Please note the event time has been changed to 10:30AM (PT) to 12:00PM (PT).

 

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register for the talk. 

 

This event is presented in partnership with Global:SF and the State of California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development.
 

U.S.-China economic relations have grown increasingly fraught and competitive.  Even amidst intensifying tensions, however, our two major economies remain intertwined.  While keeping alert to national security concerns, the economic strength of the United States will depend on brokering a productive competition with China, the world’s fastest growing economy.  Precipitous decoupling of trade, investment, and human talent flows between the two nations will inflict unnecessary harm to U.S. economic interests -- and those of California.  

Chinese trade and investments into California have grown exponentially over the last decade.  But they have come under increasing pressure following geopolitical and economic tensions between the two nations, particularly in the science and technology sectors.  This session will explore the role of Chinese economic activity in California in the context of the greater US-Chinese relationship. 

 

Craig Allen began his tenure in Washington, DC, as the sixth President of the United States-China Business Council, a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization representing over 200 American companies doing business with China. Ambassador Allen began his government career in 1985 at the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration (ITA) where, from 1986 to 1988, he worked as an international economist in ITA’s China Office. In 1988, Allen transferred to the American Institute in Taiwan, where he served as Director of the American Trade Center in Taipei. He returned to the Department of Commerce for a three-year posting at the US Embassy in Beijing as Commercial Attaché in 1992. In 1995, Allen was assigned to the US Embassy in Tokyo where he was promoted to Deputy Senior Commercial Officer in 1998. Allen became a member of the Senior Foreign Service in 1999. Starting from 2000, he served a two-year tour at the National Center for APEC in Seattle where he worked on the APEC Summits in Brunei, China, and Mexico. In 2002, Allen first served as the Senior Commercial Officer in Beijing where he was later promoted to the Minister Counselor rank of the Senior Foreign Service. After a four-year tour in South Africa, Ambassador Allen became Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asia at the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. He later became Deputy Assistant Secretary for China. Ambassador Allen was sworn in as the United States ambassador to Brunei Darussalam on December 19, 2014 where he served until he transitioned to take up his position as President of the US-China Business Council.
 

David Cheng is the chair and managing partner of Nixon Peabody’s China and Asia-Pacific practice. He is qualified in both the United States and Hong Kong. He focuses on cross-border transactions, litigations and investigations, advising on issues ranging from acquisitions, capital financing (initial public offering), intellectual property protection and disputes to fraud, FCPA and SEC investigations. He has a client portfolio from all over the world, including the United States, Middle East, Europe, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong.
 

James Green has worked for over two decades on U.S.-Asia relations. For five years, Green was the Minister Counselor for Trade Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing (2013-2018).  As the senior official in China from the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Green was deeply involved in all aspects of trade negotiations, trade enforcement, and in reducing market access barriers for American entities.  In prior government service, Green worked on the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff and at the State Department’s China Desk on bilateral affairs. He also served as the China Director of the White House’s National Security Council.  In the private sector, Green was a senior vice president at the global strategy firm founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and was the founding government relations manager at the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, Asia’s largest AmCham.  Currently, Green is a Senior Research Fellow at Georgetown University's Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues and hosts a U.S.-China Dialogue Podcast.  He was most recently named as APARC's inaugural China Policy Fellow. 
 

Anja Manuel is Co-Founder and Principal, along with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, in Rice, Hadley, Gates & Manuel LLC, a strategic consulting firm that helps US companies navigate international markets. She currently serves on two corporate boards: Overseas Shipping Group, Inc., a NYSE listed energy transportation company, and Ripple Labs Inc., a leading blockchain payments company. Manuel also serves on several advisory boards, including Former Governor Brown’s California Export Council. From 2005-2007, she served as an official at the U.S. Department of State, responsible for South Asia Policy. She is a frequent commentator on foreign policy and technology policy, for TV and radio (NBC/MSNBC, Fox Business, BBC, Bloomberg, Charlie Rose, NPR, etc.) and writes for publications ranging from the New York Times, to the Financial Times, Fortune, The Atlantic, and Newsweek, among others. She is the author of the critically acclaimed This Brave New World: India, China and the United States, published by Simon and Schuster in 2016. A graduate of Harvard Law School and Stanford University, Manuel now also lectures and is a Research Affiliate at Stanford University. She is the Director of the Aspen Strategy Group and Aspen Security Forum -- the premier bipartisan forum on foreign policy in the U.S. -- and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

 

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This Session is part of a larger conference series titled “The New Economy Conference – California’s Place in the New Global Economy”.   The New Economy Conference will broadcast public programs from April 21-May 25 on a weekly basis, designed to inform and identify the impact of COVID-19 on the economic competitiveness and resilience of the State of California.  Topics addressed will include Challenges and Opportunities Post-COVID in California (4/21); the International Dimension (4/28), Investing in the New Economy and Keeping Businesses in California (5/5); Sustainability and Urbanism (5/12); Navigating Chinese Investment, Trade and Technology (5/19); and Where do We Go from Here? (6/09).

