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.

This study proposes a theoretical framework to understand how nations deal with collective memories of perpetration of severe human rights violations, which do not fit comfortably in any national master narrative but have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Building on studies of collective memory, the framework explicates how initial historical conditions of the nation, domestic social movements, and the degree of international pressures move the national discourse along two key dimensions – (a) acceptance of guilt and (b) international orientation of the discourse – which map out seven possible responses to collective trauma of perpetration. Through examination of the history of post-war Japan and content analyses of newspaper editorials and prime ministers’ speeches from 1945 to 2004, the empirical analysis applies the framework to the Japanese case and reveals

1. that arguments for apologies to Asian victims have gained ground due to the intensification of domestic social movements, international pressures from neighboring countries, and global human rights influence; and
   
2. that arguments that evade the ugly past have persisted because of the initial conditions immediately after 1945, overwhelming emphasis on Japanese victims in the first few decades, and recent appropriation of human rights language by proponents of the defensive arguments.

Kiyoteru Tsutsui is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan. His research interests lie in political/comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, human rights, and Japanese society. He has conducted cross-national statistical analyses on how human rights ideas and instruments have expanded globally and impacted local politics and qualitative case studies of the impact of global human rights on Japanese politics. His current projects examine (a) the evolution of transnational social movement organizations, (b) global expansion of corporate social responsibility, (c) changing conceptions of nationhood and minority rights in national constitutions, (d) dynamics of political identities in contemporary Europe, (e) global human rights and three ethnic minority social movements in Japan, and (f) changing discourse around the Asia-Pacific War in Japan.

What is the role of apologies in international reconciliation? Jennifer Lind finds that while denying or glorifying past violence is indeed inimical to reconciliation, apologies that prove to be domestically polarizing may be diplomatically counterproductive.  Moreover, apologies were not necessary in many cases of successful reconciliation.  What then is the relationship between historical memory and international reconciliation?

Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government, Dartmouth College. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master's in Pacific International Affairs from the University of California, San Diego, and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Lind is the author of Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics, a book that examines the effect of war memory on international reconciliation (Cornell University Press, 2008). She has also authored scholarly articles in International Security and Security Studies, and has written for wider audiences within the Atlantic and Foreign Policy. Professor Lind has worked as a consultant for RAND and for the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Defense, and has lived and worked in Japan. Her current research interests include the resilience of the North Korean regime, planning for U.S. military missions in the event of North Korean collapse, energy competition and its security implications for East Asia, and democratization and stability in East Asia.

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).

The U.S. financial crisis has spread around the globe. Financial globalization means that most countries and regions are not immune to the contagious effects of a financial crisis that originates in one country.

East Asian countries had already experienced the contagious effects of a financial crisis in 1997. That year, a financial crisis that broke out in Thailand and Indonesia reached Malaysia and then South Korea. Each of these countries reacted differently to the crisis. South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand accepted International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities that required neoliberal economic restructuring in return for emergency loans, while Malaysia rejected the IMF offer and instead encouraged the inflow of speculative financial capital, while reforming the banking and financial system. In the aftermath of the East Asian financial crisis, regional economic, financial and security cooperation were discussed among East Asian countries. These efforts resulted in the Chiang Mai Initiative, the Bond Initiative, the East Asian Summit, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Six Party Talks.

Thus, regionalism in East Asia was revived in response to external shocks, such as global financial volatility, endogenous opportunities such as East Asian market compatibility (Pempel, 2008), endogenous security threats such as the North Korean nuclear development, and exogenous opportunities such as "bringing in the U.S." (Pempel, 2008).

Nonetheless, East Asian regionalism is still at a low level of institutionalization compared to Europe. East Asian regionalism is still basically "bottom-up, corporate (market)-driven regionalism" (Pempel, 2005). 

I will discuss the obstacles and the opportunities that Northeast Asian countries are facing since the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization.

Hyug Baeg Im is Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea. He is Dean at the Graduate School of Policy Studies and Director at Institute for Peace Studies. He received B.A. in political science from Seoul National University, M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He was visiting professor at Georgetown University (1995-1996), Duke University (1997), Stanford University (2002-2003) and visiting fellow at International Forum for Democratic Studies, National Endowment for Democracy, Washington DC (1995-1996). He served as a presidential adviser of both Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun presidency. His current research focuses on the impact of IT revolution and globalization on Korean democracy. His publications include “The Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in South Korea,” World Politics, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1987), “South Korean Democratic Consolidation in Comparative Perspective” in Consolidating Democracy in South Korea (Lynne Rienner, 2000) and “’Crony Capitalism’ in South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan: Myth and Reality,” (co-authored with Kim, Byung Kook) Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2001), “Faltering Democratic Consolidation in South Korea: Democracy at the End of Three Kims Era” Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 5(2004), “Christian Churches and Democratization in South Korea” in Tun-jen Cheng and Deborah A. Brown (eds.), Religious Organizations and Democratization: Comparative Case Studies in Contemporary Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006) and “The US Role in Korean Democracy and Security since Cold War Era,” International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Vol. 6, No.2 (2006).

This talk is an overview of the changing role of foreign investment in Chinese workplaces. Foreign investment inflows helped transform the Chinese industrial landscape in the 1990s. As ownership has become blurred and increasingly mixed between domestic-foreign and public-private in China, preferential policies and laws for foreign-invested firms have diminished. A more level playing field has raised the stakes for foreign business and led to their increased participation in national debates on labor legislation and legal protections for workers. This talk will focus on this new role for foreign investors and how it is changing Chinese laws and the Chinese workplace.

Professor Gallagher studies Chinese politics, law and society, and comparative politics. She is currently working on two projects. The first, funded by a Fulbright Research Award and the National Science Foundation, examines the development of rule of law in China by examining the dynamics of legal mobilization of Chinese workers. "The Rule of Law in China: If They Build It, Who Will Come?" focuses on the demand-side of rule of law through an exploration of legal aid plaintiffs in Shanghai, a four-city household survey on legal knowledge, attitude, and practice, and in-depth case analysis of labor disputes. The second project examines labor standards and practices in four Chinese regions. One goal is to find if there are diffusion effects in legislation, court behavior, and labor practices across different regions. Another goal is to look for evidence of a "race to the bottom" in labor standards and social welfare not between China and other competing economies, but within China's own domestic economy.

This talk is part of the Stanford China Program Winter 2009 China Seminar Series titled "30 Years of Reform and Opening in China: How Far from the Cage?"