Sixty years have passed since the signing and enactment of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Prepared against the background of the intensifying Cold War and signed by forty-nine countries (but not by the USSR, China, nor Korea), this multilateral treaty fell far short of settling outstanding issues at the end of World War II or facilitating a clean start for the “postwar” period. Rather, various aspects of the settlement were left equivocal.

In East Asian nations, the time span of sixty years (“kanreki” in Japanese) has special meaning, signifying the end of one historical cycle and the beginning of a new spirit and a new era in time. In reality, however, the major destabilizing factors in this region are still the old lingering WWII/Cold War regional conflicts, such as the territorial disputes between Japan and its neighbors, the tensions in the Korean peninsula, and the Taiwan Strait problem. This presentation will focus on these unresolved problems in terms of their treatment in the San Francisco Peace Treaty, and consider their contemporary status and future trajectories in East Asia.

Kimie Hara specializes in modern and contemporary international relations of the Asia-Pacific region. Her books include Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Francisco System (2007, 2012), Japanese Diplomacy through the Eyes of Japanese Scholars Overseas (2009, edited in Japanese), Northern Territories, Asia-Pacific Regional Conflicts and the Åland Experience: Untying the Kurillian Knot (2009, edited with Geoffrey Jukes), and Japanese-Soviet/Russian Relations since 1945: A Difficult Peace (1998). She received her Ph.D. from the Australian National University and held visiting fellowships/professorships at the Kyoto University, the University of Tokyo, the International Institute for Asian Studies/University of Amsterdam, the East-West Center, Stockholm University, and the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Science.

One of the major aims of implementing a national health insurance program in Taiwan in 1995 was to provide financial risk protection to the country's 23 million citizens. Households may differ in how they allocate the resources freed up and available to them as a result of health insurance. This study presented by Jui-fen Rachel Lu aims to evaluate the impact of social insurance on household consumption patterns.

About the Speaker

Jui-fen Rachel Lu, ScD, is a professor in the Department of Health Care Management and dean of the College of Management at Chang Gung University in Taiwan, where she teaches comparative health systems, health economics, and health care financing. Her research focuses on equity issues in Taiwan's health care system; the impact of the National Health Insurance program on the health care market and household consumption patterns; and comparative health systems in the Asia-Pacific region. She earned her BS from National Taiwan University, and her MS and ScD from Harvard University.

Lu has served as a member of various government committees dealing with health care issues in Taiwan, and is the recipient of various awards. She is the author of Health Economics, and has published papers in journals including Health Affairs, Medical Care, and Journal of Health Economics. Her detailed CV can be found online.

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) in southern China is a major world-manufacturing hub populated by small- to medium-sized firms; many are family-owned and run by entrepreneurs based in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. With a population of 56 million and a land area about one tenth the size of the State of California, the region produces over 10 percent of China’s GDP.

In April 2009, the local party chief announced that Beijing had set the goal for “the PRD’s economy to surpass that of South Korea in the next decade.” He also wanted the region “to reduce its dependence on resource-intensive industries, and increase the number of high-tech manufacturing and service industries.” More recently, in light of the worldwide declining asset values resulting from the 2008 global financial crisis, Beijing has been urging mainland firms, including those in the PRD region, to “go abroad” to invest and compete in overseas markets.

This call for firms’ international expansion, together with the mandate to move the PRD up the value-chain, makes the region an excellent research site to study China’s industrial policy and its impact on local economic and social development. Additionally, because of the changes mentioned above, the PRD also provides a natural quasi-experimental setting for investigating organizational learning and adaption to shifting environmental conditions, particularly those requiring the development of new capabilities for firm survival.

Professor Joseph L. C. Cheng will present preliminary findings from his research on the PRD region, with a focus on the entrepreneurial firms and how they acquire new internationalization knowledge and corporate governance practices to help enhance their competitiveness in the global marketplace. He will also discuss the findings’ implications for designing public policies and corporate programs to facilitate economic reform and enterprise development.