Taiwan/China Seminar Series
Cosponsored with Department for Anthropological Sciences and the Institute for Research in Social Sciences at Stanford University.
Daniel I. Okimoto Conference Room
When India spectacularly burst into the headlines via its nuclear explosions in May 1998, then US president Bill Clinton had openly vented his fury before aides in the White House. "We are going to come down on those guys like a ton of bricks," he had remarked. Clinton's "volcanic fit" found its echo in the White House statement that expressed "distress" and "displeasure", culminating in Washington imposing a slew of sanctions against India.
These images from the past, culled out from Engaging India, then deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott's book, appear incredible now. Especially as India readies itself to accord a warm reception to US President George W. Bush next week. The entente, the product of laboriously conducted diplomacy as much as geopolitical shifts that yoked the two together as 'natural allies', is now taking deep root. Sure, there will be protest rallies, strident voices will rail against Bush's hegemonic designs, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will be cautioned against any tight clinch with Bush. Yet even these voices arise from the awareness that there's a growing relationship between the US and India, realized through knots of strategic partnership and cooperation in every conceivable field - from economy and nuclear technology to education, space and agriculture.
Bush's visit next week prompted Karl Inderfurth, who was assistant secretary of state for South Asia in the Clinton administration, to say, "All of this represents a refreshing degree of continuity in US foreign policy, based on a recognition by the last two American presidents that India is a country that will be a key player in the 21st century." Similarly, Robert Hathaway, of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, is impressed that "two successive Indian governments representing different political views and parties... both came to the same conclusion that it is in India's interest to forge a better relationship with the US."
From imposing sanctions against India to laying out a blueprint for nuclear cooperation, both New Delhi and Washington have come a long way in an inordinately short time. Ironically, it was Clinton who provided the impetus for this transformation. Talbott says the former president, after coming to terms with the Pokhran II realities, found it "downright distasteful and counterproductive" to impose sanctions against a country he was trying to improve relations with. Consequently, Talbott, Inderfurth and senior director in the National Security Council Bruce Riedal were entrusted with the task of pulling out Indo-US relations from the abyss in which it had been languishing from the beginnings of the Cold War era.What followed was a dialog between foreign minister Jaswant Singh and Talbott, both seeking to convey to each other the security and strategic interests of their respective countries.
The dialog started yielding dividends immediately, even during the Kargil conflict. Clinton's confrontation of then Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif at their July 4, 1999, meeting in Washington took trust patterns between the US and India to a new level. "Throughout this period, we kept the Indian government informed of what we were doing to try to ease the crisis," recalls Inderfurth, who played a key role in the dialog with Sharif. "All of this turned into an important confidence-builder in our new relationship with India."
"The July 4 meeting was the turning point," agrees Michael Krepon of the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. "It demonstrated that US engagement in the India-Pakistan imbroglio would not be detrimental to New Delhi's interests, and it shifted the Clinton administration's focus from proliferation to engagement." The trust was manifest in Clinton's spectacularly successful visit to India in March 2000. An enabling factor in the budding Indo-US romance, says former ambassador Richard Celeste, was the now-forgotten Y2K factor. "The crisis introduced India's enormously talented manpower to our business leaders. Today, the 24/7 bond between companies in the US and service providers in India is the stuff of books and myth-making."
The budding romance acquired a new meaning with the advent of Bush in the White House. His most perspicacious decision was to appoint confidant Robert D. Blackwill as ambassador to India. Blackwill appealed to the popular imagination; his unequivocal pronouncements against Pakistan for fomenting terrorism in India further bolstered the trust between New Delhi and Washington. More importantly, he sought to impart a new heft to the relationship by putting his formidable weight behind the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership", which envisaged cooperation between the two countries in civil nuclear energy, hi-tech trade, space and dual technology. "If Clinton was the pioneer of the new relationship, Bush is its architect," says Teresita Schaffer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The impulse for the new relationship is linked to the question: why has India started to matter to the US? Inderfurth cites three reasons: India will become the world's most populous nation, it may well have the world's fastest growing economy by 2020, and it is the world's largest democracy. Krepon adds one more to the list: intellectual capital. "The world expects India to do more heavy lifting," he says.
