Stanford University

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Challenges and realities of software development in China

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George Krompacky
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Dr. Liu first offered his view on the current state of the software industry's development and in particular software outsourcing to China. Software prices and margins continue to drop. Coupled with this reality is Liu's view that "only 10-15% of software development is truly innovative and therefore suitable to be developed in Silicon Valley". As software development platforms and communication technologies, especially the Internet, become ubiquitous and affordable, distributed software development is becoming the rule.

China's challenges and advantages in software outsourcing

Compared to India, the leader in software outsourcing, China has its own distinct challenges. Chinese software companies have almost no U.S. customers for a number of reasons: language barriers, different working styles, customers' concern for software piracy, and the lack of experienced programmers and technical managers in China. Yet, China also has its advantages. Not only does it have a rapidly expanding domestic software market, but it also has a large pool of fresh engineering talent. "The key, therefore," asserted Dr. Liu, "lies in someone creating the right environment to train and build a local team to be able to develop and deliver world-class software products."

Augmentum's software development goals

This is what Augmentum has set out to accomplish. "...[W]e want to build a world-class, distributed development team for software product development... like the ODM model in the PC world..." declared Dr. Liu. Based on this vision, Augmentum's strategy hinges on its insistence to develop software for top US customers, such as Motorola, Business Objects, and PalmSource--and to rely primarily on local Chinese engineers. Explained Liu: "We want to make sure that the center of most of the people of that team is going to be in China, even though the locomotive, the teachers, is in the U.S., because that's where the leadership is in the software product development world."

Drawing on decades of experience developing top software teams at IBM and other companies, Dr. Liu detailed his company's efforts to attract the brightest local engineers and train them to be even better. He explained, "Culture and team is the true differentiation of Augmentum.... The real...challenge is to build the right culture with the right core team." The company insists on having no expatriates in their China operations but promoting close interaction between experienced mentors in the U.S. and the young teams in China, sometimes using some creative approaches for recruitment and training. For example, Augmentum puts all of its new hires under "a stress test" after hiring and proactively maintains an "upfront churn of at least 30%" in the first three-month period." Their end goal: "a world-class software development team that can bridge the East and the West but still has a cost structure comparable to local companies."

Liu's focus for the future

Despite experienced leadership, ties to leading U.S. companies, and strong young software teams, Augmentum faces real challenges. Liu acknowledged skeptics who question the ability to build a world-class team through working on the "crumbs of companies" of "projects they don't want to work on themselves." Nevertheless, he is confident in the trajectory of Augmentum's future growth, as the company is expecting to double its employees every year for the coming few years. In addition, Dr. Liu's vision includes a landscape beyond Augmentum. "I have a very simple focus. I want to train a lot of world-class software developers in China to serve the world. Many of them will not be working for Augmentum. It is fine...I want to bring my experience to there to make it happen. And the best vehicle to do that at this moment and time, the wave [that] I want to jump on is outsourcing, because it is growing the fastest."

Biography of Leonard Liu

Leonard Liu has spent 30 years in the systems industry, with a track record of developing innovative computing technologies into successful businesses. Most recently, he served as president of ASE Group, a leading provider of IC test and packaging services, having held roles as Chairman and CEO of Walker Interactive Systems, COO of Cadence Design Systems, and President of Acer Group. He was an early champion of outsourcing to India and China at Cadence and Walker. Dr. Liu began his career at IBM where he was responsible for the creation and implementation of SQL and the management of CICS, SNA and AIX, eventually overseeing the worldwide Database and Language lines-of-business. He received his undergraduate degree from Taiwan University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University.

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SPRIE Graduate Research Fellows: Research Assistantships + Paid Field Research In Greater China

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George Krompacky
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Focus on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Greater China

SPRIE is a multidisciplinary research program at Stanford University that focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship in leading high technology regions in the United States and Asia. SPRIE has an active community of scholars at Stanford as well as research affiliates in the United States, Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and India. During 2005-2006, SPRIE is expanding a new initiative on the rise of leading high technology regions in Greater China and their impact on the global knowledge economy. Specific research topics include globalization of R&D, executive leadership, university-industry linkages, venture capital industry development and leading high technology clusters in Greater China. In addition, industries of ongoing research at SPRIE include semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, and software.

