The China Program at Shorenstein APARC had the privilege of hosting Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies​ (CSIS). The program, entitled "What’s ‘Communist’ about the Communist Party of China?," explored the goals and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as well as what they might mean for the future of China in the global community. Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program, moderated the event.

After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the goals of the CCP became less clear. As the country began to adopt market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, CCP theorists were forced into contortions providing ideological justifications for policies that appeared overtly capitalist. Deng Xiaoping’s concept of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” came to be seen as a theoretical fig leaf rather than a description of an egalitarian economic system, and by the 2000s, a consensus emerged that the CCP had completely abandoned any pretense of pursuing the Marxist vision it purported to hold. With the rise of Xi Jinping, however, the Party talks with renewed vigor about Marxism-Leninism and the goal of achieving actual, existing socialism. Has the CCP re-discovered communism?  In his talk, Blanchette discussed the abandoned and existing legacies of Mao Zedong, Marxism-Leninism, and the CCP’s vision of socialism. Watch now: 

On February 10, 2021, the China Program at Shorenstein APARC hosted Professor Oriana Skylar Mastro, Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies​ for the virtual program "Military Competition with China: Harder to Win Than During the Cold War?" Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program, moderated the event.

As US-China competition intensifies, experts debate the degree to which the current strategic environment resembles that of the Cold War. Those that argue against the analogy often highlight how China is deeply integrated into the US-led world order. They also point out that, while tense, US-China relations have not turned overtly adversarial. But there is another, less optimistic reason the comparison is unhelpful: deterring and defeating Chinese aggression is harder now than it was against the Soviet Union. In her talk, Dr. Mastro analyzed how technology, geography, relative resources and the alliance system complicate U.S. efforts to enhance the credibility of its deterrence posture and, in a crisis, form any sort of coalition. Mastro and Oi's thought-provoking discussion ranged from the topic of why even US allies are hesitant to take a strong stance against China to whether or not Taiwan could be a catalyst for military conflict. Watch now: 

On January 27, 2021, the China Program at Shorenstein APARC hosted Professor Hau L. Lee, The Thoma Professor of Operations, Information & Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the virtual program “The Pandemic, U.S-China Tensions and Redesigning the Global Supply Chain.” Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program, moderated the event.

Professor Lee focused on an important question that has only become more pressing due to the COVID-19 pandemic: How, if at all, should businesses redesign their supply chains? Since the beginning of the pandemic, explains Lee, there has been an increase in calls for “redundancy” in supply chains in order to protect them from the problems they faced early in the pandemic, when China was first hit by shut downs and slowed productivity. Advice has been varied, ranging from the “China Plus One” strategy in which businesses simply add a secondary production location, to completely domesticating supply chains.

Lee warns, however, of the perils of overreaction. There are numerous risks that come along with a fully domestic supply chain, not least the danger of “having all of your eggs in one basket.” Instead, says Lee, businesses should move cautiously and, instead of fully divesting from China, should use the country intelligently. 

Professor Lee’s “In and Out Design” encourages businesses to work from the inside out, securing and strengthening their supply chains by starting at home. Companies must first build “internal supply chain excellence,” after which they can move on to making sure their strategic partners are equally strong and can work to their advantage. Eventually, companies can move on to strengthening the extended value chain and, ultimately, their entire ecosystem. Using strategies like dual response, leveraging “lubricants,” and bolstering capacity-building capabilities, businesses can create a more stable future. 

The session concluded with a fruitful Q&A between Professor Lee and the audience, moderated by Professor Oi.

A video recording of this program is available upon request. Please contact Callista Wells, China Program Coordinator at cvwells@stanford.edu with any inquiries.

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Lee studies the impacts of AI and robotics across multiple industries, including manufacturing, retail banking, and nursing homes. A trend he sees across most sectors following the adoption of robotics or AI is a positive increase in productivity. This has impacts for both the short-term and long-term relationships between humans and their robot coworkers, or “co-bots.” While it is true that the introduction of automation and robots initially replaces a significant number of workers in sectors such as manufacturing, over time, that impact reverses and there are job gains in many cases.

“The impact of robots often evolves over time from replacing human workers to augmenting them,” Lee explains, “and productivity gains [can] create opportunities for existing and new occupations.” This happens in a variety of ways. In some cases, the use of robotics and automation in one area frees up time, labor, and resources to employ more people in other, higher-skilled areas. In another situation, increases in productivity brought on by automation allow for greater company growth than would not have been possible otherwise. This, in turn, spurs the need to expand the workforce.

