On 11/29/18 a group of leading experts on China and American foreign policy released “Chinese Influence and American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance,” a report documenting Chinese efforts to influence American society. The report examines China's efforts to influence American institutions, including state and local governments, universities, think tanks, media, corporations, and the Chinese-American community, and differentiates between legitimate efforts--like public diplomacy--and improper interference, which demands greater awareness and a calibrated response.

In this special roundtable, two of the report’s co-editors, Orville Schell and Larry Diamond, and a Taiwanese scholar, Ji-Jen Hwang, will discuss the findings of the report and compare the forms and effects of Chinese “sharp power” in the United States with its practice in and toward Taiwan.

This event is co-sponsored by the US-Asia Security Initiative in the Asia-Pacific Research Center, and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.  

Orville Schell

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Schell was born in New York City, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and earned a Ph.D. (Abd) at University of California, Berkeley in Chinese History. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.

Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are: Wealth and Power, China’s long March to the 21st Century; Virtual Tibet; The China Reader: The Reform Years; and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

He is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schell is also the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism.

Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, where he now leads its Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and its Global Digital Policy Incubator. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His research focuses on democratic trends and conditions around in the world, and on policies and reforms to defend and advance democracy.  His 2016 book, In Search of Democracy, explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his writing and research, particularly on Africa and Asia.  He has just completed a new book on the global crisis of democracy, which will be published in 2019, and is now writing a textbook on democratic development.

Ji-Jen Hwang

Dr. Ji-Jen Hwang is a Research Scholar in the Institute for East Asian Studies (IEAS) at UC Berkeley. Before that, he was a Professor & Program Director of the International Master Program in Strategic Studies at the National Defense University in the Republic of China (Taiwan). In 2014-15, Dr. Hwang was a visiting fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) located in Washington D.C. He also completed an internship at the United States Library of Congress while doing his Master’s coursework. A native of Taiwan, he holds a Ph.D. in politics from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the U.K., as well as a Masters in Library Science & Information Studies from the University of North Carolina. He has been working for a non-profit Think Tank based in Washington D.C. area as a Deputy Managing Director since April 2018. His current research is focused on relations between the United States, China, and Taiwan, in which he particularly aims to study how social media and the features in cyberspace have political impacts on these relations. He is well-known known as an expert in this area and been invited as a special lecturer to think tanks such as CSIS in Washington D.C., ASPI in Canberra, NATO, GlobalSec in Europe, and INSS in Seoul.

Four member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have made territorial claims in the South China Sea that conflict with China’s professed entitlement to all of the “islands and the adjacent waters.” Because the “ASEAN Way” is to make decisions by consensus, each member state can, in effect, veto what the group might otherwise decide. Prof. O’Neill will explore how China has used its financial power to divide ASEAN’s members in order to prevent them from acting collectively to resolve their territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. He will compare China’s relations with Cambodia, the Philippines, and Myanmar in order to highlight the key role that a recipient country’s type of regime plays in enhancing or constraining Beijing’s ability to use aid, loans, and investments to influence the policies and politics of developing states. He will argue that authoritarian institutions facilitate Chinese influence while democratic institutions inhibit it.

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Singapore’s government is widely seen as competent, honest, and meritocratic—an exceptional case of post-colonial governance.  Nor can any elected incumbent party anywhere match Singapore’s People’s Action Party’s 59-year record of uninterrupted rule.  But recent events have cast doubt on the PAP government’s reputation for performance and stability.  Despite acknowledging its need for new leaders, the government has been unable to select a clear successor to the current prime minister, even as his talented and popular deputy is sidelined, apparently due to his ethnic-minority background.  When the government tried to ascertain public opinion on legislation against “deliberate online falsehoods,” the exercise descended into name-calling and threats against witnesses.  Resentments have meanwhile risen over socioeconomic inequality and the mismanagement of public transport, housing, and health care.

How did this happen? In his talk, Dr. Thum will explore the historical forces that have shaped Singapore's politics and governance; explain the political economy of decision-making there; and recount his own experience with the turmoil affecting the country's government.  He will argue that Singapore's post-colonial independence and governance are an evolution of—not from—British colonial rule.  The government is responsive and accountable to international capital.  But the PAP needs the approval of voting citizens to legitimize its continuation in power. The party’s leaders embody this dilemma in their struggles to reconcile two such different and competing sets of interests.

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In Malaysia, criminality is a highly political question, and that is mainly why local scholarship on the topic is rare. Yet political participation by outlaws and criminalized groups is not new. Begun in 2008, Dr. Lemière’s research explores uncharted territory: how criminality related to politics in semi-authoritarian Malaysia, with a focus on the ruling party (UMNO) from 2008 to 2018.  She shows how gangs have created umbrella (Malay) NGOs, like Pekida (shown here in caricature), to formalize their ties to political parties. For gangs, political militancy has become a business; political parties (mostly UMNO) have sub-contracted political actions and violence to such groups. Dr. Lemière’s research raises question regarding the nature of civil society and democratization, and offers a new perspective of ethno-religious controversies and clashes in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Sophie Lemière is a political anthropologist at Harvard’s Ash Center for Democracy in its program on Democracy in Hard Places. Her research examines the nexus between religion, politics, and criminality in a comparative perspective. She will be at Stanford in the fall before transferring to the National University of Singapore in the spring.

Dr. Lemière has held research positions in Singapore at the Asia Research Institute (NUS) and the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (NTU).  She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, Cornell, UC Berkeley, and Columbia. She received her PhD from Sciences-Po in Paris. Her dissertation was the first study on the political links between gangs and umbrella NGOs in Malaysia.  Her master’s research on apostasy controversies and Islamic civil society was awarded second prize for young scholars by the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (1998-2008) in Leiden.

Dr. Lemière believes it is essential for academics to disseminate their research findings widely, especially in the countries they study. Accordingly, her publications have been written both general and academic readers within and beyond Malaysia. She is the editor of a series of books on “Malaysian Politics and People.” Misplaced Democracy was released in 2014.  Illusions of Democracy (2017) will be re-published in 2018, and a third volume is expected in 2019, when her monograph “Gangsters and Masters: Complicit Militancy and Authoritarian Politics” will also appear. She is currently working on a political biography of Malaysia’s current prime minister during his recent campaign: “The Last Game: Malaysian Politics through Mahathir’s Eyes.”

Dr. Lemière maintains a blog on Mediapart and contributes regularly to New Mandala, The Conversation, Le Monde, and Libération among other outlets.  She has also begun to develop several documentary film projects with French production companies, including a series on arts and politics. Her first film “9/43” featuring the Malaysian cartoonist Zunar was chosen one of the 25 best movies at the French short-film festival Infracourt in 2016.