As the U.S. presidential election campaign moves into full bore, what role will foreign policy play in the national debate and the presidential election? Does foreign policy matter to voters or do international issues take a back seat to domestic concerns?  How does the election affect the conduct of foreign policy?

Here to shed light on the presidential election and U.S. foreign policy are three prominent commentators, with moderator Coit Blacker.

Michael H. Armacost is the Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow at FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, a position he has held since 2002. He is the former president of the Brookings Institution, former under secretary of state for political affairs and former U.S. ambassador to Japan and the Philippines. 

David Brady is deputy director and Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the Bowen and Janice Arthur McCoy Professor of Political Science and Leadership Values in Stanford's Graduate School of Business, a professor of political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is a specialist on U.S. national elections. 

David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford and Faculty Co-Director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. Most famously, Professor Kennedy won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book  Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999). 

Moderator: Coit D. Blacker is director and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Olivier Nomellini Professor in International Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and the Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. During the first Clinton administration, Blacker served as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). 

Life expectancy at aged 65 is remarkably similar in the three Chinese cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei, even though the cities differ in levels of socioeconomic development, health systems, and other factors. Edward Jow-Ching Tu will discuss research that aims to understand this phenomenon. Despite unprecedented increases in life expectancy and attainment of similar current levels of life expectancy, the cities differ in the contributions of changes in major causes of death to the improvements in life expectancy among the elderly. Tu and colleagues have explored several possible determinants of these different patterns and trends in the three cities, including socioeconomic development, health service delivery systems, cause-of-death classification systems, and competing risks from cardiovascular disease and other diseases. Their analysis suggests that the effect of equity of health service delivery has become more important over time.

Edward Jow-Ching Tu is a senior lecturer of demography in the Division of Social Science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His work is focused on the impact of fertility, mortality, and migration on socio-economic changes in East Asia countries with special emphasis on nations experiencing a transition from planned economy to market economy; on causes and impacts of mortality changes and health transition on aging societies; and on the causes of lowest-low fertility in many East Asia countries. He has several active research projects ongoing in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He holds graduate degress from West Virginia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). Tu has worked extensively in Asia, and has served as an adjunct professor and taught in many universities in China, including Peking University, Peoples University, Nankai Univerity, and Fudan University. He had served as a senior research scientist at the New York State Health Department and as a research fellow (full professor) at the Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at Academia Sinica. Tu has also taught at the State University of New York in Albany.

In 2011 Yingluck Shinawatra became the 1st female prime minister of Thailand,  the 3^rd member of her family to become prime minister, and the 13th member of her extended family to gain a seat in parliament.  Scholarship on family politics in advanced democracies has been scarce, perhaps because family politics are quasi-aristocratic and therefore do not align with the egalitarianism that informs democratic principles.  What literature does exist tends to treat family politics in terms of political inheritance or occupational following, and as a legacy of the past that is certain to wane with modernization.  When it comes to new democracies, in contrast, scholarship has been more abundant and has treated family politics in terms of corruption, “bossism,” hybridism, and closed games.  Professor Ockey will discuss these differences and present some preliminary findings on the scope and nature of family politics in Thailand, drawing on a database of elected members of parliament since the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932.

Jim Ockey is associate professor (reader) and coordinator in the Department of Political Science at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.  He is an expert on Southeast Asian politics, with a particular focus on democratization in Thailand.

China’s “rise” has elicited envy, admiration, and fear among its neighbors and more distant countries. Much of what has been written about the modalities and impact of China’s increased activism on the world stage comes close to depicting what has happened (and what presumably will happen in the future) as determined almost entirely by goals, approaches, and instruments conceived in Beijing and implemented as designed by their Chinese authors. Such descriptions and explanations minimize or ignore the other side of the equation, namely, what individuals, corporate actors, and governments in other countries do to attract, shape, exploit, or deflect Chinese involvement. The "China and the World" project will redress the imbalance by examining the actions of China’s partners and ways in which initiatives and reactions from partners have shaped Chinese policy and the outcome of engagements with other countries.

The ultimate objective of this study is to understand and anticipate China’s behavior on the world stage. But China’s objectives, methods, and impacts vary from one region to another, and differences between regions are as interesting and as important as are practices and patterns common to all parts of the globe. Describing and explaining regional differences (as well as differences among countries in the same region) is therefore a useful, if not necessary, prerequisite for examining behavior and interactions at the global level.

North America, to be sure, is arguably the most important partner and shaper of China’s international behavior in the decades since Deng Xiaoping launched the policy of “reform and opening” that has transformed China. The reason for not focusing specifically on the United States in this study is that U.S.-China relations have been studied more extensively than any other Chinese relationship. However, the extent and nature of U.S. relations with countries in all regions make it imperative to consider U.S.-China relations in each region and their role, if any, in shaping China’s relationships with other countries.

The “China and the World” project will focus initially on Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia.  China has a long history and deeply varied relationship with these two regions. At the next stage, the project will examine China’s relationship with South Asia. Additional regions, such as Central Asia, may be added.

The project will begin with a one-and-a-half day workshop on March 19–20, 2012, convened in Beijing at the new Stanford Center at Peking University. It will focus on China’s relationships with Japan, Korea, and Russia in Northeast Asia. The participation of scholars from Southeast Asia and North America will help ensure that the core questions developed at the workshop are broadly applicable to other regions as well.