Stanford University

Continuity and Change in Southeast Asia: 2009 Shorenstein Journalism Award:

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The Shorenstein Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. It is awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

This year’s recipient is Seth Mydans. Seth Mydans covers Southeast Asia for The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune from his base in Bangkok, Thailand. Since taking up the post in 1996 he has covered the fall of Suharto and rise of democracy in Indonesia; the death of Pol Pot, the demise of the Khmer Rouge and the trauma and slow rebirth of Cambodia; repeated attempts at People Power in the Philippines; the idiosyncracies of Singapore and Malaysia; the long-running political crisis in Thailand and the seemingly endless troubles of Myanmar.

In the 1980s he covered the fall of Marcos and struggles of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines and was in Burma for the massacres that led to the emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi and the current junta.
        
He worked for a construction company in Vietnam during the war after graduating from Harvard, and has followed the Vietnam story since then, through the exodus of refugees, to their resettlement in the United States, to the shaping of a new post-war Vietnam.

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Seth Mydans Southeast Asia Correspondent Speaker The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune
Seminars
Shorenstein Journalism Award

Is Asia Still Rising? Repercussions Of Recession

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Asia’s economies have been hard hit by the current global financial crisis, despite in most cases enjoying strong macroeconomic fundamentals and stable financial systems.  Early hopes were that the region might be “decoupled” from the Western world’s financial woes and even able to lend the West a hand through high growth and the investment of large foreign exchange reserves.  But that optimism has been dashed by slumping exports, plunging commodity prices, and capital outflows.  The region’s most open, advanced and globally-integrated economies—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan—are already in severe recession, with Japan, Korea and Malaysia not far behind, and dramatic slowdowns are underway in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.  What role did Asian countries play in the genesis of the global crisis, and why have they been so severely impacted?  How is their recovery likely to be shaped by market developments and institutional changes in the West, and in Asia itself in response to the crisis?  Will the region’s embrace of accelerated globalization and marketization following the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis now be retarded or reversed?

Linda Lim is a leading authority on Asian economies, Asian business, and the impacts of the current global financial crisis on Asia, and she has published widely on these topics. Her current research is on the ASEAN countries’ growing economic linkages with China.

Forthcoming in 2009 are Globalizing State, Disappearing Nation: The Impact of Foreign Participation in the Singapore Economy (with Lee Soo Ann) and Rethinking Singapore’s Economic Growth Model. She serves on the executive committees of the Center for Chinese Studies and the Center for International Business Education at the University of Michigan, where formerly she headed the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Before coming to Michigan, she taught economic development and political economy at Swarthmore. A native of Singapore, she obtained her degrees in economics from Cambridge (BA), Yale (MA), and Michigan (PhD).

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Linda Yuen-Ching Lim Professor of Strategy, Stephen M. Ross School of Business Speaker University of Michigan
Lectures

Mobilized Workers vs. Morphing Capital: Challenging Global Supply Chains in Vietnam

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Capital in its many facets is variable.  Like quicksilver, it can divide, reunite, and metamorphose seamlessly across a spectrum of ownerships by foreigners, the state, and domestic private
entrepreneurs.  

What does variable capital mean in and for Vietnam?  Who are the different investors?  How do they respond to state efforts to attract investments from overseas Vietnamese?  How do global supply chains—corporate buyers, contract factories, and subcontractors—shape the changing nature and impacts of capital in Vietnam?  How does a self-described socialist state use policies on investment, employment, and the privatization of state-owned factories to control the relations between workers and owners?  What roles in this mix are played by journalists who can ignore neither the party line nor the workers who protest in spite of it?  

In addition to addressing these questions, Prof. Tran will argue that workers in Vietnam are not resigned to being squeezed between morphing capital and state control.  They defend their interests flexibly in diverse forms of protest, overt and covert, including appeals to the state’s own socialist vision.  Fresh from extensive fieldwork in labor-intensive industries such as textiles, garments, and footwear, Prof. Tran will show how Vietnamese workers use origin, class, gender, and ethnicity to mobilize collective action against morphing capital in a one-party state.