SPRIE Graduate Research Fellows: Research Assistantships & Support for International Field Research

As part of its new initiative on innovation and entrepreneurship in Greater China, SPRIE will select outstanding Stanford students as SPRIE Graduate Research Scholars. SPRIE Graduate Research Scholars will work with SPRIE faculty and senior researchers at Stanford for two (or more) academic quarters in 2005-2006 to gather and analyze data, conduct interviews in Silicon Valley, contribute to publications, and advance progress on the overall project agenda. During summer 2006, they will conduct SPRIE field research through interviews or surveys with business and government leaders in Beijing, Shanghai, or Hsinchu. As part of SPRIE's international research team, they will have the opportunity to interact closely with project leaders and visiting scholars at Stanford as well as partners in Asia, such as the Ministry of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, or Zhongguancun Science Park in Mainland China or the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan. They will also participate in SPRIE's public and invitation-only seminars and workshops with academic, business, and government leaders. The financial award will include RA support at 15-20 hours/week (or equivalent) plus summer stipend to cover travel, living expenses, and research.

How To Apply (limited to current Stanford graduate students)

Successful candidates will have demonstrated a track record of superior analytical ability, strong oral and written communication skills (including full fluency in English and Chinese), knowledge of high technology and entrepreneurship, high motivation, and willingness to be part of a dynamic international research team.

Applicants should submit:

  1. A brief statement (not to exceed two single-spaced pages), which describes the candidate's interests and skills,
  2. a curriculum vitae
  3. contact information for 2 references, preferably recent professors, advisors, or employers

Send applications to:

SPRIE
Encina Hall - East 301
Stanford University 94305-6055

or by email to George Krompacky. Questions? Please contact George Krompacky, Program Coordinator, by email or call 650.725.1885

Deadline for receipt of all materials: December 30, 2005

Applicants will be notified of decisions in January 2006

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Why China's Rise Will Be Peaceful: Hierarchy and Stability in East Asia

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Realpolitik pessimists, power transition theorists, and others see China's rise as inherently destabilizing. However, China has already been growing rapidly for almost three decades, and there is little evidence that the region is devolving into balancing, nor that China's rise is causing undue alarm in the region. China's expected emergence as the most powerful state in East Asia has been accompanied with more stability than pessimists believed because hierarchy, not balancing, is emerging in East Asia. Dr. Kang explains the relationships between dominant and secondary states in a hierarchic system. Furthermore, on the one hand, China has provided credible information about its capabilities and intentions to its neighbors. On the other hand, East Asian states actually believe China's claims, and hence do not fear -- and instead seek to benefit from - China's rise. This shared understanding about China's preferences and limited aims short-circuits the security dilemma.

David Kang has scholarly interests in both business-government relations and international relations, with a focus on Asia. His book Crony Capitalism: Corruption and Development in South Korea and the Philippines (Cambridge University Press, 2002), was named by Choice as a 2003 Outstanding Academic Title. He is also author of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies, co-authored with Victor Cha (Columbia University Press, 2003). Kang is a Stanford alumnus (B.A. 1988, anthropology and international relations) and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

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David Kang Visiting Professor, Shorenstein APARC and Associate Professor of Government, Dartmouth College Speaker
Lectures

Offshoring and the Future of U.S. Engineering: An Overview

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Engineering as a profession in the United States and other developed nations may soon face a crisis. As a result of sophisticated telecommunications and the digitization of engineering work processes, increasing portions of engineering work can be done without close proximity to particular persons, places, or other processes. In principle at least, this work can be done anywhere in the world that has access to (1) global telecommunications networks and requisite software packages and (2) adequately trained personnel. Undergraduate engineering students in relatively advanced developing nations, such as India and China, follow a curriculum roughly comparable to the one taught in developed nations. Thus, even as barriers to performing conventional engineering work remotely are eroding, a global pool of conventionally trained engineers is growing. This means that U.S. engineers are now in global competition with engineers in developing nations whose wages are 40 to 80 percent lower than ours.

In this paper, our discussion is limited to work that is relocated but still services markets in developed countries (rather than work done to meet the needs of local markets in developing countries). Offshoring of this work can not only directly replace existing workers, but can also capture jobs that would have been added to the U.S. economy, especially for fast-growing entrepreneurial ventures that must lower cash expenditures and speed up product development. Recent examples include Silicon Valley high-technology start-up companies that establish offshore subsidiaries very early in their life cycles. In these cases, offshoring does not reflect direct job displacement but redirects job growth to lower cost developing nations, at the same time making the start-up more competitive.

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Went for Cost, Stayed for Quality?: Moving the Back Office to India

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Went for Cost, Stayed for Quality?: Moving the Back Office to India
Working Papers
November 2003
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The Bridge: Linking Engineering and Society
Authors
Rafiq Dossani
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Lidong Wei

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Corporate Affiliate Visiting Fellow
Wei.jpg PhD

Lidong Wei is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at Shorenstein APARC for 2005-06. He is a deputy general manager of a department of PetroChina, where he has worked for twenty years, focusing on equipment, purchasing, and refinery. Wei received his PhD from Dalian University of Science and Technology in China.

