5:30 pm registration 6:00 pm program followed by reception Public Policy Institute of California 500 Washington Street, Founders' Room, 5th Floor, San Francisco $12 Members of the Asia Society $15 Non-members $8 Student with ID Please contact that Asia Society to register for this event. They can be reached at 415-421-8707. Experts on Indonesia's political, social, and economic climate will share their insights on the challenges and opportunities ahead for the world's fourth most populous country. Organized in conjunction with the upcoming release of Asia Society's Asian Update on decentralization in Indonesia, this panel will assess some of the key issues facing the largest Muslim society in the world. With presidential elections scheduled for April 2004, what progress has been made toward political reforms and increased accountability in Indonesia? As regional conflicts in Aceh and Papua continue to simmer and expanded military authority is being debated, how will Indonesia balance its needs for effective central authority and greater regional autonomy? Will transferring power and resources downward merely decentralize corruption? How will Indonesia's economy fare in the face of the war in Iraq, sagging American and global markets, and the prospect of higher energy prices? How have the AmericanÑled wars against terrorism and the Iraqi regime affected Indonesia's domestic politics and relations with the United States? Please join us for a timely and informative briefing on political, economic, and social developments in Indonesia today.

Journalism in Southeast Asia is triply constrained. In a given country, the regime in power may impose censorship or induce self-censorship. Outraged by an article, headline, or photograph, a threatening mob can achieve the same result. Concern for the bottom line may pressure commercial media to avoid "serious" analyses in favor of "lighter" stories with ostensibly greater reader, listener, or viewer appeal. Violence and sex may be featured for the same material reason. What is it like to work under such constraints? What strategies are available to journalists for defeating or deflecting them? How do the news environments in Indonesia and Thailand differ in these respects? What about the prejudices and preferences of journalists themselves? How do all these limits, incentives, and propensities go into the making of the news in Southeast Asia? Yuli Ismartono is uniquely suited to answer these questions. As a correspondent for TEMPO, she covered wars in Cambodia and Sri Lanka, drugs in the Golden Triangle, the student uprising in Burma, the Soviet exit from Afghanistan, Russian elections, the first Gulf War, and events in Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and, of course, Indonesia. For five years while TEMPO was banned, she worked in television and corporate public relations while writing for The Indonesian Observer. Her current responsibilities as executive editor include managing TEMPOInteraktif (online news).

How is the American-led war in Iraq affecting Asian countries and their relations with the United States? Is a clash of civilizations underway? Will Islamist rage in Southeast Asia spawn terrorist attacks on Americans there? Will Islamist parties in Indonesia be able to ride this wave of anger into power in the elections to be held in April 2004? Will the regime in North Korea take advantage of American preoccupations in Iraq and Afghanistan to escalate tensions in Northeast Asia? How will the economies of Southeast and Northeast Asia be affected by the conflict in Iraq? Will Washington's priority on ousting Saddam Hussein undermine its effort to stabilize Afghanistan? And what will the repercussions in Asia be if, against the expectation of many observers, the Iraq war turns out to be short and the seeds of Iraqi democracy are successfully sown?

Educational achievement in Malaysia is racially skewed across its three main cultural groups: The Malay-Muslim majority lags behind the country's Chinese and Indian minorities. This poses a dilemma. Should the state give the majority preferential access to education in the name of group equality? Or permit such access to be decided by merit alone, in the name of fairness among individuals? Malaysia has chosen to expand opportunities for schooling while maintaining a strict policy of affirmative action for Malays, all within a centrally controlled and standardized system of national education that relies on the Malay language and includes emphasis religion and morality. After showing how this pattern evolved from the secular, English-language format adopted by the British when they ruled Malaysia, Dr. Bakri Musa will assess the costs and benefits of affirmative educational action in the country today. Bakri Musa has written extensively on Malaysia. His latest book, An Education System Worthy of Malaysia (2003), has been described as "a severe critique" and "a comprehensive proposal for reform." Earlier titles include Malaysia in the Era of Globalization (2002), and The Malay Dilemma Revisited (1999). Shorter commentaries have appeared in Asiaweek, Education Quarterly, The Far Eastern Economic Review, and The International Herald Tribune, among other print media, and been aired by National Public Radio on its program, "Marketplace." A surgeon in private practice in Silicon Valley, Dr. Musa earned his medical and graduate degrees at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Asked his reaction to the Iraq war, the accused Bali bomber Amrozi said: "It just goes to show I was not wrong to bomb." The October 2002 bombings of two nightclubs on Bali were the worst act of terrorism since 9/11. 202 people died; 350 were seriously injured. Preliminary analysis of what the suspected perpetrators have said about the case suggests that they were motivated mainly by deep hatred of the United States. This lecture will explore the ideology and psychology of the accused bombers and, more broadly, the likely impact of the war in Iraq on terrorism in Southeast Asia. Greg Fealy is a leading specialist on Islam and the history and politics of Indonesia. His publications include two co-edited books, Nahdlatul Ulama, Traditionalism and Modernity in Indonesia and Local Power and Politics in Indonesia: Decentralisation and Democratisation. He has worked as an Indonesia analyst for the Office of National Assessments in Canberra and as a consultant for the Asia Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jakarta. The history of Indonesia's largest Muslim party was the subject of his dissertation (PhD, Monash University, Australia, 1998).