Ultimately, a relationship in international affairs hinges on convergence of interests. Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who's now advising under secretary of state R. Nicholas Burns, listed a string of "common interests" at a congressional hearing last year. These included:
preventing Asia from being dominated by any single power that has the capacity to crowd out others and which may use aggressive assertion of national self-interest to threaten American presence, American alliances, and American ties with the states of the region; eliminating the threat posed by state sponsors of terrorism; protecting the global commons, especially the sea lanes of communications, through which flow not only goods and services critical to the global economy but also undesirable commerce such as drug trafficking, people smuggling and weapons of mass destruction technologies.
So, isn't China the "single power" that Tellis thinks could threaten American interests in Asia? He denied this assumption to Congress, but many feel China is indeed the factor behind Washington's attempts to assist India in becoming a major world power.As author Sunil Khilnani, of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, says, "Many current inhabitants of the Pentagon see an India allied to the US as a potential bulwark to a China whose ambitions are still difficult to read." Washington's long-term view is that since China will not support the US war on terror, it's a threat against which the US needs a counterweight. "Japan has proven it does not have the emotional and intellectual muscle to face China. Hence, India should play that role," explains Rafiq Dossani of Stanford University.
The Bush regime's keenness on India also springs from the disaster his other foreign policy initiatives have been. "Bush would like to leave at least one foreign policy achievement as his legacy. He'd like to claim that he 'delivered' India to the US, just as Nixon could earlier claim the same about China," says Khilnani.
These reasons apart, the relationship has gathered great momentum from business-to-business links over the last decade. Says Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation in Washington, "India's abandoning of its social democratic economic model, derived from the Nehru period, in favor of globalization and free market economics has made it much more attractive to investment and ideologically sympathetic to the US." Indeed, the more the two countries deepen their economic interdependence, the more each will have a stake in the other. And this economic interdependence can deepen, says Stephen P. Cohen of the Brookings Institution, through the removal of obstacles to US investments. "Infrastructure, (inadequate) liberalization, and education are three real obstacles. These (improvement in the three areas) will make it easy to implement the strategic relationship."
That India matters to the US is no longer a promise of the future. At a recent conference, former state department official Walter Andersen pointed out two US decisions that underscored India's enhanced importance. First, the four-country tsunami relief efforts involving the navies of the US, Japan, Australia and India. Two, the Bush administration's efforts to exempt a nuclear-capable India from exports restrictions on nuclear and dual use technology.
The blossoming ties have enabled significant partnerships in the international arena too. India has supported the war on terror in Afghanistan; its navy protected high-value US cargoes through the Straits of Malacca; more recently, India voted with the US at the International Atomic Energy Agency to declare Iran in "non-compliance" with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
All this doesn't mean the US and India will automatically collaborate on every problem dogging them. "Nobody expects a perfect alignment ever, but increasing alignment is something we hope will come naturally," says Schaffer. Partly this alignment can be brought about through changes in the conduct of foreign policy. For instance, the US, Hathaway admits, needs to recognize that India expects to be treated on a basis of equality. Similarly, Khilnani contends, a section of Indian political elites need to shed its instinctive anti-Americanism. "This does not mean renouncing a critical position, or an independent assessment of our own interests. It means engaging more deeply and confidently, and picking battles more selectively and prudently," he says.
Obviously, like any two countries, there will be disagreements. "Indeed, there have been over the past few years on a number of issues, including the war in Iraq," says Inderfurth. But, he adds optimistically, "the fact that this has not disrupted the upward trajectory of our relationship is a good sign and a promising one for future relations."
The United States and India have gone a long way from Cold War days of wariness and suspicion to genuine friendship and incipient global partnership. The visit of President Clinton to India in 2000 marked a breakthrough in Indo-U.S. ties, which had been set back by India's decision to conduct nuclear weapons tests in 1998.
President Bush, to his credit, broadened the road opened by Clinton and paved it with a more solid foundation. Cooperation in a range of areas, from military ties to joint scientific work, is well established. A presidential visit puts a personal seal on that budding partnership -- even if it is a couple of years late.
