Stanford University

Explaining Policy Outcomes in the Philippines: Is the President Too Strong, or Is Congress?

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Who influences policy outcomes in the Philippines? While most analysts agree that the quality of policymaking has been poor, they offer two very different explanations. Some blame a too-strong presidency: Presidents keep personal control over policy, so policies change when one president succeeds another. Discontinuity undermines performance. Other observers blame the power of congress: Legislators have stymied presidential agendas for reform, while presidents have been powerless to stop congress from failing to act or from acting to undermine reform. Takeshi Kawanaka takes a different approach. He argues that while presidents have control of fiscal policy, congress is dominant when it comes to ordinary legislation. It is the allocation not the concentration of power that facilitates short-sighted pork-barrel politics and inhibits the growth of cohesive and disciplined political parties.

Takeshi Kawanaka, a visiting scholar in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, has written mainly on Philippine politics. After two years of field work on local governance and political machines, he wrote Power in a Philippine City (2002). More recently he edited The Philippines in the Post EDSA Period (2005, in Japanese), which deals with the interaction between democratic consolidation and economic liberalization. His current research is on the role of political institutions in shaping policy outcomes in new democracies. He received his PhD in political science from Kobe University, and his MA and BA from Waseda University.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Takeshi Kawanaka

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 723-9741 (650) 723-6530
0
Visiting Scholar
T_Kawanaka.jpg PhD

Takeshi Kawanaka is a 2005-06 visiting scholar at Shorenstein APARC, and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE), Japan. He was a visiting research associate at the University of the Philippines from 1996 to 1998.

Since Kawanaka joined IDE in 1993, he has been working on politics in developing countries. He did field research mainly in the Philippines. He wrote a book on local politics, Power in a Philippine City (Chiba: IDE) and edited a book on post-democratization politics, The Philippines in the Post EDSA Period (in Japanese, Chiba: IDE). Now, he works on political institutions and policy outcomes in new democracies.

Kawanaka received BA and MA in Law from Waseda University and a PhD in political science from Kobe University. He taught courses on Southeast Asian Politics at Komazawa University and Seijo University. Aside from Japanese and English, he speaks Tagalog.

Takeshi Kawanaka Speaker
Seminars
Southeast Asia Program

Indonesia's Revolution Is It Starting Up Again? A Perspective Inspired by the Ideas of Pramoedya Ananta Toer

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Is it really "a democratic transition" that is taking place in the aftermath of Suharto's overthrow? Is it something else? Something more? Can Pramoedya's analysis of movements in Indonesian history, in his novels and other writings, help us understand what is happening in and to the country now? And what is the answer to Pramoedya's question: How did the young generation succeed so impressively in ousting a military-backed dictator, yet fail to produce a national political leadership to replace him? In his analysis Max Lane will draw linkages between seemingly disparate events and trends: emerging "Pramism"; burgeoning demonstrations (aksi); the controversy over "rectifying history"; the new alliance of Sukarnoist parties; rapid decentralization; and the longer-term dynamics of Indonesian history.

Max Lane is affiliated with the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He has been writing about Indonesian politics and history since 1972. His highly regarded translations include novels by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, plays by W. S. Rendra, and writings by other Indonesians. Recently he finished translating Arok Dedes and The Chinese In Indonesia by Pramoedya and The Social Sciences and Power in Indonesia by Daniel Dhakidae and Vedi Hadiz. Presently he is completing a book of his own, Aksi, the Fall Of Suharto and the Next Indonesia, while preparing a PhD at the University of Wollongong on class consciousness in modern Indonesia and lecturing at the University of Sydney.

Co-sponsored with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UC-Berkeley

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UC-Berkeley
IEAS Conference Room, 6th Floor
2223 Fulton Street
Berkeley, CA

Max Lane Translator of Pramoedya's four-novel Buru Quartet and founding editor of Inside Indonesia Speaker
Seminars
Southeast Asia Program

U.S., China eager to gloss over any disagreements, according to Pantech Fellow Daniel Sneider

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Despite chatter about "the Chinese threat" during Chinese President Hu Jintao's recent visit to Washington, neither China nor the United States seeks to confront the issues plaguing their complex relationship. Pantech fellow and San Jose Mercury News foreign affairs columnist Daniel Sneider considers the muscular side of "China's peaceful rise."

The visit of China's President Hu Jintao to the United States this week is yet another opportunity for chatter about the "Chinese threat.'' In the lead-up to his arrival, we have heard rising voices from Congress and from the administration on everything from China's currency manipulation and piracy of intellectual property to its military buildup.

Do not be deceived. There is no real appetite in either Washington or Beijing for confrontation over any of these issues, much less a serious exploration of the challenge that China presents to American global leadership.

Neither government can afford an escalation of tensions. Economically, we are too intertwined. Strip away the packaging on the $200 billion trade deficit with China and you will find American companies running global assembly lines that begin in Ohio, pass through Malaysia, and end up in southern China.

