Stanford opened a research and education center at China’s Peking University, strengthening an already close academic bond and building a stronger tie to one of the world’s fastest-growing countries.

“Globalization is the defining characteristic of the 21^st Century,” Stanford President John Hennessy said during an opening ceremony on March 21 that drew hundreds of academics, donors and government officials to the opening of the Stanford Center at Peking University.

“It is increasingly important for our students to understand what it means to be citizens of the world, to bring a more international perspective, to be able to communicate with others from different backgrounds or with different expertise,” he said. “Both Peking University and Stanford are stepping up to that challenge and moving to become more global institutions to address the challenges of this century. This new center exemplifies that.”

Designed as a resource for the entire Stanford community and administered by the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, 10 programs and departments – including the School of Medicine’s Asian Liver Center, the Bing Overseas Studies Program and the Rural Education Action Project – will locate operations at SCPKU.

FSI faculty already doing research in China showcased their work during conferences held in conjunction with the opening of the center.

The new building is available to the several hundred Stanford scholars studying, researching and conducting university activities in China each year. It also offers the opportunity for Stanford faculty to work with academics from Peking University and other universities throughout China.

“Stanford is one of the most valued partners of Peking University,” PKU President Zhou Qifeng said. “The center will create more opportunities through collaborative research, student and faculty exchange programs, joint teaching and other activities.”

The center makes Stanford the first American university to construct a building for its use on a major Chinese university campus. SCPKU will allow current educational programs to expand, but will not grant Stanford degrees.

The center’s distinctiveness is reflected in the building that houses it – a 36,000-square-foot structure that combines Chinese and Western architecture. The courtyard building was constructed with interlocking mortise-and-tenon joinery – a classic Chinese technique that eliminates the need for nails or glue.

Hand-painted scenes depicting typical Chinese landscapes and views from Stanford’s campus are featured on the building beams. At the point where beams and columns meet, artists added Chinese symbols for teaching, learning and scholarship.

State-of-the-art classrooms, conference rooms and meeting spaces fill out the two floors below the courtyard. Skylights, interior gardens and a reflecting pool invoke a natural setting.

The melding of styles brings as much substance as symbolism.

SCPKU “marks a new era of collaboration between two outstanding universities,” Gary Locke, the U.S. ambassador to China, said during the opening ceremony. “It also represents a new bridge of understanding between our nations – and most importantly – our peoples.

“There are virtually no problems in the world today that cannot be solved if the people – the scientists and engineers, and the business people – of the United States and China join together,” Locke said. “And this center will help make that happen.”

Stanford’s relationship with China dates to the late 1970s, when the university began accepting Chinese graduate students. Students from China have accounted for the largest number of Stanford’s foreign graduate students for the past decade, with about 600 enrolled last year.

Those scholars are part of the 160,000 Chinese students studying in American colleges and universities every year, a number that eclipses the 16,000 American students taking classes in China, Locke said.

“We have to know much more about each other’s cultures, customs, traditions, values and languages so we can build a mutual trust and understanding that will allow us to face all of the challenges we face,” he said. “The way to build that trust starts with building people-to-people interactions. It starts with more student exchanges…and it most certainly starts with the Stanford center here at Peking University.”

Over the last 30 years, Stanford’s bond with Peking University has grown from an initial collaboration between the schools’ Asian language departments to a wide range of joint research and academic exchanges.

In 2004, Stanford’s undergraduate study abroad and internship programs began at Peking University. The study abroad program continues to be managed by the Bing Overseas Studies Program, which hosts roughly 60 undergraduates every year on the Peking University campus.  The internship programs are coordinated by the International, Comparative, and Area Studies Program.

The overseas studies program offers a broad curriculum taught by a Stanford faculty-in-residence who spends a 10-week quarter with the students in Beijing.  A range of topical and language courses are taught by Peking University faculty.

“The new center at PKU allows us to continue this dynamic program in a new environment designed to encourage interaction across disciplines and with graduate students and faculty from both universities,” said Irene Kennedy, the program’s executive director. “We also plan to continue supporting and developing interactions between Stanford and PKU students through language partnering and by including Chinese students in classes taught by Stanford faculty and associated field trips.”

