Certain East Asian territorial disputes have simmered, unresolved, since the arrangements concluding the Second World War: Japan, China, and Taiwan contest sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu(tai) islands and their surrounding waters; South Korea and Japan both assert a claim to Dokto/Takeshima island (also called Liancourt Rocks); Japan and Russia have not yet signed a formal peace treaty ending the war, mainly because of their continuing dispute regarding sovereignty over the Northern Territories/southern Kuriles; and China, Taiwan and Vietnam plus three other nations assert sovereignty over one or more of the Spratly Island group in the South China Sea. These contending claims arise -- and generate heat -- from conflicting historical memories, national identities, nationalistic impulses, regional power rivalries, and potentially rich economic benefits. China's rising military power and concomitantly more assertive foreign policy posture have added to that volatile mix. The United States was, in a sense, "present at the creation" of the specific postwar arrangements -- that failed adequately to resolve historical issues and left the contested East China Sea islands in a legally uncertain status. The Obama administration's announced "pivot" or "rebalancing" toward Asia was accompanied by public affirmations of enduring U.S. policy interests in Asia and by a call for China to settle its South China Sea disputes through multilateral negotiations.  So the U.S. is involved to a greater or lesser degree in each of the contemporary East Asian territorial disputes. Keyser will discuss the U.S. policymaker's perspective on these territorial conflicts including whether the U.S. government can and should play an active role in facilitating resolutions. 

Donald W. Keyser retired from the U.S. Department of State in September 2004 after a 32-year career.  He had extensive domestic and foreign experience in senior policy positions, conflict resolution, intelligence operations and analysis, and law enforcement programs. His career focused geographically on U.S. policy toward East Asia, particularly China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Fluent in Chinese and professionally conversant in Japanese, Russian and French, he served three tours at the American Embassy in Beijing and two tours at the American Embassy in Tokyo. A Russian language and Soviet/Russian area studies specialist in his undergraduate and early graduate-level work, Keyser served 1998-99 as Special Negotiator and Ambassador for Regional Conflicts in the Former USSR. He is currently a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the China Policy Institute, University of Nottingham, U.K.

China and some other Asian countries have experienced a large surplus of men of marriageable age. The existing literature studies the impact of sex imbalance using aggregate sex ratios, such as at the county, city, or province level. However, these studies may miss important impacts on health and behavior because the relevance of surplus sons to family decisions mainly stems from pressure conveyed through social interactions with the local reference group.

This paper draws from unique social network data, collected from households' long-term spontaneous gift exchange records (li dan), combined with household panel data from 18 Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. The surveyed villages are home to Chinese ethnic minorities, which largely circumvents endogenous fertility decisions on the first-born child due to the implementation of One Child Policy and its associated relaxations afterwards. To identify the effect of pressure to find wives for their sons on parental risky behavior, we focus on comparing families with a first-born boy versus a first-born girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect.

The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried sons and unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having an unmarried son also affects parental risk-taking behavior. The results are consistent across specifications allowing for long-run and short-run effects. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. In contrast, parents with a daughter do not demonstrate this pattern. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design policies to improve parental well-being.

Dr. Xi Chen's main research interests involve health economics and development economics in the developing contexts. He recently completed his PhD in applied economics at Cornell. His research seeks to better understand how social interactions affect health behavior and outcomes, how socioeconomic status drives social competition. Most of his current work draws on primary data from China and secondary data from India and Indonesia.

The more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainably beneficial ways. Cambodia, a post-conflict state that cannot refuse aid, is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance—a major impediment to rational economic growth. Massive intervention by the UN in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule. Yet the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Based on a comparison of how more and less aid-dependent sectors have performed, Prof. Ear will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. Copies of his just-published book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia, will be available for sale. The book intertwines events in 1990s and 2000s Cambodia with the story of his own family’s life (and death) under the Khmer Rouge, escape to Vietnam in 1976, asylum in France in 1978, and immigration to America in 1985.

Sophal Ear was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and a TED Fellow in 2009. His next book—The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World, co-authored with Sigfrido Burgos Cáceres—will appear in February 2013. Prof. Ear is vice-president of the Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, advises the University of Phnom Penh’s master’s program in development studies, and serves on the international advisory board of the International Public Management Journal. He wrote and narrated “The End/Beginning: Cambodia,” an award-winning documentary about his family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge. He has a PhD in political science, two master’s degrees from the University of California-Berkeley, and a third master’s from Princeton University.

The U.S.-Japan relationship is not much in the headlines these days—and when it is the stories seem to focus on issues, such as Okinawa and beef, that have bedeviled ties seemingly for decades. But, in the midst of seismic shifts in Asia-Pacific security and global economic relations, shouldn’t the two countries be talking about something else?

