This talk is presented by the Greater China Business Club (GCBC) of Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars at Stanford (ACSSS). 

In July 2013, a Ted Talk “A tale of two political systems” was posted, and was instantly viewed millions of times around the world. In the talk, Mr. Eric X. Li, a venture capitalist and a political scientist argued that the universality claim of Western democratic systems was going to be "morally challenged" by China.  

Do you agree? What do you think? Now you have the opportunity to discuss with Mr. Li face to face!

On Nov.6, Mr. Li will come to Stanford and talk with Professor Thomas Fingar on China’s Political System, its status, development, competitiveness and so on. Watch the Ted Talk and come to the event. We look forward to seeing you there!

---

Eric X. Li is a political scientist and an active participant in the intellectual discourses on the re-emergence of China as a great power and its impact on the world.  His writings on comparative political governance and international relations have been widely published in leading publications such as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, and Huffington Post.  His most recent publications, The Life of the Party (Foreign Affairs, January/February, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138476/eric-x-li/the-life-of-the-party), Warring States (http://www.theasanforum.org/warring-states-the-coming-new-world-disorder/) and his talk at TED Global 2013 (http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems.html), have generated active debates around the globe.

Mr. Li is a native of Shanghai.  He received his B.A. in Economics from University of California, Berkeley, M.B.A. from Stanford Business School, and PhD from Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs.

Thomas Fingar is the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford during January to December 2009. 

From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2004–2005), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001–2003), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994–2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989–1994), and chief of the China Division (1986–1989). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Fingar is a graduate of Cornell University (AB in government and history, 1968), and Stanford University (MA, 1969 and PhD, 1977 both in political science). His most recent book is Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security (Stanford University Press, 2011).

One of the most important developments in the modern global economy is financial globalization. This has raised threats to the stability of political regimes in two ways: (1) by enhancing the possibility of a financial crisis that could cause political turmoil; and (2) by easing access to foreign sources of financing for opposition political groups. I argue that state capitalism – defined as state-owned publicly listed corporations -- has risen disproportionately among single party regimes as a way to address these dual threats. Single party regimes have both the motivation and a greater institutional capacity for addressing these threats in comparison to other regimes. Tests are conducted on 607 firms in 1996 and 856 firms in 2008 across seven East Asian economies, and are supplemented with case studies of Malaysia and South Korea.  The evidence suggests that financial globalization is contributing to the rise of the state as a counter reaction.

Richard W. Carney is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations located in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. His research and teaching are in the areas of international and comparative political economy with a focus on corporate governance and finance in East Asia. He has published articles in many academic journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and Business and Politics. He is also the author of the book Contested Capitalism: The Political Origins of Financial Institutions, and editor of the book Lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis. He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy (2003-04), and has held visiting positions at INSEAD. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (UCSD 2003). Before joining the ANU in 2011, he was an Assistant Professor in Singapore.

Prime Minister Abe's economic policy, called Abenomics, places policies to open up Japan as a key component.  The government argues that reducing the barriers for international trade and capital flows will revitalize the Japanese economy and restore the growth in Japan.  At the core of the opening up policy are efforts to establish free trade agreements (FTAs) with major trading partners.  Japan joined the negotiation for TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), which includes the U.S., Japan's second largest trading partner, in July this year.  Japan has also started negotiation for RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), which includes China, Japan's largest trading partner.  Will these efforts really succeed in making the Japanese economy more open?  Do they lead to the recovery of Japan from two decades of stagnation?  Experts from both sides of the Pacific discuss these issues.

Participants:

Glen S.

Image

Image

Image

Image

The digital Information Technology (IT) revolution currently underway is profoundly reshaping economic activity, influencing politics, and transforming societies around the world. It is also forcing a reconceptualization of the global and local; many of the technologies, platforms, and fundamental disruptions are global in nature, but national or local contexts critically influence the uses and effects of IT.

Digital media— broadly conceived as digital platforms for information creation, transmission, and consumption—is a core driver of the IT revolution. Information is the very essence of civilization itself, and the advent of digital media fundamentally transforms our relationship to information. We have already seen: 1)  the Internet maturing as a platform for posting, disseminating, and consuming information, such as online news startups, video such as Youtube, microblogs to evade censorship, and a global marketplace for selling software, advertising and even personal information; 2) the diffusion of mobile communications, making information available across  geographic and socio-economic boundaries, and 3) the widespread adoption of social networking services that represent exploration into the next stage of relationships between people, groups, firms, and other entities.