When it comes to Indo-U.S. relations, however, there are three pitfalls to avoid: the India card; democracy matters; and it's the economy, stupid!
The India card
Washington has a surplus of geo-strategists. As Kissinger famously played the "China card'' against the Soviet Union, the strategists imagine cleverly using an India card against a rising China.
There is one small rub in that grand design -- India isn't interested in being an instrument of an American containment strategy against China. As Robert Blackwill, former Bush administration ambassador to India, put it recently: "There's no way better to empty a drawing room in New Delhi of Indian strategists than to start talking about this idea.''
Indians eagerly compete with China for economic leadership in Asia. They have a legacy of tensions, from border wars to nuclear rivalry. But Indian policy is to engage China and create the best relationship possible.
The president is avoiding India card talk. But it is no secret that some inside the administration harbor these illusions. Let's hope they keep their mouths shut for at least this week.
Democracy matters
Beyond cliches about the world's two largest democracies, both governments have a habit of forgetting that democracy really matters. Witness the up-to-the-last-minute effort to salvage a deal from July to open India's civilian nuclear program to international inspection in exchange for access to nuclear energy technology and fuel.
The Bush administration did little to sell that deal in Congress, either ahead or afterward. Opposition has mounted on both sides of the aisles from those who fear it would undermine nuclear proliferation controls, particularly when Iran is claiming its own right to pursue peaceful nuclear technology.
The United States has now toughened its requirements. But the coalition government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faces rising resistance in parliament, encouraged by the prestigious nuclear establishment, to any deal that would significantly restrict India's ability to develop and build nuclear weapons.
I favored the July deal and support any reasonable new agreement that would separate a significant part of India's civilian nuclear program from its military one. Hopefully, the negotiations will succeed, but even if they do, both governments need to do a much better job selling it in their feisty democratic systems.
It's the economy, stupid
The biggest threat to this emergent partnership is to forget what brought the two countries together -- not geopolitics but shared interests. Some of those are security-driven, not least a common foe in Islamist terrorism. But the real driver has been economics.
Since India decided to open its protected economy in the early 1990s, the country has taken off, producing sustained growth rates nearing double digits. Led by the high-technology industry, foreign investment and trade with India is rising rapidly. The Indo-Americans who thrive in Silicon Valley form a powerful cultural and economic bridge between our two countries.
India's billon people include a middle class of 200 million to 300 million, equal to the population of this country, with an increasingly sophisticated appetite for Western consumer goods. In contrast to China, India has a young population, half of them under 25 years old.
For the United States, there are added opportunities -- and competitive challenges. As is evident from the Saturday morning phone calls from telemarketers in Chennai trying to sell me a new mortgage, India has a great resource in its English-speaking educated elite. That has meant job loss in the United States but also openings to create new businesses and new jobs.
Both governments need to focus on what is needed to accelerate the kind of virtual integration between India and the United States we see in Silicon Valley. If we do that right, the geopolitics will follow naturally. If we mess that up, all the strategic castles in the sky will come crashing to Earth very soon.
In this report I provide a summary of the work that I have been doing on China’s vegetable economy over the past year. This work, in part, was supported financially by the Western Growers Association (WGA). The funds provided by the WGA were mostly used to support a survey of vegetable producers and wholesale procurement traders in rural China. It also went to support the procurement of a data set that could aid in the analysis of the productivity of China’s vegetable producers. The work that I summarize here, however, is from far more different sources. I greatly appreciate the support of WGA and look forward to continuing to interact with the management and members in the coming years.
To make the material more accessible, I plan on organizing this report by asking a question and then summarizing the answer. In this way I can cover a lot of ground without getting lost in the details. I am more than willing to try on any given aspect of the final report to expand on the issues.