 

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Corrupt countries are usually poor, yet China is an exception. President Xi Jinping acknowledges that corruption in the country has reached crisis proportions. If this is true, why has China nevertheless sustained 40 years of economic growth and deep transformation?

In this talk, Professor Yuen Yuen Ang will analyze how different types of corruption exert different effects on the economy.  Reminiscent of America’s Gilded Age during the 19th century, reform-era China has steadily evolved toward a particular type of corruption: access money (elite exchanges of power and wealth).  Starting in the 2000s, the central government effectively curbed directly growth-damaging types of corruption such as embezzlement and bureaucratic extortion. But access money fueled commerce by rewarding politicians for aggressively promoting growth and connected capitalists for taking on increasingly risky ventures. Such corruption has also produced systemic risks, distortions, and inequality, however—problems that define China's Gilded Age under Xi Jinping’s leadership. As a result, China today is a high-growth but risky and imbalanced economy. 

Despite popular perceptions that China and the United States are two polar opposites, therefore, contemporary China and 19th century America share some striking commonalities.

Yuen Yuen Ang is a PhD graduate of Stanford University, where she studied comparative political economy with a focus on China. She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize, awarded by the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical, theoretical and/or methodological contributions to the study of comparative politics.” She was also named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for “high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to the most pressing issues of our times.” Her first, award-winning book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (2016), is acclaimed as “game changing” and “field shifting.” It received the Peter Katzenstein Prize in Political Economy, the Viviana Zelizer Prize in Economic Sociology, and was named “Best of Books 2017″ by Foreign Affairs. The sequel to this book, China’s Gilded Age: the Paradox of Economic Boom & Vast Corruption, is released in 2020. It was featured in The Diplomat, The Economist, and The Wire China. She is an associate professor in political science at the University of Michigan and previously a faculty member at Columbia University SIPA.

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This event is part of the 2021 Winter/Spring Colloquia series, Biden’s America, Xi’s China: What’s Now & What’s Next?, sponsored by APARC's China Program.

 

Co-sponsored by the Southeast Asia Program, Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan

Shocking events obliterate context.  The coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 is a case in point.  Who could imagine the cruelty of the Burmese generals who on February 1^st 2021 grabbed power and proceeded to retain it by arresting thousands and murdering hundreds of its local opponents?  Who expected that on February 2^nd the country’s youth would launch a nonviolent Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) and keep it going and growing against such massively intimidating odds?  In this webinar, two experts will provide the essential but all too often missing contexts—current and historical, domestic and foreign, political and socioeconomic—within which the crisis can be understood, its future projected, and its implications assessed.  To those ends, the on-the-ground knowledge, personal experience, and close observer’s insights of Burmese scholar Moe Thuzar will interact with the insights of American professor David Steinberg based on his Burmese experiences and scholarship dating back into the 20^th century.

The webinar will consider in particular what the coup and its aftermath may imply for Southeast Asia and its relations with China.  Relevant in that regard is the involvement of all four panel members in a recent collection, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21^st Century—Steinberg and Ciorciari as authors, Emmerson as editor, and ­­Thuzar as an analyst who is using the book in her own research. 

David I. Steinberg is Distinguished Professor of Asian Studies Emeritus, Georgetown University, where he directed its Asian studies program (1997-2007). Other positions he has held include the presidency of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs and Southeast Asia-related US foreign-policy posts as a member of the Senior Foreign Service. He has also represented The Asia Foundation in South Korea, Burma, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.  His 15 books and monographs include one translation, more than 150 articles, and several hundred op-eds.. Among these books are: Myanmar: The Dynamics of an Evolving Polity (ed., 2015); Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013, 2^nd edition); Modern China-Myanmar Relations: Dilemmas of Mutual Dependence (with Fan Hongwei, 2012); Turmoil in Burma: Contested Legitimacies in Myanmar (2006); Burma: The State of Myanmar (2001); and Burma’s Road to Development (1981). His expertise includes the two Koreas, about which he has written widely. Professor Steinberg was educated at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Harvard University, Darmouth College, and Lingnan University in Canton (now Guangzhou), China.

Moe Thuzar joined the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore in 2008. Her responsibilities there have included managing or co-managing its Myanmar Studies Programme, serving as a lead researcher in its ASEAN Studies Centre, and helping the Centre engage with Myanmar regarding its turn to chair ASEAN in 2014. She spent the 2019-2020 academic year as a Fox International Fellow at Yale University's MacMillan Center researching the socio-cultural underpinnings of Burma’s Cold War foreign policy for her National University of Singapore PhD. Earlier she worked for a decade at the ASEAN Secretariat, where she headed its Human Development Unit. Her many publications include, as co-author, the 2020 and 2019 editions of ISEAS’s widely read State of Southeast Asia: Survey Report. Other recent writing includes chapters and articles in ASEAN-EU Partnerships: The Untold Story (ed., 2020); the Journal of Southeast Asian Economies (2019); Southeast Asian Affairs (ed., 2019); Human Security Norms in East Asia (ed., 2019); and, as co-author, ASEAN’s Myanmar Dilemma (with Lex Rieffel, 2018). Earlier works include Myanmar: Life After Nargis (with Pavin Chachavalpongpun, 2009).