Digital media is also at the crux of the “global meets local” dynamic, since digital media is by nature global, but differences in economic, political, and social conditions across countries lead to wide variation in its impact. For example, digital media is argued to have been a catalyst in the Arab Spring demonstrations that led to regime shifts in Tunesia, Egypt, and then Syria, but digital media in itself may not lead directly to a regime shift in China— due to government success in sophisticated censorship and physical network design.

The Asia-Pacific provides a fascinating array of countries for examination of the political, economic, and socio-cultural effects of digital media on the modern world. Economies range from developing to advanced. Governments include varied democracies as well as one party regimes. The press enjoys relative freedom in some countries, undergoes limited constraints in others, and is tightly controlled in a few. Populations range from dense to sparse, and from diverse to relatively homogenous.

The panels were divided to discuss four major themes:

Digital Media versus Traditional Media
Around the world, digital media is disrupting traditional media such as newspapers and television. Traditional business models are undermined, new entrants proliferate, and experimentation abounds with no end-game in sight. Questions for countries with well-established traditional media include: what are the patterns for the emergence of new players? To what degree do they threaten the traditional? In countries with less diffused traditional media, what are the opportunities enjoyed by digital media? 

Beyond business models, the social and political functions of digital media may differ from those of traditional media—particularly where traditional media is subject to close governmental control. Who are the new entrants, and what new functions do they provide?  Have traditional media failed as sources of information? What shifts have occurred in how people get information, and how does this differ across countries?

Digital Media and Political Change in Asia
Digital media opens up vast new information flows that can influence political change. From the perspective of grass-roots movements and civil society, digital media provides new tools to congregate, coordinate, and demonstrate. Governments that strongly control civil society, such as China and Vietnam, were alert to the role digital media played in the Arab Spring. What is the potential for digital media in civil society and democratization? In democratic countries such as Japan, South Korea, or India, how is digital media transforming civil society? For example, Japan’s peaceful anti-nuclear demonstrations, coordinated through digital media, displayed an entirely new pattern.

From the perspective of governments, digital media presents not only challenges, but new opportunities to monitor, gather information, and respond to the public. In strong state countries, control of information flows to the people, and gathering of information about people are the cornerstones of state control. How are these states adapting their attempts at controlling media in the face of pervasive digital media? In democratic systems, deciding what information to channel to which voters at what point in election cycles is a critical part of any electoral strategy. How are governments and parties using digital media to reach their constituencies, and what is their effectiveness?

Social Change and Economic Transformation
As a core part of the IT revolution, digital media has opened up new domains of innovation that transforms industries and economies. For advanced countries, it raises serious questions about how best to profit from digital platforms whose underlying technology is increasingly controlled by American multinational firms. For developing countries, the question is how to best take advantage of the world-class computing resources, global markets, and extensive reach enabled by the technological platforms underlying digital media. Instruments such as smartphones and the digital content conveyed on those devices are altering interpersonal relations and even the struggle against poverty in societies such as India.

The advent of social network services is also altering how we conceive of social connections. How do these networks affect groups such as the Korean or Filipino diasporas, and what are the implications for identity, “imagined communities,” and group identification. In what ways is the cohesiveness of groups enhanced by connections such as Facebook or Twitter, and in what ways are groups fragmented along interest cleavages, with people exposed to only ideas and groups of their choice. How does digital media impact social change and how does that impact lead to economic transformation in both developed and developing countries?

Digital Media and International Relations
The growth of digital media produces a powerful and sometimes troubling impact on international relations in the Asia-Pacific region. It can provide greater cultural understanding and regional integration but also aggravate tensions.  Cultural phenomenon such as the wildly popular Korean pop star Psy (of “Gangnam Style” fame) arise from the availability of digital media allowing a video to ‘go viral’ on a global scale in weeks. Conversely, tensions over territorial and historical issues in Northeast and Southeast Asia gain credence and momentum from discussion on digital media platforms, often pushing governments to act in ways detrimental to peace and stability. How does digital media influence international relations in the region? Is it a force for positive change or a source of instability? Finally, the rules governing critical parts of the physical infrastructure upon which digital media depend, such as governance of the Internet are increasingly contested in the international domain.