Alternatively, supplementing the labor of a small workforce with robotics and AI can also spread limited resources much farther. Lee and Eggleston’s studies of the impacts of robots on nursing home care in Japan repeatedly show that the use of robots positively increases the quality of service that oftentimes-understaffed care facilities can provide to the elderly and infirm. This can range from monitoring the physical condition of patients and reliably delivering medications to providing mental and emotional support to elderly residents through the use of robotic humanoid companions. Such innovative use of tech fills critical gaps that a human-only workforce would struggle to meet in a staffing shortage like Japan faces.

Looking to the future, Lee shares this perspective: “When the automobile was invented, we suddenly had a new demand for drivers. Now we’ll have to see if [automation] creates demand for other new occupations.” It’s an area of innovation and research he, Dr. Eggleston, and other Stanford researchers will be closely watching with their human eyes in the years to come.

Read the original article by Stanford HAI here >>

APARC is pleased to share that Stanford alumnae Shiran Victoria Shen and Lizhi Liu have won prestigious awards for best dissertation in their fields. Both Shen and Liu earned their doctoral degrees in Political Science in 2018 and worked with Jean Oi, director of the China Program at APARC, during their tenure as doctoral students.

Shen, who is currently an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, has won the 2020 Harold D. Lasswell Award for her dissertation The Political Pollution Cycle: An Inconvenient Truth and How To Break It. The award is given annually by the American Political Science Association for “the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public policy.” Using a wide array of data, techniques, and research designs, Shen’s work explains how environmental change influences and is shaped by politics and policy. It centers on the critical case of air pollution control policies and uses China as a natural experiment.

Liu, whose doctoral research focuses on the political economy of e-commerce in China, has won the 2020 Ronald H. Coase Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics. Her study proposes that China has devised a novel solution, that is, institutional outsourcing, to the central question of how developing states build market-supporting institutions. She is currently an assistant professor in the McDonough School of Business and a faculty affiliate of the Department of Government at Georgetown University.

Congratulations, Shiran and Lizhi, on your excellent work and prestigious awards!

The Great Wall of China is one of Asia’s most photographed and visited landmarks. Built over thousands of years and winding through a total of 13,170 miles, this wide-reaching network of defenses was constructed as a barrier against China’s northern neighbors. But within the digital landscape of China is a much less conspicuous yet far more pervasive set of fortifications: the Great Firewall. China’s state-operated internet is carefully controlled, heavily censored, and designed to keep its own citizens away from information that might damage the power and perception of the Communist Party.

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In Robert’s assessment, the Great Firewall is an example of censorship via what she terms “friction.” Rather than centering on fear, this type of censorship acts as a tax on information, creating small inconveniences that are easy to explain away and requiring those seeking information to spend more time and money if they want access to it. Censorship thus “works through distraction and diversion. It nudges — but does not force — most users away from unsavory material.”

This framing of censorship, Robert says, helps explain why, even though China’s Great Firewall is porous and can be circumvented, the number of people who “jump the wall” using a virtual private network (VPN) remains relatively low. People are not necessarily afraid of legal or political consequences of using a VPN, but rather the process of doing so is deemed too bothersome or offers too little value for the effort in most people’s day-to-day lives.

This friction-driven censorship is, therefore, effective on two levels: it keeps the majority of citizens away from sensitive material by making it too labor-intensive for them to access, and it naturally filters for outlier individuals the government has an interest in monitoring. According to Robert’s data, VPN users are overwhelmingly 35-year-old and younger, tend to be college degree holders, have fluency in English, have traveled or studied outside of China, and are interested in international politics — precisely the kinds of cohorts the Communist Party would benefit from managing more closely.

However, these digital demographics shift dramatically to include much broader groups of people during crises and following abrupt interruptions to citizen’s daily lives. Through analysis of Chinese social media data, online experiments, and nationally representative surveys, Roberts shows how the number of VPN  downloads spiked during the devastating Tianjin chemical explosion in 2015 as people scrambled to find information on the disaster. VPN downloads also increased after the shutdown of Instagram on September 29, 2014, following protests in Hong Kong. The Chinese government barred access to the platform to contain posts about the protests, but Roberts says that it was the sudden loss of access to the social media platform’s draw of entertainment that pulled many more “everyday” citizens over the firewall than would be typical. Once over, these new users quickly moved from accessing pictures of pop stars to exploring banned websites and censored information in more political spaces.

This is one of the important takeaways Roberts sees in her work. “This porous nature of censorship . . . means that there’s an Achilles heel of friction, which is that during crises, or sudden, more visible [moments of] censorship, people are willing to seek out that type of information and that can undermine some of these other strategies.”

With the Great Firewall only a few decades old, the full effects of its friction-based barricades remain to be seen, but Roberts is certain that in the coming years, the control of access to and accuracy of online information will have important effects not only on modern China but the future digital world as a whole.

You can learn more about Margaret Robert’s work in her book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall.