Muslim minorities in China are often depicted as either forces for integration (i.e., sinicization and assimilation) or disintegration (as separatists, radical Islamists, or ethnic nationalists). Yet, many of the challenges China’s Muslims confront remain the same as they have for the last 1400 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society, though clearly many are new as a result of China's transformed and increasingly globalized society, and especially since the watershed events of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the subsequent Sino-U.S. cooperation on the “war on terrorism.”

Muslims in China live as minority communities amid a sea of people, in their view, who are largely pork-eating, polytheist, secularist, and kafir ("heathen"). Nevertheless, many of their small and isolated communities have survived in rather inhospitable circumstances for over a millennium. 

This seminar will examine Islam and Muslim minority identity in China. Through comparing the two largest Muslim minorities in China (Uyghur and Hui), it will be argued that successful Muslim accommodation to minority status in China can be seen to be a measure of the extent to which Muslims have been able to reconcile the dictates of Islamic identiy to their host culture. This goes against the opposite view that can be found in the writings of some analysts of Islam in China, that Islam in the region is almost unavoidably rebellious and that Muslims as minorities are inherently problematic to a non-Muslim state. The history of Islam in China suggests that both within each Muslim community, as well as between Muslim nationalities, there are many alternatives to either complete accommodation or separatism.

Dru C. Gladney is the author of over 50 academic articles, as well as Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People's Republic (Harvard University Press, 1996, 2nd edition); Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality (Wadsworth, 1998); Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, China, Korea, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the U.S. (Editor, Stanford University Press, 1998). Former president of the Pacific Basin Institute and dean of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, Gladney is also the author of  Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Sub-Altern Subjects  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). He is currently working on a comparative study of Muslim adaptations in China as well as a study of new media in helping to build a Uyghur "virtual" nation. 

 This seminar series is co-sponsored by the South Asia Initiative,
 

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More than two decades have passed since the first case of HIV infection was detected in Cambodia in 1991. Cambodia is among the countries with the highest HIV prevalence in Asia and has been experiencing the most serious HIV/AIDS epidemic in the region. The epidemic is spread primarily through heterosexual transmission and revolves largely around the sex trade.

Since the beginning of the epidemic, the Royal Government of Cambodia has made a strong political commitment to the need for prevention of HIV transmission and care for people living with HIV/AIDS. It has received some technical and financial support from national and international agencies. Several prevention and intervention programs have been successfully implemented, and the WHO/UNAIDS recognized that the Cambodia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic appeared to have stabilized in 2002.

The estimated HIV prevalence in the general adult population declined to 0.5% in 2009, down from 1.2% in 2001. Among women visiting antenatal care clinics, the prevalence also declined from 2.1% in 1999 to 1.1% in 2006. There was also a gradual increase in the percentage of HIV-infected pregnant women who received antiretroviral therapy to reduce the risk of mother-to-child transmission, from 1.2% in 2003 to 11.2% in 2007, and finally to 32.3% in 2009.

Despite the decline of HIV prevalence in the general population, the prevalence remains high among high-risk groups such as commercial sex workers, men who have sex with men, and injection drug users. Furthermore, the so-called prevention-successful-country is also seeing the growing need for HIV/AIDS treatment and care.

This seminar will highlight the past and current features of Cambodia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, lessons learned from prevention and care policies, and future challenges that Cambodia may face in the battles against HIV/AIDS.  

Dr. Siyan Yi joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center during the 2011–12 academic year from the National Center of Global Health and Medicine and the University of Tokyo, Japan, where he jointly served as a research fellow and lecturer. He has also served as an adjunct faculty member at Cambodia’s School of Public Health, the National Institute of Public Health, and the School of International Studies at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

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.