The fifth Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue focused on these issues surrounding the impact of digital media. The Dialogue brought together scholars, policy experts, and practitioners from the media, from Stanford University and from throughout Asia. Selected participants will start each session of the Dialogue with stimulating, brief presentations. Participants from around the region engaged in off-the-record discussion and exchange of views. The final report from the Dialogue will be published on this page as soon as it has been completed.

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) established the Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue in 2009 to facilitate conversation about current Asia-Pacific issues with far-reaching global implications. Scholars from Stanford University and various Asian countries start each session of the two-day event with stimulating, brief presentations, which are followed by engaging, off-the-record discussion. Each Dialogue closes with a public symposium and reception, and a final report is published on the Shorenstein APARC website.

Previous Dialogues have brought together a diverse range of experts and opinion leaders from Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Australia, and the United States. Participants have explored issues such as the global environmental and economic impacts of energy usage in Asia and the United States; the question of building an East Asian regional organization; and addressing the dramatic demographic shift that is taking place in Asia.

The annual Stanford Kyoto Trans-Asian Dialogue is made possible through the generosity of the City of Kyoto, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and Yumi and Yasunori Kaneko.

We have ample examples of efforts to "engage" adversaries, from Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik to Kissinger’s conception of détente and Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine policy. Yet much more attention has been given to understanding the logic of sanctions than the logic of inducements. Drawing an array of new sources of information on the North Korean economy, from the direction of its foreign trade to two firm‐level surveys of Chinese and South Korean firms doing business in the country, we consider the political and economic logic of engagement. Like sanctions, the conditions under which engagement strategies are likely to work are subject to a number of constraints. Target governments appear well aware of the risks of engagement and there is only mixed evidence for claims that such engagement has transformative effects.

Dr. Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Distinguished Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies and Director of Korea-Pacific Program (KPP) at the University of California, San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.

Stephan Haggard works on the political economy of developing countries, with a particular interest in Asia and the Korean peninsula. He is the author of Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (1990), The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995, with Robert Kaufman), The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000) and Development, Democracy and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe (2000, with Robert Kaufman). His current research focuses on the relationship between inequality, democratization and authoritarianism in developing countries. 

Professor Haggard has written extensively on the political economy of North Korea with Marcus Noland, including Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (2007) and Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (2011). Haggard and Noland co-author the "North Korea: Witness to Transformation" blog at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Neo-liberalism, which became a dominant ideology in policy-making in many countries from the early 1980's, is now blamed for worsening inequality and the 2008 world financial crisis. As the recovery process is moving very slowly due to lingering uncertainties from the Euro crisis, going back to the European model of a welfare state is not a feasible policy direction for most countries. Thus, now is the time to seek a new paradigm for a sustainable capitalism and welfare state, Dr. Sang-Mok Suh argues. He proposes 'welfarenomics,' implying a better balance between economics and welfare.

Welfarenomics means promoting a sustainable calitalism through modifying the neo-classical market economy model in three ways: (1) strengthening the role of government in the areas of formulating & implementing national strategy; (2) increasing social values of business activities through developing new CSV (Creating Shared Value) activities; and (3) creating a habitat for co-development through activating civil society. Welfarenomics also implies promoting a sustainable welfare state through modifying the European welfare state model in three ways: (1) building a foundation for 'workfare' through developing customized job programs for welfare beneficiaries; (2) utilizing various welfare programs as means for social innovation; and (3) improving the effectiveness of welfare programs through applying various management concepts to the field of social welfare.

The presentation will cite some of the recent experiences in Korea, but the concept of welfarenomics can be applied to any country in need of achieving both economic growth and social equity.

For the past four decades, Dr. Sang-Mok Suh has been a policy-making expert in both economics and social welfare. After receiving his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 1973, Professor Suh worked at the World Bank for five years and at the Korea Development Institute (KDI), a top South Korean think tank, for ten years as a researcher. His doctoral dissertation was on the relationship between economic growth and income distribution. In 1986, he led the research team at KDI for formulating the National Pension Scheme for Korea. He was vice president of KDI, 1984–1988. As a Korea National Assembly member, 1988–2000, Dr. Suh played the key role of coordinating economic and welfare policies between the ruling party, on the one hand, and the government and opposition parties, on the other. While he was Minister of Social Welfare, 1993–1995, Dr. Suh formulated a comprehensive welfare strategy for Korea for the first time and initiated the Osong Bio Industrial Complex.