Angie Ngoc Tran is a professor of political economy at California State University, Monterey Bay.  Her latest publications include articles in the Labor Studies Journal (2007) on labor media and labor-management-state relations in Vietnam.  Her PhD is from the University of Southern California (1996).

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Angie Ngoc Trần

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

(831) 582-3753 (650) 723-6530
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Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia
Angie_BioPhoto_Adjusted.jpg MA, PhD

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB).  Her plan as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow is to complete a book manuscript on labor-capital relations in Vietnam that highlights how different identities of investors and owners—shaped by government policies, ethnicity, characteristics of investment, and the role they played in global flexible production—affect workers’ conditions, consciousness, and collective action differently.

Tran spent May-July 2008 at Stanford and will return to campus for the second half of November 2008.  She will share the results of her project in a public seminar at Stanford under SEAF auspices on November 17 2008.

Prof. Trần’s many publications include “Contesting ‘Flexibility’:  Networks of Place, Gender, and Class in Vietnamese Workers’ Resistance,” in Taking Southeast Asia to Market (2008); “Alternatives to ‘Race to the Bottom’ in Vietnam:  Minimum Wage Strikes and Their Aftermath,” Labor Studies Journal (December 2007); “The Third Sleeve: Emerging Labor Newspapers and the Response of Labor Unions and the State to Workers’ Resistance in Vietnam,” Labor Studies Journal (September 2007); and (as co-editor and author) Reaching for the Dream:  Challenges of Sustainable Development in Vietnam (2004).  She received her Ph.D. in Political Economy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California in 1996 and an M.A. in Developmental Economics at USC in 1991.

Angie Ngoc Tran 2008 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow Speaker
Lectures
Worker Identities and the Origins of Capital in Vietnam

Private Providers and Public-Private Partnerships in Health: Asia in Comparative Perspective

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Dr. Forsberg will present findings from studies in China and Vietnam and put those findings into a broader comparative perspective regarding the future role of the private sector in improving health service delivery and population health.

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Birger Carl Forsberg is a public health specialist and lecturer in International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden from where he holds an MD and a PhD. He is also trained in economics and has health economics as one of his areas of work. Dr Forsberg has more than 20 years experience from international health from around 25 low- and middle-income countries as an adviser to bilateral donors and international organisations. Since 2002 he has been a consultant to the World Bank on public private sector collaboration in health. He is also coordinator since 2002 of a joint Harvard-Karolinska research programme called Private Sector Programme in Health (PSP). The programme has coordinated studies of the private health sector in five countries in Asia and Africa. In his talk Dr Forsberg will present findings from PSP studies in China and Vietnam and put those findings into a broader perspective on the future role of the private sector in health service delivery for increased access to health services and improved health.

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Birger Carl Forsberg, MD Private Sector Program in Health Coordinator Speaker Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Seminars

Late Democratization in Pacific Asia

Professor Thompson builds on Barrington Moore's insight that there are different "paths to the modern" world. Thompson's manuscript explores alternatives to the familiar South Korean-and Taiwan-based model of "late democratization." According to that model, political pluralism follows a formative period of economic growth during which labor is demobilized and big business, religious leaders, and professionals depend upon and are co-opted by the state.

Worker Identities and the Origins of Capital in Vietnam

The Vietnamese government legalized strikes in 1995. Since then Vietnamese workers have gone on strike more than 1,500 times. Most of these actions have erupted in factories established by capital investments from South Korea and Taiwan. Far fewer have been reported in factories relying on private investments from other countries or in publicly funded and state-owned enterprises (SOEs). When labor protests do occur in SOEs, they tend to be less confrontational, involving petitions and letters of complaint sent to local labor newspapers and relevant officials.