Jean Oi and Andrew Walder – both senior fellows at the Freeman Spogli Institute – began building on that relationship in 2006 by envisioning a way to bolster Stanford research, teaching, training and outreach activities in China. Their ideas led to the creation of SCPKU and several new academic programs, including a law school exchange program.

The $7 million project is funded entirely from gifts made to the Stanford International Initiative. The lead donor was the charitable foundation of the family of Chien Lee, a Hong Kong-based private investor and Stanford emeritus trustee who received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the university in 1975 and his MBA from the Graduate School of Business four years later.

The SCPKU building is named for his father, the late Lee Jung Sen, who attended Peking University in the mid-1930s when it was Yenching University. Lee’s mother, Leatrice Lowe Lee, graduated from Stanford in 1945.

A bust of Lee Jung Sen sits in SCPKU’s courtyard, one level above the modern facility and surrounded by the more familiar, traditional Chinese architecture.

Newly printed “no smoking” signs went up across China when the government rolled out a nationwide public indoor smoking ban in May 2011. A sticky gray layer of smoke residue now coats many signs, representing the challenges China’s growing tobacco-control movement faces against a multibillion-dollar government-run industry and deeply embedded social practices.

How has the cigarette become so integrated into the fabric of everyday life across the People’s Republic of China (PRC)?

To get to the heart of this question, historians, health policy specialists, sociologists, anthropologists, business scholars, and other experts met Mar. 26 and 27 in Beijing for a conference organized by Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program. They examined connections intricately woven over the past 60 years between marketing and cigarette gifting, production and consumer demand, government policy and economic profit, and many other dimensions of China’s cigarette culture.

Anthropologist Matthew Kohrman, a specialist on tobacco in China, led the conference, which was held at the new Stanford Center at Peking University. In an interview, he spoke about the history of China’s cigarette industry, cigarettes and society, and the tobacco-control movement.

The early years

Tobacco first entered China through missionary contact in the 1600s, says Kohrman, but it was not until the early 20th century when cigarettes began gaining popularity. The first cigarette advertising was a “confused tapestry” of messages as marketers figured out what spoke to the public. “There were just as many images of neo-Confucian filial piety as there were of cosmopolitan ‘modern women,’” says Kohrman.

Through improved marketing and aggressive factory building, British American Tobacco and Nanyang Brothers, China’s two largest pre-war firms, helped increase the demand for cigarettes. The Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) disrupted the cigarette supply, but their popularity had taken hold. Some cigarette firms shifted during the war to the relative safety of southwest China, where tobacco production has remained concentrated ever since.

Post-1949

After the founding of the PRC in 1949, the tobacco industry was nationalized and strong relationships between the central government and cigarette manufacturers in the provinces were formed. Cigarettes also began to be viewed as a part of everyday life. “Ration coupons for cigarettes were issued alongside grain, sugar, and bicycle coupons,” says Kohman. “The Maoist regime legitimized cigarettes as the right of every citizen."

During the Deng Xiaoping era (1978–1997), China’s cigarette industry really took off as manufacturers competed with one another for foreign currency to purchase cutting-edge European equipment and newer varieties of tobacco seed stock. Increased production and the return of full-scale advertising fueled greater consumer demand, and manufacturers began producing more and more varieties of cigarette. Vendors displayed glass cases filled with a colorful patchwork of cigarette packs bearing names like Panda, Double Happiness, and Red Pagoda.

The tobacco industry remained under government control as other industries privatized in the 1980s and 1990s. Party-state management of the cigarette became even more centralized in the early 1980s with the creation of the China Tobacco Monopoly Administration and its parallel external counterpart, the China Tobacco Corporation.

Since 1949, provincial protectionism has marked the cigarette market. It is now possible to purchase Beijing cigarettes in Kunming, Chengdu brands in Shanghai, and so on, but to distribute cigarettes in another province, a manufacturer must cut a deal with provincial government officials. Provincial administrations are loath to cut such deals because central government policy dictates that the portion of cigarette sales tax which does not go to the central government always is channeled to the finance bureau of the province of original production. China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization opened the market ever so slightly to international brands like Marlboro and Kent, but domestic brands continue to dominate because of fierce protectionism.