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo recently pointed to gold mining on the island of Mindanao as a possible solution to her country's chronic financial problems. Philippines gold reserves are among the world's largest, and gold prices are near a six-year high. But the metal is no panacea; damage to the environment and battles over land rights are among the risks and impediments. The president is not the first in her country to have focused on gold. In pre-Hispanic times the metal was both a medium of exchange and a sign of status. Ferdinand Marcos' rise to power is still widely, if credulously, attributed to his discovery of a famous hoard of gold. This lecture will show how scholarly attention to precious metals, including silver, can yield a perspective on Philippine history that challenges conventional narratives. By foregrounding precious metals, the archipelago's past can be relocated--away from the peripheral position it occupies in most world histories and toward a strikingly central role in global events and trends. About the Speaker: Martin W. Lewis came to Stanford in Fall 2002 from Duke University, where he co-directed the Program in Comparative Area Studies. His first book examined the interactions of economic development, environmental degradation, and cultural change on the Philippine island of Luzon. His other publications include The Myth of Continents (1997), coauthored with Karen Wigen. He received his PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 1987.

America has called for a multilateral solution to the recent crisis on the Korean Peninsula. As a result, Russia, China and Japan have been asked to play a more active role in contributing to a peaceful resolution. Drawing on years of experience in this region, Ambassador Armacost gives us his insights into this volatile area, including prospects for change. Most recently (1995-2002), Armacost served as president of Washington D.C.'s Brookings Institution, the nation's oldest think tank and a leader in research on politics, government, international affairs, economics, and public policy. Previously, during his twenty-four year government career, Armacost served, among other positions, as undersecretary of state for political affairs and as ambassador to Japan and the Philippines. Registration: 7:30 pm Program: 8:00 pm Students with ID - Free Members of the World Affairs Council - $5 Nonmembers - $8

Anthony Reid, a leading historian of Southeast Asia and author of many books and articles on the region, directs the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. His previous positions include professorships at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Australian National University. He has written extensively on Indonesian and Acehnese topics. In his talk he will situate the Acehnese conflict historically and assess the chances that a recent peace agreement will or will not take hold. Professor Reid last visited the long-embattled province in February 2003.

Elections in Thailand in January 2001 yielded a remarkable near-majority for the Thai Rak Thai ("Thai Love Thai") Party of computer and telecommunications billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, who became prime minister despite serious legal charges of tax evasion. Although the Constitutional Court acquitted him (by a close 8-to-7 vote), his tenure in office has given rise to widespread impressions of populism on the one hand and corruption on the other.

In her talk, Dr. Phongpaichit will explore the background and implications of Thaksin's rise to power and his ongoing use of it. Pasuk Phongpaichit is Thailand's best known and most widely read economist. Books authored or coauthored by her include Corruption and Democracy in Thailand; Thailand: Economy and Politics; Thailand's Crisis; Thailand's Boom and Bust; The Thai Village Economy in the Past; Employment, Income and the Mobilization of Local Resources in Three Thai Villages; Challenging Social Exclusion: Rights and Livelihood in Thailand; Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja: Thailand's Illegal Economy and Public Policy; and From Peasant Girls to Bangkok Masseuses.

Her current research is on "The Structure and Dynamics of Capital in Post-Crisis Thailand." In fall 2002 she was a visiting professor at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Cambridge University.

Widely regarded as a classic text of modern Vietnamese literature, Vu Trong Phung's The Storm (1936) is also the only colonial-era novel that features a leading member of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) as its main character. As a result, the novel provides rare insight into popular Vietnamese attitudes of the day toward communism and local communist activists. This issue merits attention because studies of early Vietnamese communism tend to approach the movement from the inside exclusively (by examining the institutional development of the Party and the lives and ideas of its leaders) while more or less ignoring perceptions of it from without. It is also important because the Party has long fostered a suspiciously monochromatic image of itself over time as an entity that is invariably modern, scientifically oriented, morally virtuous, socially based in the lower classes and deeply nationalistic. The process whereby this cluster of vaguely Stalinist attributes came to embody the transhistorical nature of the Party dovetailed with the consolidation of communist control over state power in northern Vietnam after 1954. Vu Trong Phung's The Storm, however, calls into question the historical continuity of the Party's character and reputation by presenting a pre-Stalinized portrait of the Vietnamese communist leadership. The recovery of this image is significant because of the likelihood that it reflected a widely held view of the movement during the late colonial era and because it is consistent with a fragmentary body of historical evidence about the nature of the ICP during its formative stage of development. Finally, a consideration of recent debates over the novel will reveal the limited extent to which the Party has been prepared, during the reform era, to tolerate the spread of unorthodox narratives of its origins and historical development. Peter Zinoman is associate professor of history and Southeast Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His first book - The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) - was awarded the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association in 2,002. He is currently working on a study of the writer Vu Trong Phung and the emergence of modernist movements in inter-war Vietnam. His most recent publication - Dumb Luck: A Novel by Vu Trong Phung (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) - is a translation of a vernacular-language satire of colonial society in Vietnam published originally in 1936.