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Enabling ICT for Rural India

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India, over the past decade, has become a test bed for innovations in information and communication technologies (ICT) serving the rural user. Various reasons explain this emergence. The most obvious is the search for a solution to what has long been an intractable problem: that rural India has remained poor while the rest of the country has moved ahead. The hope that ICT can surmount at least some of rural India's social, political, and administrative challenges and create a viable technology for the provision of health, education, and other social services is thus ICT's strongest calling card. An additional expectation is that ICT can be used innovatively to improve access to the large, underserved market that rural India's 700 million people represent, especially considering that India has the resources to build an ICT infrastructure, i.e., its large, skilled, cost-efficient IT workforce.

The object of this report is to explain the problems facing rural use of ICT and to make recommendations to improve usage. Over three months, from September to December 2004, our team visited nine ICT projects. As a generalization, we concluded that all the projects are still experimenting with how best to serve rural users through ICT. None has yet had a widespread socio-economic impact or even developed a catalytic, replicable approach. Nevertheless, there are successes and failures, good and bad practices and local demand to learn from in order to help frame the recommendations.

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Shorenstein APARC/National Informatics Centre
Authors
Rafiq Dossani

Security, Community, and Democracy in Southeast Asia: Analyzing ASEAN

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Is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) a pluralistic security community (PSC)? Does community cause security in Southeast Asia? In a PSC, member states are sovereign. So are the members of ASEAN. Before concluding that the ASEAN region is a PSC, however, one should distinguish between two versions: a thin or descriptive PSC, whose members share both a sense of community and the expectation of security, and a thick or explanatory version in which community has actually been shown to cause security. Depending on how a sense of community is defined, one may say that at certain times in its history, ASEAN probably has been a thin PSC. More recently, however, the cooperative identity of regional elites may have frayed, as democratization, especially in Indonesia, has incorporated non-elites into public life. Meanwhile the proposition that the assurance of security in Southeast Asia has resulted from this sense of community, that ASEAN is a thick PSC, remains to be proven.

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Japanese Journal of Political Science
Authors
Donald K. Emmerson

The Korean Peninsula: China's Opportunity or Challenge?

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Claude Barfield is a resident scholar and Director of Sciences and Technology Policy Studies at American Enterprise Institute. A former consultant to the office of the United States Trade Representative, Dr.. Barfield researches international trade policy (including trade policy in China and East Asia), the World Trade Organization, science and technology policy, and intellectual property.

Nam K. Woo is President of LG Electronics, Inc. (LGE), a $30 billion global leader in consumer electronics, home appliances and mobile phones. Over the past five years, as President and CEO of LGE's Digital Display and Media Company, Mr. Woo led the transformation of LG Electronics into a global consumer electronics brand, while establishing the company as a world leader in flat-panel plasma and liquid-crystal displays, optical storage devices and digital television.

Anne Wu is a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Her current research focus is the cooperation among major powers in resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis. Prior to joining Harvard, she was a career diplomat in China, with focus on Asian Pacific security and political issues.

Scott Snyder is a Pantech Fellow at Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center and Senior Associate with the Pacific Forum CSIS and a Senior Associate at the Asia Foundation. Snyder has written extensively on Korean affairs and has also conducted research on the political/security implications of the Asian financial crisis and on the conflicting maritime claims in the South China Sea.

Scott Rembrandt is the Director of Research and Academic Affairs at KEI, having joined the institute in October 2004 after four and a half years in Asia. Prior to joining KEI, Scott most recently served as a consultant in China and as the Business Manager for the Chief Country Officer Group - Asia for Deutsche Bank.

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Gi-Wook Shin

Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall E301
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
(650) 724-8480 (650) 723-6530
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Professor of Sociology
William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea
Professor, by Courtesy, of East Asian Languages & Cultures
Gi-Wook Shin_0.jpg PhD

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in the Department of Sociology, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the founding director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) since 2001, all at Stanford University. In May 2024, Shin also launched the Taiwan Program at APARC. He served as director of APARC for two decades (2005-2025). As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, democracy, migration, and international relations.

In Summer 2023, Shin launched the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL), which is a new research initiative committed to addressing emergent social, cultural, economic, and political challenges in Asia. Across four research themes– “Talent Flows and Development,” “Nationalism and Racism,” “U.S.-Asia Relations,” and “Democratic Crisis and Reform”–the lab brings scholars and students to produce interdisciplinary, problem-oriented, policy-relevant, and comparative studies and publications. Shin’s latest book, The Four Talent Giants, a comparative study of talent strategies of Japan, Australia, China, and India to be published by Stanford University Press in the summer of 2025, is an outcome of SNAPL.

Shin is also the author/editor of twenty-seven books and numerous articles. His books include The Four Talent Giants: National Strategies for Human Resource Development Across Japan, Australia, China, and India (2025); Korean Democracy in Crisis: The Threat of Illiberalism, Populism, and Polarization (2022); The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security (2021); Superficial Korea (2017); Divergent Memories: Opinion Leaders and the Asia-Pacific War (2016); Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea (2015); Criminality, Collaboration, and Reconciliation: Europe and Asia Confronts the Memory of World War II (2014); New Challenges for Maturing Democracies in Korea and Taiwan (2014); History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories (2011); South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (2011); One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era (2010); Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia (2007);  and Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (2006). Due to the wide popularity of his publications, many have been translated and distributed to Korean audiences. His articles have appeared in academic and policy journals, including American Journal of Sociology, World Development, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Political Science Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Comparative Education, International Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, Journal of Democracy, and Foreign Affairs.

Shin is not only the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, but also continues to actively raise funds for Korean/Asian studies at Stanford. He gives frequent lectures and seminars on topics ranging from Korean nationalism and politics to Korea's foreign relations, historical reconciliation in Northeast Asia, and talent strategies. He serves on councils and advisory boards in the United States and South Korea and promotes policy dialogue between the two allies. He regularly writes op-eds and gives interviews to the media in both Korean and English.

Before joining Stanford in 2001, Shin taught at the University of Iowa (1991-94) and the University of California, Los Angeles (1994-2001). After receiving his BA from Yonsei University in Korea, he was awarded his MA and PhD from the University of Washington in 1991.

Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL)

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Shin's Reflections on Korea

A monthly column in the Korean magazine Sindonga
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Reengaging North Korea

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Stanford Asia-Pacific Innovation

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Director of the Korea Program and the Taiwan Program, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Director of Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab, APARC
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Gi-Wook Shin Speaker Stanford University
Claude Barfield Speaker American Enterprise Institute
Nam K. Woo CEO Speaker LG Electronics
Scott Rembrandt Moderator Korea Economic Institute
Anne Wu Speaker Harvard University

Scott Snyder

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 723-6530
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Pantech Fellow
MA

Scott Snyder is a senior associate in the International Relations program of The Asia Foundation and Pacific Forum CSIS, and is based in Washington, DC. He spent four years in Seoul as Korea Representative of The Asia Foundation between 2000 and 2004. Previously, he served as a program officer in the Research and Studies Program of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and as acting director of the Asia Society's Contemporary Affairs Program. He has recently edited, with L. Gordon Flake, a study titled Paved With Good Intentions: The NGO Experience in North Korea (2003), and is author of Negotiating on the Edge: North Korean Negotiating Behavior (1999).

Snyder received his BA from Rice University and an MA from the Regional Studies East Asia Program at Harvard University. He was the recipient of an Abe Fellowship, administered by the Social Sciences Research Council, in 1998-99, and was a Thomas G. Watson Fellow at Yonsei University in South Korea in 1987-88.

Scott Snyder Speaker Stanford University
Symposiums

Issue Salience of Unemployment and Vote Switching

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Dr. Kwon will examine the electoral effects of issue salience of unemployment. While increasing employment volatility has spawned exciting research, evidence of how unemployment affects voter choice is inconclusive. Professor Kwon refines partisan voting theory by focusing on issue salience of unemployment and the dynamics of voter choice. Voters are more likely to make a transition to support Left parties when they identify unemployment as the most important and salient issue, while there is no effect of issue salience of unemployment on loyal Left voter behavior. His study also examines voter heterogeneity in the link between issue salience and the probability of transition to Left. Analysis of a transition model using the 1997 Korean presidential election survey finds supporting evidence.

Hyeok Yong Kwon (Ph.D., Cornell University) is an assistant professor in political science at Korea University. Before joining Korea University, he taught at Texas A&M University. His research interests include political economy, voting behavior and mass public opinion, and political methodology. His recent works explore economic insecurity and the dynamics of voter choice in comparative perspective. Also, he works on the relationship between government partisanship and welfare spending in OECD countries. Previous publications include "Targeting Public Spending in a New Democracy: Evidence from South Korea" British Journal of Political Science (2005) and "Economic Reform and Democratization: Evidence from Latin America and Post-Socialist Countries" British Journal of Political Science (2004).

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Hyeok Yong Kwon Speaker Texas A & M University
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Korean Studies Colloquium Series
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