Despite adverse implications for its image, when it comes to territorial disputes, China has been willing to employ coercion. But Beijing is selective regarding the timing, targets, and tools of coercion. Military coercion is rare and the forms and uses of coercion vary. In the face of what China sees as similar threats by different countries, for example, Beijing tends to tailor its responses, country by country, case by case. Dr. Zhang will focus on Chinese coercive behavior in the South China Sea. She will offer a new theory as to when, why, and how China coerces other states.  Leveraging a wealth of newly available primary documents and hundreds of hours of interviews with Chinese officials, she will trace the decision-making processes that result in coercion’s use or non-use.

Where others may view China as repetitively aggressive, Dr. Zhang sees a cautious bully that does not coerce frequently and has tended, as it has gained strength, to use non-kinetic kinds of coercion. She finds that protecting a reputation for resolve and calculating economic costs are critical elements in China’s decision-making regarding the (dis)advantages of coercing its neighbors. Nor is the intended target country necessarily clear. China often coerces one to deter another – “killing the chicken to scare the monkey.” Implications will also drawn from her research that can help in projecting China’s likely future foreign-policy behavior beyond Southeast Asia and in understanding the roles played by coercion in the strategies of states more generally.

To learn more about, watch a recent interview APARC filmed with Dr. Zhang.

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The event is jointly sponsored by the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

In this talk, David Leheny (Waseda University) discusses his new book Empire of Hope (Cornell University Press, 2018), which challenges current trends in debates about emotion and politics, arguing that we should instead look at the role of narrative in shaping emotional representation. In the book, Leheny draws from debates about status in international relations theory and from debates about affect and narrative in literary and historical studies to analyze cases from Japan’s Bubble and post-Bubble eras. This talk will focus especially on a 2001 crisis in US-Japan relations over a collision between a US Navy nuclear submarine and a fisheries training boat that resulted in the deaths of nine Japanese, including four high-school students. By presenting grief as both a national emotion and as one that could be narrated through the lens of timeless cultural difference, the US and Japanese governments crafted a crisis resolution that ostensibly rested on “mutual understanding” but that also hid the messier realities of power and of loss in the collision’s aftermath.

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Hiroaki Yasutake has had a front row seat in the development of Japan’s startup ecosystem for the past 20 years as he joined Rakuten as one of its earliest employees, spending many years at its CTO. In this talk, he will share various insights gained from being an integral part of the rise of Rakuten as it grew rapidly by introducing new services, buying much larger and established companies, and the process by which it made itself a reputable, established company in Japan. He also experienced Rakuten’s famed “English-nization” and the company’s aggressive global push. More broadly, many of his friends, associates and acquaintances fanned out to drive the growth of Japan’s startup ecosystem, which has transformed dramatically in the past two decades, and he will share many of their experiences, along with challenges facing Japan’s stage of the startup ecosystem. Yasutake also co-founded Junify, and he will introduce the business itself, his motivations for moving to Silicon Valley, and his observations of specific efforts by Japanese entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. 

SPEAKER:

Hiroaki Yasutake, Co-founder and CSO, Junify, and former CTO, Rakuten

BIO:

Hiroaki Yasutake joined Rakuten (founded 1997) in its infancy in 1998 as an engineer after briefly working at NTT. At Rakuten, he was in charge of creating various services and served as CTO before departing in 2016. He moved to Silicon Valley and co-founded a new startup, Junify, and currently also assists various large and small Japanese companies about their technology and innovation strategies as external board member and advisor. He graduated from Waseda University’s Graduate School of science research, mathematical sciences, and in 2015, attended the Stanford Executive Program (SEP) at the Graduate School of Business.

AGENDA:

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP REQUIRED:

Register to attend at http://www.stanford-svnj.org/112718-public-forum

Please note there is significant construction taking place on campus, which is greatly affecting parking availability and traffic patterns at the university. Please plan accordingly.

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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