About the seminar

As China's Internet population surges towards the half billion mark—double the United States—how are U.S. Internet companies faring in China? Google, Facebook, eBay, Yahoo and others have all faced challenges in China. These include external (competition, regulation/censorship) and internal (management, strategy). Can these firms find a viable position in China? Will emerging players such as Groupon fare any better? Although U.S. Internet companies have struggled, U.S. institutional investors have reaped rich rewards from stakes in leading Chinese firms such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba/Taobao. Is this approach a better bet than hoping that U.S. firms gain a foothold in China? If leading Chinese Internet firms continue to dominate their home market, do they stand a chance to succeed internationally including through expansion or M&A in the US?

About the Speaker

Duncan Clark is Chairman of BDA China, a company he founded in Beijing in 1994. Previously, Duncan was an investment banker with Morgan Stanley in London and Hong Kong, where he focused on telecommunications, media and technology (TMT) transactions.

He has guided BDA to become the leading consultancy servicing participants and investors in the TMT sectors in China and India. With a team of over 50 in Beijing and an office of 15 in New Delhi (opened in 2006), BDA has in recent years added to TMT an advisory capacity serving leading private equity firms investing in other fast-growing sectors in these countries such as education, retail and alternative energy.

Clark holds a B.Sc degree in economics with honors from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and currently chairs the school's alumni group in China. A UK citizen, Clark was raised in the UK, the United States and France.

Media X is the partner of this seminar.

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The new health reform started in 2009 has shown the determination of the Chinese government, especially the central government, to increase its responsibility in the health sector. The most obvious manifestation of this commitment would be to increase government health expenditure (GHE). But there is still a hot debate about whether the government should allocate more public finds to health or just deepen the marketization of the health sector. Moreover, commitments at the central and local levels are not the same: local government responsibility for GHE is high, and commitments by the central government to increase GHE have not translated into increases in local government GHE as much as proposed in the national health reform.

Our research seeks to answer two questions: What was the actual pattern of GHE? And why did China’s local governments respond as they did? We first discuss the necessity of public financing for health care, and then analyze how intergovernmental economic competition affects local governments’ behavior under “Chinese-style decentralization” (known as fiscal decentralization with political centralization). Empirically, we apply a dynamic panel data model to provincial panel data from 1991 to 2007 to identify the effect of GHE on health performance in each province over time, using infant mortality and some morbidity metrics as health performance variables. We also examine differences across regions, as well as before and after the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003.

Our analysis provides evidence that Chinese-style decentralization negatively impacted GHE. The main findings are as follows:

1. Increasing GHE did improve health performance, and this improvement was mainly driven by the GHE through the health department directly, not through spending by other governmental departments that also impact health. However, pursuit of economic performance lowered local governments’ GHE, mainly by decreasing GHE through local health departments.
   
2. Compared with in the eastern and western regions, this health improvement was not significant in China’s middle regions, where the intergovernmental economic competition leads to much less GHE through health departments.
   
3. The outburst of SARS in 2003 further increased the positive effect from GHE through local health departments, while the effect from GHE through other departments was not equally significant.
   

All these results suggest that adjusting the structure of public health financing, reforming the fiscal system, and improving the performance evaluation system for local governments are critical for the success of China’s on-going health reform.

Lee Kong Chian was among the most influential Chinese entrepreneurs in the Asian diasporic landscape from the 1920s to 1960s. In 1903, as a young boy, he migrated from China to then-British Singapore. He went on to build a formidable plantation-based business empire. Known in his heyday as Southeast Asia’s “Rubber King” and “Pineapple King,” he left profound imprints on business, education, and philanthropy that can still be felt in the region today.

Lee Kong Chian lived through tumultuous times: the rise of Chinese nationalism, World War II, British decolonization, independent state formation, and the Cold War. Different impressions of him have been produced and projected at different times in different places: as “a leading capitalist and philanthropist in Nanyang,” “a representative patriot of the Chinese Diaspora,” and “a virtuous pioneer in the revised national history template.” After reviewing these images, Prof. Huang will move “beyond representation” to explore less well-known aspects of Lee’s life including the nature of his economic empire and the political sensitivity of his position at a time when the sun was setting over the British empire.

Huang Jianli is an associate professor in the Department History at the National University of Singapore and a research associate in the university’s East Asian Institute. His many publications include The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Pasts (2008), Power and Identity in the Chinese World Order (co-edited, 2003) and Macro Perspectives and New Directions in the Studies of Chinese Overseas (co-edited, 2002). Recent journal articles include “Umbilical Ties: The Framing of Overseas Chinese as the Mother of Revolution” (2011), “Portable Histories in Mobile City Singapore: The (Lack)lustre of Admiral Zheng He” (2009), “Chinese Diasporic Culture and National Identity: The Taming of the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore” (2007), and “Entanglement of Business and Politics in the Chinese Diaspora: Interrogating the Wartime Patriotism of Aw Boon Haw” (2006). Further details including contact information are accessible at http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/hishjl.

The movement of people leaving and returning to China from the second half of the 19th century to the present is a vast and complex subject. Among scholars worldwide, none has contributed more to the study of these cycles of migration and settlement in Southeast Asian contexts than National University of Singapore Prof. Wang Gungwu. His extensive writings on the topic richly illustrate the conceptual difficulties involved. 

The very terms used to name the phenomenon are contested: “Greater China,” “Chinese Diaspora,” “Huaqiao,” and “Nanyang Chinese”? Are these migrants and settlers and their descendants “Overseas Chinese” or “Chinese Overseas”? Are they even “Chinese” at all?  Prof. Wang’s struggles with nomenclature will be used by Prof. Huang to discuss larger issues, including how language can bias thought and influence policy and how to navigate the troubled waters at the confluence of scholarship and policy.

Huang Jianli is an associate professor in the Department History at the National University of Singapore and a research associate in the university’s East Asian Institute. His many publications include The Scripting of a National History: Singapore and Its Pasts (2008), Power and Identity in the Chinese World Order (co-edited, 2003) and Macro Perspectives and New Directions in the Studies of Chinese Overseas (co-edited, 2002). Recent journal articles include “Umbilical Ties: The Framing of Overseas Chinese as the Mother of Revolution” (2011), “Portable Histories in Mobile City Singapore: The (Lack)lustre of Admiral Zheng He” (2009), “Chinese Diasporic Culture and National Identity: The Taming of the Tiger Balm Gardens in Singapore” (2007), and “Entanglement of Business and Politics in the Chinese Diaspora: Interrogating the Wartime Patriotism of Aw Boon Haw” (2006).