Southeast Asian Studies at Stanford: A rising profile

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Five visiting scholars with expertise on Southeast Asia will spend varying portions of the academic year 2008-09 in residence at Stanford. Shorenstein APARC and the Southeast Asia Forum will host four of them: three were selected under the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Initiative on Southeast Asia. and one is a recipient of a 2008-09 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. A fifth scholar will be on campus as a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution.

The five are John Ciorciari, Joel S. Kahn, Mark Thompson, Angie Ngoc Tran, and Christian von Luebke.

John Ciorciari spent the 2007-08 academic year at Stanford as a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC. He finished a book that examines how Southeast Asian states have "hedged" their relations with the United States and China.

Dr. Ciorciari will spend upcoming academic year at Stanford as a Hoover Institution National Fellow. In that capacity he plans to expand his research to include the international relations of India.

Joel S. Kahn is a professor of anthropology (emeritus) in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. He will be at Stanford for the first half of October 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Lecturer.

While at Stanford Professor Kahn will give three public lectures. Their tentative titles are: "A Southeast Asian Modernity?"; "Empires, States, and Political Identities in (Pen)insular Southeast Asia"; and "Religion, Reform, Science, and Secularity." Details including dates, times, and venues will be posted as they become known.

Mark Thompson is a professor of political science at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He will be in residence at Stanford in Winter and Spring 2009 as the 2009 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

While at Stanford, Prof. Thompson will pursue a book project on "Late Democratization in Pacific Asia." The book will question the claim that democratization in Pacific Asia (including Southeast Asia) has been driven by economic growth and offer an alternative perspective. He will present the results of his project in a public lecture in the spring of 2009. Date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). She will be in residence at Stanford for the second half of November 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

In a public lecture on November 17, 2008 (Mobilized Workers vs. Morphing Capital: Challenging Global Supply Chains in Vietnam), Professor Tran will present the results of her study of labor-capital relations in Vietnam and how the different national origins of investors and owners affect workers' conditions, consciousness, and activism. Details including time and venue will be posted as they become known.

Christian von Luebke was a research fellow in Tokyo at Waseda University's Institute for Global Political Economy in 2007-08 following receipt of his 2007 PhD in public policy and governance at the Australian National University. He will be at Stanford for the 2008-09 academic year as a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow.

During his residence Dr. von Luebke will pursue a research and writing project on "Good Governance in Transition: Explaining Local Policy Variations in Indonesia, China, and the Philippines." He will give a public lecture on the results of his project in winter or spring 2009. The date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

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Machiavelli for economic reformers?

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In 2007 Shorenstein APARC and The Asia Foundation chose Dennis Arroyo to be the first Shorenstein APARC/Asia Foundation Visiting Fellow.  Arroyo spent the 2007-08 academic year researching and completing a monograph on "The Political Economy of Successful Reform:  Asian Stratagems."  An edited abstract follows:

Major economic reforms are often politically difficult, causing pain to voters and provoking unrest.  They may be opposed by politicians with short time horizons. They may collide with the established ideology and an entrenched ruling party.  They may be resisted by bureaucrats and by vested interests.  Obstacles to major economic reform can be daunting in democratic and autocratic polities alike.
 
And yet, somehow, past leaders of today's Asian dragons did implement vital economic reforms. "The Political Economy of Successful Reform:  Asian Stratagems" recounts the political maneuvers used by Asian leaders of economic reform in these countries at these pivotal times:  Thailand under General Prem Tinsulanonda; Vietnam during Doi Moi (or Renovation); Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew; China under Deng Xiaoping; India in the 1990s; and South Korea under Park Chung Hee.

The paper classifies these maneuvers as responses to the main political barriers to reform and develops a "playbook" of tactics for economic reformers.  To overcome ideological obstacles, for example, the reformers packaged and presented reforms as ways of strengthening the party in power. Reformers proceeded gradually.  Initially they sought win-win compromises. They blessed pro-market violations as pilot projects. They even created new provinces in order to dilute the anti-reform vote.