Co-moderated by John Ciorciari, Director, Weiser Diplomacy Center, University of Michigan, and Donald K. Emmerson, Director, Southeast Asia Program, Stanford University

 

 

The Bay of Bengal, while split by national boundaries and even our concepts of distinct South and Southeast Asian regions, is re-emerging as a connected geographic and demographic space. Some of Asia’s most consequential transnational policy challenges will be most starkly presented here, across the borders of India, Bangladesh, and Burma – and traditional policy-making structures are already struggling to cope with environmental disasters, the mass movement of people, and the yawning need for economic connectivity. This webinar will examine these policy challenges, from the fragility of the Sundarbans ecosystem to the transnational implications of the Burma coup, and whether existing state and multilateral institutions are capable of addressing them.

SPEAKERS:

Kelley Eckels Currie served as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues and the U.S. Representative at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.  Prior to her appointment, she led the Department of State’s Office of Global Criminal Justice (2019) and served under Ambassador Nikki Haley as the United States’ Representative to the UN Economic and Social Council and Alternative Representative to the UN General Assembly (2017-2018).  Throughout her career, Ambassador Currie has specialized in human rights, political reform, development and humanitarian issues, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. She has held senior policy positions with the Department of State, the U.S. Congress, the Project 2049 Institute, and several international and non-governmental human rights and humanitarian organizations.  Ambassador Currie holds a Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center.

Tanaya Dutta Gupta is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Tanaya’s dissertation research focuses on climate change, (im)mobilities and borders in the Bengal delta region of Bangladesh and India. Her educational background includes MA in Sociology and Geography. As visiting researcher with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development and collaborator with the Observer Research Foundation, Tanaya participates in policy conversations through her research. Her research has been funded by the National Geographic Society and UC Davis Graduate Program Fellowships. 

Constantino Xavier is a Fellow in Foreign Policy and Security Studies at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, in New Delhi, where he leads the Sambandh Initiative on regional connectivity. He is also a non-resident fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. His research and publications focus on India’s changing role as a regional power, and the challenges of security, connectivity and democracy across South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Dr. Xavier regularly lectures at various Indian, European and American universities, as well as at civilian and military training institutions in India. He holds a Ph.D. in South Asian studies from the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, and an M.A. and M.Phil. from Jawaharlal Nehru University.  

MODERATOR:

Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia research initiative. He is also a senior nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research. His research focuses on Indian military strategy and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. He previously held research positions at the RAND Corporation, the Observer Research Foundation, and the East-West Center in Washington. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defence Department, which included operational deployments as well as a diplomatic posting to Washington, DC. Arzan holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London.

 

 

 

Few American diplomats can match the years of experience in multiple Southeast Asian countries that Ambassador Scot Marciel has accumulated during his career in the US Foreign Service. The book he is writing at Stanford will interpret the region and its relations with the United States historically and now. Policy questions from the manuscript that the webinar will address include: Can America’s relations with Thailand be reinvigorated, and if so, how? Why have US-Vietnam relations prospered, and with what prospects going forward? Realistically, what can be expected from relations between the US and Indonesia? How should the recent coup in Myanmar be understood and how does it challenge US foreign policy? More broadly, in the near term, what priority ends and means should inform US engagement with Southeast Asia? In exploring answers to these and other questions, Amb. Marciel will interact with a second distinguished speaker, Catharin Dalpino, who is uniquely well qualified to discuss these matters based on her extensive experience in US policymaking positions, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations related to Southeast Asia.

Scot Marciel is a career US Foreign Service Officer. He served as America’s Ambassador to Myanmar in 2016-2020 when thousands of ethnic Rohingya were killed, expelled, or emigrated from the country—a challenging time for its democratic transition and for US-Myanmar relations. Earlier assignments included tours as Ambassador to Indonesia, Ambassador for ASEAN Affairs, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, he worked as an editor of publications at the National Center for Export-Import Studies at Georgetown University. Ambassador Marciel’s more than 35 years of experience as a diplomat in Asia and around the world have also included assignments in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. His degrees are an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a BA in International Relations from the University of California, Davis.

Catharin Dalpino’s remarkable career has encompassed academe, government, and NGOs. At Georgetown University she taught Southeast Asian Studies and launched and led the university’s Thai Studies Program. Other institutions in which she has lectured, researched, administered, or advised include The Asia Foundation, the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Council, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, George Washington University, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and has held positions at the World Bank and the United Nations in Geneva. The author of many articles and three books on US-Asian relations, she has testified on that topic before the Senate and the House of Representatives more than a dozen times. Her degrees are an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from Barnard College.

Donald K. Emmerson, in addition to heading the Southeast Asia Program, is affiliated with Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and its Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. Recent writings relevant to US-Southeast Asia relations include articles in December 2020 in The Diplomat and East Asia Forum and an edited volume, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century (2020). Before moving to Stanford in 1999, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he headed its Center for Southeast Asian Studies.  He has held visiting positions at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Australian National University, among other institutions. His degrees are from Yale (PhD) and Princeton (BA).