In popular discourse, variations on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis have cited cultural differences to explain conflicts ranging from Hindu-Muslim violence in India to the Rwandan genocide. Few scholars take these accounts seriously. Culture differences are multiple and ubiquitous. Were they sufficient causes of conflict, the world would have undergone far more inter-group violence than has in fact occurred. Social scientists have instead focused on a far wider range of reasons, including skewed distributions of material resources and the political mobilization of group identities by rival elites.

Yet those who are involved in or affected by such conflicts often describe or explain them in cultural terms, and this affects how the conflicts evolve. The empirical divisions expressed by a supposedly “ethnic” conflict can also change, as can the material issues involved, such that whatever first led to the conflict may no longer be relevant. In this process, global and local fears and narratives can intersect. Drawing on quantitative evidence and case studies from Southeast Asia, Graham K. Brown will explore how and why these shifts occur.

Graham K. Brown directs the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bath. He has held research positions with Oxford University, and with the Consumers Association of Penang, Malaysia. His many publications include a chapter on Malaysia in The Political Function of Education in Deeply Divided Societies (2011). His current work focuses on the interactions between inequality, identity, and security, with particular reference to Southeast Asia.

In spring 2009, China’s leadership announced ambitious national health reforms. Have the five stated goals of the first three years of reform been met? What policies will China pursue in the next phase? As a prominent advisor to China's State Council Health Reform Office, Liu will discuss progress and prospects for reforms—especially the role of the private sector within the health system—within the context of China’s 2012 leadership transition.

Gordon Liu is a professor of economics at Peking University's (PKU) Guanghua School of Management, and director of PKU's China Center for Health Economic Research. Previously, he served as a tenured associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2000–2006), and as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California (1994–2000).

Liu's primary research interests include health and development economics, health policy and reform, and pharmaceutical economics. His current research is funded by the State Council Health Reform Office, the National Science Foundation, UNICEF, and the China Medical Board.

Liu currently serves on the State Council Health Reform Advisory Commission, and the Expert Panel for the State Ministry of Human Resource and Social Security. He serves as co-editor for the journal Value in Health, and as editor-in-chief for China Journal of Pharmaceutical Economics. He sits on the editorial boards for the European Health Economic Review, Global Handbook for Health Economics, and Chinese Journal of Health Economics.

He received his PhD in Economics from the City University of New York Graduate School while working as a graduate research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research under the supervision of Michael Grossman (1986–1991). He obtained post-doctoral training at Harvard University with William Hsiao (1992–1993). Liu has served as the president for the Chinese Economists Society, and chair for the Asian Consortium for the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research.

The fall of Bo Xilai is the most serious political crisis in China since Tiananmen in 1989. The leadership succession process was nearly derailed and a deep rift has opened up at the top of the Communist Party. While many critical details of this power struggle remain unknown, the effects of this incident are certain to be far-reaching. Many key questions have been raised, including: How will the fall of Bo affect the new leadership line-up and its policies? How will the rift affect the party's ability to maintain control over a society showing growing signs of defiance and tensions? What does the incident tell us about the systemic corruption at the core of the party's leadership? Professor Minxin Pei will address these and other issues during this timely seminar.

About the Speaker

Minxin Pei joined Claremont McKenna College in 2009. Prior to that he was a senior associate and the director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC.

Pei's research focuses on democratization in developing countries, economic reform and governance in China, and U.S.-China relations. He is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994) and China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 2006). Pei’s research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and many edited books.

He is a frequent commentator for BBC World News, Voice of America, and National Public Radio; his op-eds have appeared in the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek International, the International Herald Tribune, and other major newspapers.

Pei received his PhD in political science from Harvard University. He was on the faculty at Princeton University from 1992 to 1998, and he has received numerous prestigious fellowships, including the National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the McNamara Fellowship at the World Bank, and the Olin Faculty Fellowship of the Olin Foundation.

So much has been written and said about the Obama administration’s “pivot” toward Asia that one might think diplomacy has become ballet. More than three years have passed since February 2009 when Hillary Clinton broke a 48-year-old precedent at the State Department by choosing Asia as the destination for her first trip abroad as secretary of state. “As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan,” she wrote in November in Foreign Affairs, “the United States stands at a pivot point.” A skeptic might have stressed the negative: a pivot away from failure in the Middle East. She preferred the positive: a pivot towards greater “investment—diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise—in the Asia-Pacific region,” itself the designated pivot of “America’s Pacific century.” 

How much of this pivot talk is hype, and how much is real? How have Asians responded to this apparent turn toward them? What global and regional scenarios and strategies could it imply? Will future historians remember the pivot as the start of a Sino-American cold war, or the requisite of a realistic entente? Does the pivot illustrate renewed American leadership in foreign affairs, or belated American acquiescence in a multi-polar world? Is Washington being implicated in conflict over the South China Sea? Even if Obama is re-elected this November, will Clinton’s replacement continue to pivot? Or is it time for the pivot’s critics to do some pivoting of their own—to stop worrying about the downside, start acknowledging the upside, and help make the ballet a constructive performance for all concerned?

Donald K. Emmerson has discussed the pivot recently with analysts in Asia, Canada, and the United States. “America Pivots toward ASEAN” and “US, China Role Play for ASEAN,” datelined November 2011 in Asia Times Online, reflect his impressions of the East Asia Summit that President Obama and Secretary Clinton attended that month in Bali. Forthcoming work includes an essay on Southeast Asia in the Journal of Democracy and a chapter in Indonesia Rising: The Repositioning of Asia’s Third Giant.