The full text of Arroyo's monograph has been published by the Stanford Center for International Development in its working paper series.

Arroyo came to Stanford well qualified to study economic reform techniques.  In 2005 he was named director for national planning and policy at the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) of the Philippines.  His duties included building public support for the economic reforms championed by NEDA.  He has consulted for the World Bank, the United Nations, and the survey research firm Social Weather Stations, and has written widely on socioeconomic topics.  His critique of the Philippine development plan won a mass media award for "best analysis."  He has degrees in economics from the University of the Philippines.

In May 2008 Arroyo presented his findings in a SEAF lecture entitled "The Foxy Art of Herding Dragons: How Sly Asian Leaders Pulled off Politically Difficult Economic Reforms."

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Angie Ngoc Trần

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

(831) 582-3753 (650) 723-6530
0
Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia
Angie_BioPhoto_Adjusted.jpg MA, PhD

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB).  Her plan as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow is to complete a book manuscript on labor-capital relations in Vietnam that highlights how different identities of investors and owners—shaped by government policies, ethnicity, characteristics of investment, and the role they played in global flexible production—affect workers’ conditions, consciousness, and collective action differently.

Tran spent May-July 2008 at Stanford and will return to campus for the second half of November 2008.  She will share the results of her project in a public seminar at Stanford under SEAF auspices on November 17 2008.

Prof. Trần’s many publications include “Contesting ‘Flexibility’:  Networks of Place, Gender, and Class in Vietnamese Workers’ Resistance,” in Taking Southeast Asia to Market (2008); “Alternatives to ‘Race to the Bottom’ in Vietnam:  Minimum Wage Strikes and Their Aftermath,” Labor Studies Journal (December 2007); “The Third Sleeve: Emerging Labor Newspapers and the Response of Labor Unions and the State to Workers’ Resistance in Vietnam,” Labor Studies Journal (September 2007); and (as co-editor and author) Reaching for the Dream:  Challenges of Sustainable Development in Vietnam (2004).  She received her Ph.D. in Political Economy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California in 1996 and an M.A. in Developmental Economics at USC in 1991.

ASEAN's ''Black Swans''

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It was meant to be a celebration not a showdown, let alone a showdown that the brutal junta in Burma (Myanmar) would win. In August 2007, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) turned forty. On November 20, to mark the occasion, the heads of government of the association's ten member states-Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam-met in Singapore for the thirteenth ASEAN Summit. A day later the heads of government from Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea joined them for the third East Asia Summit (EAS).

The summitry had three purposes. The first was to commemorate ASEAN's first forty years. From only five members at its inception in 1967, the association had by 1999 grown to encompass all of Southeast Asia's formerly quarrelsome states. For the first time in the region's history, a single indigenous organization could claim to stand for all of Southeast Asia-albeit only by overlooking just how variously accountable ASEAN's diverse regimes were to the peoples whom they presumed to represent.

But ASEAN was not content to rest on these laurels. The second reason for the summitry in Singapore was to prepare the organization for the future. The ASEAN summit's peak event was to be the unveilingand signing of a first-ever charter for the organization.

Finally, the packed schedule in Singapore was meant to project the best possible image of ASEAN to the assembled foreign guests and the wider world. By inaugurating a charter meant to enhance the association’s effectiveness, the organizers of the celebrations hoped to belie Western criticism that ASEAN was little more than a “talking shop.” They also hoped that showcasing the charter would distract attention from the presence in Singapore of ASEAN’s most widely castigated member, Burma, and thereby gain some relief from Western charges of guilt by association with that pariah state.

It was not to be. The summit was convened and the charter was signed. Plans to implement the ASEAN Economic Community were announced. But the Burmese junta stole the spotlight from these accomplishments in a way that tainted the anniversary, embarrassed the association in front of its foreign guests, and reminded analysts just how tenuously regionalism is related to democracy in Southeast Asia.

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Publication Type
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Journal of Democracy
Authors
Donald K. Emmerson
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