Part I: Asia in the World Series

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the world economy has gone through a set of stages, or cycles, each defined by its leading centers, its major technologies, and its most critical political conflicts. While technologies have progressed immensely some of the same patterns have been repeated. Though most economists do not seem to believe that there have been long term more or less regular cycles, thinking in terms of repetitive and therefore somewhat predictable and explainable changes can help us better model the past and get some sense of possible futures. Until now the dominant economies have all been Western. Will this continue? Why has Asia lagged, and are contemporary developments going to fundamentally change the nature and causes of success in the world economy?

Dan Chirot has authored books about social change, ethnic and nationalist conflicts, Eastern Europe, and tyranny. He co-authored Why Not Kill Them All? (Princeton Univeristy Press), about political mass murder and most recently he wrote a completely new, very revised edition of his book How Societies Change (Sage Publications).  He has edited or co-edited books on Leninism’s decline, entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, ethnopolitical warfare, the economic history of Eastern Europe, and memories of World War II.  He founded the journal East European Politics and Societies and has received help from, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations and from the US State Department. He has consulted for the US Government, the Ford Foundation, CARE, and other NGOs. In 2004/05 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace working on African conflicts. He earned his BA from Harvard and his PhD from Columbia.

Co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for International Development

Under what conditions is decentralization most likely to foster development and reduce poverty?  Plausible answers include:  a sufficiently committed central government; local checks against corruption; and sufficiently resourced actors able to deliver public services effectively. Indonesia is a good place to explore the explanatory power of these and other propositions, thanks to the country’s diverse local conditions and the rapid and sweeping (“Big Bang”) decentralization that it underwent in the late 1990s.  In his disaggregation of the Indonesian case since then, Dr. Sumarto will examine whether, how, and why poverty alleviation has been helped or hurt by particular economic, social, and political variations in the context and character of local governments across the archipelago.

Sudarno Sumarto was an Asia Foundation Visiting Fellow at APARC in 2009-2010.  In 2001-2009 he was the director of SMERU, a highly regarded independent institute for research and public policy studies in Jakarta.  He has served as a consulting economist for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, among other organizations, and has taught in Indonesia’s leading universities. His latest publication is Explaining Regional Heterogeneity of Poverty:  Evidence from Decentralized Indonesia (co-authored, 2013).  Earlier titles include more than sixty co-authored books, working papers, articles, chapters, and reports on topics such as poverty, decentralization, employment, vulnerability, and economic growth.  His degrees in economics include a PhD and an MA from Vanderbilt University and a BSc from Satya Wacana Christian University (Salatiga).

Lunch will be served.

China and Japan have entered a dangerous standoff in the East China Sea. As China launched a series of unprecedented maritime patrols, anti-Japan protests erupted in more than 200 Chinese cities to condemn Japan's nationalization of the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. What missed signals and domestic political pressures led to this crisis? Why did Chinese authorities tolerate widespread anti-Japanese protests in 2012 after restraining protests in earlier crises, including the 2010 dispute over a Chinese fishing captain's arrest? Drawing on material from her forthcoming book, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China's Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, Summer 2014), Professor Jessica Chen Weiss will trace China's management of anti-Japan protest from 1985 to 2012, discussing the role of nationalism and public opinion in Chinese foreign policy.

Jessica Chen Weiss is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University and Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Her research interests include Chinese politics and international relations, nationalism, and social protest. Her book, Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China's Foreign Relations, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press (Summer 2014). The dissertation on which it is based won the 2009 American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Reid Award for best dissertation in
international relations, law and politics. Her research has appeared in International Organization and has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Princeton-Harvard China  & The World Program, Bradley Foundation, Fulbright-Hays program, and the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Before joining the Yale faculty, she founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford, while an undergraduate at Stanford (B.A., 2003). She teaches courses on Chinese foreign relations, state-society relations in post-Mao China, and anti-Americanism in world politics.

Maritime security has become an increasingly salient point of friction in China-Japan relations. The focus has been small islands called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese, islands that both countries claim but Japan controls. Besides the territorial claims, many issues are at play:  historical memory, geo-strategy, the quest for natural resources, domestic nationalisms, the capacity of governments to manage crises, and Tokyo’s and Beijing’s relationship with the United States. Richard Bush, author of The Perils of Proximity: China-Japan Security Relations will address the two countries growing rivalry in the maritime domain and the implications for the United States.

Richard C. Bush III is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies, and holder of the Chen-Fu and Cecilia Yen Koo Chair in Taiwan Studies.

Bush came to Brookings in July 2002, after serving almost five years as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the mechanism through which the United States Government conducts substantive relations with Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic relations.

Bush began his professional career in 1977 with the China Council of The Asia Society. From July 1983 to June 1995, we worked on the staff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, first on the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs (chair, Steve Solarz), and then the full committee (chair, Lee Hamilton). In July 1995, he became National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and a member of the National Intelligence Council, which coordinates the analytic work of the intelligence committee. He left the NIC in September 1997 to become head of AIT.

