Twenty years ago, there was little to no private wealth in China, yet today the average personal net worth of the wealthiest 50 entrepreneurs is over $200 million. The Communist Party's survival depends on China's successful economic integration into the world trading system, and it can not achieve this without entrepreneurship on a large scale. Hence the Party's pragmatic philosophy: to allow a few individuals to get rich in the belief that they will play a significant part in developing the rest of the country. Who are the 47 men and 3 women on this year's top 50 list? In what industries have their companies arisen? How has the composition of the ranking changed during the past 2 years? And what do their stories illustrate about changes in China's climate for entrepreneurship?

Rupert Hoogewerf is a freelance journalist whose research into the Top 50 wealthiest entrepreneurs of China was published for the second year running in Forbes magazine. Prior to journalism, Mr. Hoogewerf worked for 7 years with Arthur Andersen in London and Shanghai. Graduating from Durham University in Chinese and Japanese, he is based in London and Shanghai.

Kurt Campbell is Senior Vice President of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington D.C., where he also directs the International Security Program. Prior to joining CSIS he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the United States Department of Defense. A former White House Fellow, Dr. Campbell has taught in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he was also served as Assistant Director of the Center for International Affairs. He is a former officer in the US Navy, and toured with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A Marshall Scholar, he holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford.

The complex issues arising from child labor have been addressed in several of the most significant ways--yielding the most important lessons--in the Asia Pacific region. It is in the Asia Pacific region too, that the greatest number of child laborers live. This conference will address the complexities of child labor and review the range of key "solutions" to improve the condition of children--especially impoverished, working children--in the region. Some people claim that abusive child labor is an inevitable byproduct of agrarian and developing economies. But is this accurate? What measures will alleviate abuses and hasten the elimination of exploitation? The United States is now the largest contributor to the ILO's International Programme on the Eradication of Child Labor. At the same time, the United States and US-based business have been accused of contributing to increases in child labor, through trade practices that allegedly expand inequality, or through the strong U.S. role in promoting neo-liberal economic policies through the activities of multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF. What role can the United States play in alleviating the problem--and what role is it playing now? Are the critiques accurate? The term "child labor" conjures up images of poor young people, working in unsafe conditions, receiving inadequate wages, their health imperiled for life and their opportunity for education denied. What policies are appropriate to bring the worst practices to a swift though humane end? Much of the debate has been highly polemical, but more recently, the tone of the discussion has begun to change. It has begun to focus on the concrete measures that can be undertaken to improve the conditions under which children work, and to eliminate the abuses and exploitation to which millions of children are subjected. Participants in this roundtable will share the latest empirical findings on child labor in Asia and identify policies that are at the cutting edge in dealing with this issue.

Organizational discontinuity appears to be an important contributor to venture success in rapidly changing technological environments. Most Silicon Valley ventures are assemblies of human, technological, and financial resources, and supplier/client relationships with disparate organizational heritage. We analyze ways in which organizational discontinuity, under conditions of high technological uncertainty, contributes to new ventures' competitive advantage and exposes difficulties inherent to simulating venturing within an existing industrial organization. We use a comparative framework to expose the relative abundance of organizational discontinuity in the U.S. high technology sector and identify institutional barriers that stifle it in its Japanese counterpart. Professor Cole is Loraine Tyson Mitchell II Professor of Leadership and Communication at the Haas School of Business. He holds a joint appointment with the Department of Sociology. He is the co-director of the Management of Technology Program, a joint venture between the Haas School of Business and the College of Engineering. Professor Cole is a long-term student of things Japanese, having published three books and numerous articles on Japan. Most recently, he published the book, Managing Quality Fads, in 1999 with Oxford University Press, a study of how American industry learned quality improvement practices from the Japanese. This year, he published (with Sage Publications) The Quality Movement and the Organizational Theory, a book co-edited with Richard Scott of Stanford University.

Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education and affiliated Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. where he is Director of the Scandinavian Consortium on Organizational Research, and Co-PI, with Nathan Rosenberg, of the KNEXUS Program on the Knowledge Economy.

Professor Powell works in the areas of organization theory and economic sociology. Author of many books and articles, heis most widely known for his contributions to institutional analysis, including a forthcoming edited book, How Institutions Change.

Powell is currently engaged in research on the origins and development of the commercial field of the life sciences. With his collaborator Ken Koput, he has authored a series of papers on the evolving network structure of the biotechnology industry.This line of work continues his interests in networks as a form of governance of economic exchange, first developed in his 1990 article, "Neither Market Nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization," which won the American Sociological Association's Max Weber Prize and has been translated into German and Italian. Powell and Koput and their research collaborators have developed a longitudinal data base that tracks the development of biotechnology worldwide from the 1980s to the present. With Jason Owen-Smith, Powell is studying the role of universities in transferring basic science into commercial development by science-based companies,and the consequences for universities of their growing involvement in commercial enterprises.

Hailed by the New York Times as one of China's most influential intellectuals, Liu Junning is the founder and editor of the Journal Res Publica. Formerly a Fellow at the Institute of Political Science at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Liu is responsible for the Chinese translation of numerous works on democracy and classic liberal thought. In 1999 his collected essays were published as Republic, Democracy, Constitutionalism. He holds a doctorate in political theory from Beijing University.

Dr. Cha will speak on his forthcoming book (Alignment Depite Antagonism, Stanford University Press, February 1999) on the impact that historical enmity, domestic politics, and realpolitik forces have had in fostering cooperation in this critically important security relationship during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. Victor Cha is Assistnat Professor in the Department of Government and School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. For the 1998-99 academic year, he is the Edward Teller Fellow for National Seurity at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and a recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award (Korea). Dr. Cha has published articles on topics related to international relations, East Asia, and Korea in various scholarly journals. He has also taken part in Track II dialogue on US-Japan-Korea cooperation and has consulted on various projects related to East Asia for the US government.