The project studies the impact of China's current economic transition on its agricultural economy with special reference to the consequences of trade liberalization and of changing trade flows. The project will track impacts on social conditions and on the environment in China's rural areas as well as on markets in the rest of the world, with particular emphasis on the EU. For this, the research considers (a) the dynamic, rapid pace of the transition; (b) the size and geographical diversity of the country; and (c) the effect of the changes on the rest of the world. The research opts for a quantitative approach, supplemented by qualitative investigations, and focuses on three themes: trade, social conditions, and environment. On trade, the research aims to account for the size of China's trade and take a closer look at trade between the EU and China with scenario simulations over the period 2000-2030, by establishing a linkage between (a) the Chinagromodel, a spatially explicit equilibrium model that comprehensively depicts China's farm sector in 2433 counties, while connecting these through trade and transportation flows; (b) the GTAPmodel of world trade; (c) FEA-27, a model of EU-agriculture for 27 members states. The research on social conditions proceeds by linking geo-referenced household surveys to a population census of China and a detailed geographical data set, relying on a suitable adaptation of poverty mapping methodology, so as to trace impacts at household level. Finally, we use agro-ecological assessment tools to quantify the environmental pressures resulting from intensified livestock industry as well as from intensified horticulture production. Findings on the three themes are subsequently integrated to arrive at policy suggestions that account for efficiency, equity and sustainability considerations. Throughout the project, a policy dialogue and dissemination program, conducted in both China and the EU, maintains communication with policy makers.
The supermarket revolution has arrived in China and is spreading as fast as or faster than anywhere in the world. As the demand for vegetables, fruit, nuts and other high valued products have risen, urban retailers are finding new venues from which they can sell to the increasing prosperous city residents. However, the experience of many developing countries suggests that there could be serious distributional impacts of the rising of supermarkets. There is concern among policy makers and academics that poor, small farmers might be excluded from market. The main goal of our paper is to understand what types of farmers have been able to participate in the horticultural revolution, how they interact with markets and how supply chains affect their production decisions. Using a unique set of spatially sampled communities in the Greater Beijing area, in contrast to fears of some researchers, we find small and poor farmers have actively participate in the emergence of China's horticulture economy. Moreover, there has been almost no penetration of modern wholesalers or retailers into rural communities. In the paper we document seven characteristics of China's food economy that we believe account for this set of findings.
This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization
Based on a wide variety of unusual and only recently available sources, this book covers the entire Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76) and shows how the Cultural Revolution was experienced by ordinary Chinese at the base of urban and rural society. The contributors emphasize the comple interaction of state and society during this tumultuous period, exploring the way that events originating at the center of political power changed people's lives and how, in turn, people's responses took the Cultural Revolution in unplanned and unanticipated directions. This approach offers a more fruitful way to understand the Cultural Revolution and its historical legacies.
The book provides a new look at the student Red Guard movements, the effort to identify and cultivate potential "revolutionary" leaders in outlying provinces, stubborn resistance to campaigns to destroy the old culture, and the violence and mass killings in rural China.
The nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula is one of the greatest challenges facing the global non-proliferation system. Yet the very root of that issue reaches far beyond the non-proliferation system. The Six-Party Talks, involving North Korea, South Korea, the United States, Russia, Japan, and China, bring hope for a peaceful solution between these nations. However, the continued strategic mistrust between the United States and North Korea casts an uncertain light on the struggling negotiations. Yang Xiyu will speak about the challenges of the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, the profound mutual mistrust between the US and North Korea, and China's role in the Six-Party Talks. He will also discuss a possible solution.
Before coming to Shorenstein APARC as a visiting scholar, Yang Xiyu was Director of the Office for the Korean Peninsula Issues in Chinese Foreign Ministry. The office was set up in January 2004, when Dr. Yang was its first director to deal with the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula, as well as, affairs relating to the Six-Party Talks. He began his involvement in issues related to the Korean Peninsula in 1994, when he worked in the Chinese Embassy in the United States. During the following years, he took part in the launch of the Four-Party Talks, and was the representative for the Chinese side in the working level meeting of the talks, as well as, a member of the Chinese Delegation in the Four-Party Talks that were held in New York and Geneva.
He was awarded the National Award for Outstanding Contribution to Social Science Studies by the State Council of China, and the Honorable Allowance for National Distinguished Experts.
Philippines Conference Room