Bush received his undergraduate education at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He did his graduate work in political science at Columbia University, getting an M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He is the author of a number of articles on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan, and of At Cross Purposes, a book of essays on the history of America’s relations with Taiwan (M. E. Sharpe, 2004). In July 2005, Brookings published Untying the Knot: Making Peace in the Taiwan Strait. In March 2007, through Wylie Publishers, Richard Bush and his Brookings colleague Michael O’Hanlon released A War Like No Other: The Truth About China’s Challenge to America. In 2010, Brookings published his Perils of Proximity: China-Japan Security Relations, which focused on growing tensions in the East China Sea. In January 2013, Brookings published his Uncharted Strait: The Future of China-Taiwan Relations

In the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of colonial violence, the Japanese annexation of Korea, and World War I, religious and secular groups in East Asia voiced support for a new ethos of humanitarian internationalism.  This presentation examines the confluences between millenarian "new religions" such as Chŏndogyo (Korea), Ōmotokyō (Japan), and Daoyuan (China), Bahá'ís, Esperantists and other groups espousing world peace, gender and social equality, and religious unity.  Under the scrutiny of the Japanese imperial state, these communities presented teachings that were inimical to colonial hierarchies, but they had to do so without resort to the standard means and methods of social, economic, and political reform, such as protests, provocative civil disobedience, lobbying, electioneering, coercion, and either the threat or actual use of political violence.

This talk is presented by the Greater China Business Club (GCBC) of Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford (ACSSS). 

In July 2013, a Ted Talk “A tale of two political systems” was posted, and was instantly viewed millions of times around the world. In the talk, Mr. Eric X. Li, a venture capitalist and a political scientist argued that the universality claim of Western democratic systems was going to be "morally challenged" by China.  

Do you agree? What do you think? Now you have the opportunity to discuss with Mr. Li face to face!

On Nov.6, Mr. Li will come to Stanford and talk with Professor Thomas Fingar on China’s Political System, its status, development, competitiveness and so on. Watch the Ted Talk and come to the event. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Eric X. Li is a political scientist and an active participant in the intellectual discourses on the re-emergence of China as a great power and its impact on the world.  His writings on comparative political governance and international relations have been widely published in leading publications such as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, and Huffington Post.  His most recent publications, The Life of the Party (Foreign Affairs, January/February, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138476/eric-x-li/the-life-of-the-party), Warring States (http://www.theasanforum.org/warring-states-the-coming-new-world-disorder/) and his talk at TED Global 2013 (http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems.html), have generated active debates around the globe.

Mr. Li is a native of Shanghai.  He received his B.A. in Economics from University of California, Berkeley, M.B.A. from Stanford Business School, and PhD from Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs.

Thomas Fingar is the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford during January to December 2009. 

From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2004–2005), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001–2003), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994–2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989–1994), and chief of the China Division (1986–1989). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Fingar is a graduate of Cornell University (AB in government and history, 1968), and Stanford University (MA, 1969 and PhD, 1977 both in political science). His most recent book is Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford University Press, 2011).

Vietnamese news accounts of labor-management conflicts, including strikes, and even reports of owners fleeing their factories raise potent questions about labor activism in light of this self-proclaimed socialist country’s engagement in the global market system since the late 1980s. In explaining Vietnamese labor resistance, how important are matters of cultural identity (such as native-place, gender, ethnicity, and religion) in different historical contexts? How does labor mobilization occur and develop? How does it foster “class moments” in times of crisis? What types of "flexible protests" have been used by workers to fight for their rights and dignity, and how effective are they?

Based on her just-published book, Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam's Labor Resistance, Prof. Trần will highlight labor activism since French colonial rule in order to understand labor issues and actions in Vietnam today. Her analysis will focus on labor-management-state relations, especially with key foreign investors/managers (such as from Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) and ethnic Chinese born and raised in Vietnam. She will convey the voices and ideas of workers, organizers, journalists, and officials and explain how migrant workers seek to empower themselves using cultural resources and appeals to state media and the rule of law. Copies of her book will be available for sale at her talk.

Prof. Trần's current research on global south-south labor migration focuses on Vietnamese migrants working in Malaysia and returning to Vietnam. In 2008 she was a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia. Her co-authored 2012 book, Corporate Social Responsibility and Competitiveness for SMEs in Developing Countries: South Africa and Vietnam, compared the experiences of small-and-medium enterprises in these two countries. Her many other writings include (as co-editor and author) Reaching for the Dream: Challenges of Sustainable Development in Vietnam (2004). She earned her PhD in Political Economy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California in 1996 and an MA in Developmental Economics at USC in 1991.

Copies of Ties that Bind: Cultural Identity, Class, and Law in Vietnam's Labor Resistance will be available for signing and sale by the author following her talk.