Strategically, the United States is painfully dependent on China to try to cope with the greatest security challenge in northeast Asia: North Korea's nuclear program.

Beijing is wedded to its doctrine of "China's peaceful rise.'' First formulated three years ago, it aims to keep things calm with the United States and most of its neighbors, buying time to manage the tightrope act of continuing high growth while preserving domestic stability.

In any case, Washington is too bogged down in the Middle East to do more than bark now and then about China.

"At the strategic level, the United States is really focused like a laser on the Middle East,'' and the Chinese like it that way, said Asian security expert Kurt Campbell. "They appreciate the fact that with the U.S. attention focused elsewhere, it allows China to play a larger role in Asia as a whole,'' he told a gathering last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Typically, while Washington is focused on Hu's visit, the Chinese defense minister is in the midst of an unprecedented Asian tour that will take him to North and South Korea and to Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. China's prime minister has just finished a swing through Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Cambodia.

In my own travels through Asia recently, from South Korea and Japan in the northeast down to Singapore, Vietnam and Hong Kong in Southeast Asia, I found a stunning growth in China's influence. The question of how to deal with China's rise is high on every agenda.

Everywhere people are looking over their shoulder, worried about China's burgeoning strength and presence. They are equally fearful that the United States is abandoning the field to China. But they also don't want to choose between these two powers.

That is even true in Japan, where the popular media and politicians are full of talk about the Chinese threat. But look a little closer and you will also find a growing counter-movement, particularly in elite policy circles, warning against becoming separated from the rest of Asia. The battle for succession to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is stepping down in the fall, is now being shaped around this issue.

The China-Japan rivalry tends to reveal the more muscular side of China's "peaceful rise,'' one that Americans rarely glimpse. In Vietnam, senior foreign policy officials recounted what happened when the Japanese came courting to gain Vietnam's backing for a resolution to give them permanent membership in the U.N. Security Council, a key goal of Japan's foreign policy. Japan is Vietnam's largest aid donor and a major source of foreign investment.

China and Vietnam have a long and stormy history as neighbors, including wars that go back centuries and -- more recently -- a brief invasion in 1979 that ended in defeat for the Chinese. Relations these days are relatively good, however, fed by growing trade, heavily in China's favor.

Hu, in his role as leader of the Chinese Communist Party, sent a special envoy to talk to the leadership of the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party. Sometimes, a Vietnamese official told me, the Chinese can be very indirect. Not this time. The message was simple: "Don't do it!'' The ``or else'' was left unspoken.

The Vietnamese compromised, supporting Japan's membership but refusing to co-sponsor the resolution. China was not pleased, but apparently accepted it.

For the Vietnamese, a senior official explained, they must engage in a "lot of fine balancing.'' Vietnam "can't stop engaging China'' but wants to make sure China becomes a "predictable'' power.

In Washington, when the cloud of rhetoric clears, that formula pretty much sums up the reality of U.S.-China relations, too.

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Philippines Conference Room

Stella Quah

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 724-6402 (650) 723-6530
0
Visiting Scholar
PhD

Stella Quah, (PhD, University of Singapore; M.Sc [sociology], Florida State University) is professor of sociology at the National University of Singapore. She was a Fulbright Hays scholar from 1969 to 1971. Since 1986 she has spent academic sabbaticals as research associate and visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California Berkeley; the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Department of Sociology at Harvard University; the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University; the Stanford Program in International Legal Studies, Stanford University; and the National Centre for Development Studies, Australian National University.

Professor Quah was elected vice president for research of the International Sociological Association (ISA); chairperson of the ISA Research Council for the session 1994-98; and served as associate editor of International Sociology (1998-2004).

Among her professional activities, Professor Quah serves on two institutional review boards; is member of the Society for Comparative Research; member of the International Advisory Board of the British Journal of Sociology; member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Health Sociology Review, the journal of the health section of the Australian Sociological Association; member of the editorial board of Marriage & Family Review; member of the International Advisory Board of Asian Population Studies; editor of the Sociology in Asia Series; and editor of the Health Systems Section, Encyclopedia of Public Health (Elsevier Inc).

Professor Quah's main areas of research are medical sociology, social policy, and family sociology. The complete list of her publications is at http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/socquahs.

Stella Quah Visiting Scholar, Shorenstein APARC, Stanford and Professor, Department of Sociology National University of Singapore Speaker
Jim Whitman Director, MA Programme, Department of Peace Studies, School of Social and International Studies, Speaker University of Bradford, United Kingdom
Chris Beyrer Director, Johns Hopkins Fogarthy AIDS International Training and Research Program, Director, Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights, Speaker Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Graham Scambler Director, Unit of Medical Sociology, and Deputy Director,The Centre for Behavioural and Social Sciences in Medicine, Department of Medicine, Faculty of Clinical Sciences Speaker University College London
Kari Hartwig Division of Global Health, Dept of Epidemiology and Public Health Speaker Yale School of Medicine
DK Owens Speaker
Gabriel M. Leung Department of Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine Speaker University of Hong Kong
Workshops

Explaining Stability in Singapore: Calibrated Coercion?