...If it chooses to do so, China is in a position to lead and change the landscape in a very profound way.
-Matthew Kohrman, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford
A new era

In 2003, the World Health Organization established the first global health treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Although the United States still has not yet ratified the FCTC, China signed the treaty in 2003 and ratified it in 2005. Kohrman says China’s tobacco industry giants fear competition from international cigarette brands more than they worry about tobacco-control measures related to the FCTC.

Nonetheless, the FCTC ushered in a new era of public health research about tobacco and has helped increase public awareness about the dangers of smoking. New restrictions have been imposed on print and television advertising for cigarettes, and international organizations, such as the Bloomberg Family Foundation, have begun funding anti-tobacco work in China.

A big challenge to tobacco-control campaigns, says Kohrman, is the sheer amount of money that tobacco companies have available for marketing. “In 2010, China’s tobacco industry posted profits in excess of U.S. $90 billion—that’s huge. Tobacco control research and advocacy now annually receive a few million dollars, and much of that is coming through outside funders, which have very specific projects in mind.”

China’s tobacco advertisers have adapted to the new restrictions that prevent them from openly promoting cigarettes in the media. They have instead moved to point-of-sale and soft-marketing tactics, including misinformation campaigns about the “dangers” of quitting smoking. “The actual expenditure on marketing probably hasn’t dropped very much,” says Kohrman.

Cigarettes and society

Strong marketing and the legitimization of cigarettes as a part of everyday life have led to the deep integration of cigarettes into Chinese society. While only 3 to 4 percent of women in China smoke, cigarettes are an important part of male identity and social mobility. The wide range of cigarette brands has led to the growth of high-end varieties favored by businessmen and politicians, with some brands costing as much as $50 a pack. The custom of cigarette gifting has existed in China for decades, and it is difficult for a young man to turn down a package of cigarettes from a senior colleague or supervisor.

There is also the fact that nicotine is highly addictive, and quitting is difficult in an environment where smoking cigarettes is socially sanctioned. Kohrman says, “When you take an incredibly addictive substance like nicotine and throw it into the mix of all of these norms and customs, it creates a pretty toxic brew.”

The future?

Tobacco control presents a formidable challenge in China, one that requires understanding the historical context and complex dimensions of the cigarette industry. “Cigarettes have been insinuated into so many aspects of daily life across China, and the market for this product has now become so closely enmeshed with matters of government finance and operations,” says Kohrman.

What happens in China could have implications for the entire world. “There’s a tobacco-induced human annihilation unfolding right now in almost every country and questions about how society and Big Tobacco are enmeshed, and how cigarette culture and government finance have become mutually supportive are pivotal,” says Kohrman. “Every country except Bhutan has legalized cigarette sales and is subject to many of the same general issues as China—only in China they’re on a much larger scale. But if it chooses to do so, China is in a position to lead and change the landscape in a very profound way.”   

China possesses vast coal reserves, and coal accounts for 70 percent of the country’s total energy consumption—3 billion tons per year. But China also consumes oil, natural gas, and an increasing amount of renewable energy.

Xuteng Hu, a Corporate Affiliates Visiting Fellow Program alumnus (2007–08), manages energy and materials development projects at PetroChina’s Petrochemical Research Institute in Beijing, where he serves as vice president.

Hu received his master’s and doctorate degrees in chemical engineering from Tsinghua University. 

PetroChina, one of China’s largest energy companies, has recently developed its own biojet fuel. The company is also researching other renewable energy technologies, including biofuel made from plant fiber.

During his year at Stanford University, Hu conducted research on the governance of China’s state-owned enterprises, focusing on energy companies like PetroChina, Sinopec, and China National Offshore Oil Corporation. He also studied strategies for the development and promotion of different forms of energy, ranging from coal to chemicals and oil to natural gas. Jean C. Oi, a political science professor and director of the Stanford China Program, served as Hu’s research advisor.

Since returning to China three years ago, Hu has managed the research and development of synthetic petroleum-based materials, and the construction of major pilot petrochemical plants. Perhaps most exciting of all, the biojet fuel project he led conducted a successful demonstration flight in October.

Of his time at Stanford, Hu says: “My experiences helped me think about corporate governance structure, energy development, and other issues related closely to my work from different perspectives, such as culture and society. It also enhanced my understanding of cultural and business exchanges between China and the West.”