Many in American industry have thought so and in 2009 the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan released a white paper calling for a new set of discussions with Japan directed at capturing the innovation and growth potential of the emerging global Internet economy. Accompanying the call were a set of over 70 specific recommendations for discussion in areas ranging from privacy, security, intellectual property, spectrum management, cyber security to competition—an agenda for the future not the past.

The paper found resonance with the new Democratic Party government in Japan and the Obama administration that were searching for a new direction and vocabulary for U.S.-Japan economic relations and were mindful that partnership with Japan in this area strengthened the U.S. hand in dealing with preemptive attempts elsewhere to define rule of the road for the Internet and “cloud computing.” 

The Dialogue was formally launched in the fall of 2010 and its third plenary session is taking place in Washington, D.C. October 16 to 19, 2012. Professor Jim Foster is participating in the Dialogue as a leading member of the U.S. private sector delegation to the talks. He will be coming to Stanford immediately following the joint industry-government meeting on October 18 (the governments will continue in closed-door session through the 19th) and will offer his analysis and insight into the discussions in Washington and their implications for future cooperation between Japan and the U.S. industry in the cloud computing field and for the two governments on challenging issues of broader Internet governance.

Jim Foster is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, where he teaches and researches on U.S. foreign policy issues and global Internet policy. He is the co-director of Keio’s Internet and Society Institute. Foster worked as a U.S. diplomat from 1981 to 2006, serving in Japan, Korea, the Philippines and at the U.S. Mission to the EU. He was director for corporate affairs at Microsoft Japan from 2006 to 2011. He is a former vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and a co-author of the ACCJ White Paper on the Internet Economy.

From 18 to 20 November 2012 Phnom Penh in Cambodia will be the summit capital of the world. President Obama and the heads of nearly 20 other countries will gather there for a series of high-level meetings organized by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Events will include the ASEAN Summit, the ASEAN Plus Three Summit, and the East Asia Summit (EAS). Obama will attend the EAS and the US-ASEAN Leaders Summit as well.

Here at Stanford the issues at stake in these summits will be assessed in conversation among the ambassadors to the United States from five ASEAN member countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Viet Nam—and the president of the US-ASEAN Business Council. How will the ASEAN Community planned for 2015 affect economy, security, and democracy in Southeast Asia? What are China’s intentions in East Asia?  How should ASEAN respond to Chinese behavior? Will a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea be announced in Phnom Penh? What can we expect from Indonesia’s leadership of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 2013? Is protectionism in Southeast Asia on the rise? Has Europe’s recent experience discredited economic regionalism? Is the US-backed Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) good or bad for Southeast Asia? Should the controversial American “rebalance” toward Asia be rebalanced? How reversible are the reforms in Myanmar (Burma)? What changes inside ASEAN will make the organization more effective? What is the single change in US policy that each ambassador would most like to see?

Since Thailand’s coup of September 2006, which forced the controversial government of billionaire businessman Thaksin Shinawatra out of office, pro- and anti-Thaksin forces have waged an intense battle for control of the government. Rural people in Thailand have played an important role in this struggle, but the nature of their politics is poorly understood. On the one hand there are breathless accounts of agrarian class struggle, while on the other hand rural protest is dismissed as the product of elite manipulation and financial inducement. These paradigms are unhelpful because they ignored the emergence of a new political relationship between the state and the rural population. Sustained economic growth since the 1960s had lifted rural households to levels of income and consumption previously unimagined. They are no longer mainly challenged by food insecurity but by the need to diversify economically and improve productivity. The state plays a key role in addressing these challenges through an array of subsidy, welfare, and community development schemes. Modern peasant politics in Thailand are motivated not by an antagonistic relationship with the state but by a desire to draw the state into mutually beneficial transactions. The classic frameworks for explaining peasant political behavior, based on rebellion or resistance, are impediments to understanding this new style of political behavior. Prof. Walker will propose instead an alternative model of rural “political society” based on the relationship between a persistent peasantry and a subsidizing state.  Copies of Thailand's Political Peasants will be available for signing and sale by the author following his talk.

Andrew Walker is an anthropologist who has worked in northern Thailand since the early 1990s. His latest book is Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy (2012). His many earlier publications include “Royal Succession and the Evolution of Thai Democracy,” in Montesano et al., eds, Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a Divided Thailand (2011); Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Mainland Southeast Asia (edited, 2009); Forest Guardians, Forest Destroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand (co-authored, 2008); and The Legend of the Golden Boat: Regulation, Trade and Traders in the Borderlands of Laos, Thailand, China and Burma (1999). He also co-founded and co-convenes New Mandala, a widely read and highly regarded blog that offers fresh perspectives, both analytic and anecdotal, on mainland Southeast Asia.