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Singapore's general elections in 2006 are unlikely to shake the country's legendary political stability. Despite repeated predictions over decades that the long-ruling People's Action Party (PAP) would falter, opposition parties and dissident groups have made little headway. Cherian George will offer a counter-intuitive reason for this situation: deliberate self-restraint in the use of violence by the state against its opponents. Since the 1980s, modes of repression in Singapore have grown increasingly subtle and sophisticated. Thanks to "calibrated coercion," the PAP has been able to neutralize opposition with minimum political cost. The study of authoritarian regimes would benefit from more nuanced attention to the methodology of coercion. It is time for analysts to stop treating coercion as if it were not problematic - a black box that need not be taken apart. Or so, based on Singapore's case, Prof. George will argue.

Cherian George is the author of Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore (2006) and Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation: Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control (2000). After completing his PhD in communication at Stanford in 2003, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute, Singapore. He is now deputy head of the journalism program at Nanyang Technological University.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Cherian George Assistant Professor, School of Communication and Information Speaker Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Seminars
Southeast Asia Program

Creating the Political Forest in Southeast Asia: Law, Violence, and Institutional Practices

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Nancy Peluso will discuss how "political forests" originated in colonial-era Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and how they have been maintained over at least a century and a half of broader political-economic change. She will argue that forests were produced and normalized in Southeast Asia through political categories embedded in the law, scientific and public practice, colonial and post-colonial empires of forestry, and the insurgencies and emergencies of the Cold War era. This required the sometimes violent separation of the components of agrarian environments. From the fact that forests can be shown to be not only biological but also historical and political in nature she will draw important implications for conservation, development, and "green governance."

Nancy Lee Peluso is program director of the Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics at UC - Berkeley, where she teaches courses in political ecology and studies forest politics and agrarian change in Southeast Asia. She is the co-editor of Violent Environments (2001) and Borneo in Transition: People, Forests, Conservation and Development (1996) and the author of Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (1992) and many journal articles and book chapters. She is presently finishing a book manuscript whose working title is "Ways of Seeing Borneo: Territoriality, Violence, and the Production of Landscape History". She is an associate editor of Global Environmental Politics and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Her PhD is from Cornell University.

Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room

Nancy Lee Peluso Professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management Speaker University of California-Berkeley
Seminars
Southeast Asia Program

China's Rise and Implications for the Korean Peninsula: Why the US-ROK Alliance will Inevitably Change

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The US-ROK alliance has come under increasing strains in the past few years. Often this is attributed to emotion: a naive young generation of Koreans or perhaps resentment over Apollo Ohno's victory in the past winter Olympics. However, the strains arise from deeper, more enduring reasons. One factor that is not often discussed is how China's rise is affecting the US-ROK alliance. South Korea, once again, is caught between powers much larger than itself. There are no easy answers, but an understanding of the real pressures on the Korean peninsula is a way to begin.

David Kang is associate professor of government, and adjunct associate professor and research director at the Center for International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He has scholarly interests in both business-government relations and international relations, with a focus on Asia. At Tuck he teaches courses on doing business in Asia, and also manages teams of MBAs in the Tuck Global Consultancy Program that conduct in-country consulting projects for multinational companies in Asia.

Kang's book, Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge University Press, 2002), was named by Choice as one of the 2003 "Outstanding Academic Titles". He is also author of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (co-authored with Victor Cha) (Columbia University Press, 2003). He has published scholarly articles in journals such as International Organization, International Security, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Foreign Policy.

Philippines Conference Room

David Kang

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-6392 (650) 723-6530
0
Visiting Professor
David_Kang.jpg PhD

David Kang is associate professor of government, and adjunct associate professor and research director at the Center for International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He has scholarly interests in both business-government relations and international relations, with a focus on Asia. At Tuck he teaches courses on doing business in Asia, and also manages teams of MBAs in the Tuck Global Consultancy Program that conduct in-country consulting projects for multinational companies in Asia.

Kang's book, Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge University Press, 2002), was named by Choice as one of the 2003 "Outstanding Academic Titles". He is also author of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (co-authored with Victor Cha) (Columbia University Press, 2003). He has published scholarly articles in journals such as International Organization, International Security, Comparative Politics, International Studies Quarterly, and Foreign Policy. He is a frequent radio and television commentator, and has also written opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, Chosun Ilbo (Seoul), Joongang Ilbo (Seoul), and writes a monthly column for the Oriental Morning News (Shanghai). Kang is a member of the editorial boards of Political Science Quarterly, Asia Policy, IRI Review, Business and Politics, and the Journal of International Business Education.

Professor Kang has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale University, Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), the University of Geneva IO-MBA program (Switzerland), Korea University (Seoul, Korea) and the University of California, San Diego. He received an AB with honors from Stanford University and his PhD from University of California, Berkeley.

David Kang Speaker
Seminars
Korea Program
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