reform and adjust to new times and new challenges.

Dr. Jeong Kap-Young is president and a professor of economics at Yonsei University. He holds a B.A. from Yonsei University, an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, all in economics. His research interests are in industrial organization and public policy, applied microeconomic theory, and East Asian economies. He has authored numerous works, and served as adviser to the Korean government.