The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is pleased to announce its new China Policy Fellowship, which will bring to Stanford mid-career to senior-level experts with extensive research experience on issues vital to U.S. China policy and influence in the policymaking process. With this new offering, APARC seeks to apply cutting-edge academic analysis to pressing challenges affecting U.S. policy toward China and to strengthen U.S.-China relations.

The fellowship will be awarded annually to one expert. While at Stanford, the China Policy Fellow will undertake original research in his/her area of expertise and will play a lead role in organizing a major conference on a topic central to the U.S.-China policy agenda. Each fellow’s work and annual conference will result in a publication that will help advance a deeper understanding of China and its aims.

The fellowship will be hosted by APARC’s China Program, whose mission is to facilitate multidisciplinary, social science-oriented research on contemporary China, with a dual emphasis on basic and policy-relevant research. The appointment of the inaugural 2021-22 China Policy Fellow will begin in the fall quarter of 2021. The new fellowship is made possible thanks to the generosity of an APARC supporter.

“The need to enhance understanding within the United States about China has never been more critical,” says China Program Director Jean Oi, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics. “In these times when divergent claims and bellicose propositions are regularly made by politicians and policymakers in the United States and in China, the China Policy Fellowship will help us promote dialogue between the two nations and empirically-driven research relevant to U.S. China relations. I am delighted that we are able to offer this new fellowship opportunity.”

The application deadline for the 2021-22 China Policy Fellowship is February 15, 2021.

This podcast conversation with Gi-Wook Shin was originally produced by CSIS.

South Korea may seem to be a mature democracy from the outside, but Gi-Wook Shin, director of APARC and the Korea Program, warns that internally, democratic norms in the ROK are starting to weaken and crumble. He joins Victor Cha and Andrew Schwartz on The Impossible State, a podcast by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), to further discuss his recent Journal of Democracy article, "South Korea's Democratic Decay," and how democratic backsliding in the Moon administration is part of a broader trend of the global decline of democracy. Listen above to the full conversation.

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This article by Kiyoteru Tsutsui and Charles Crabtree was originally published in The Hill.

On Sept. 16, Yoshihide Suga was elected as Japan’s 99th prime minister, following the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Suga was Abe’s right-hand man, serving as the chief cabinet secretary and achieving the longest tenure in Japanese history for this position. Now as prime minister, Suga is widely expected to continue many of Abe’s policies and has publicly vowed to do so. 

True to his words, his cabinet appointments include many holdovers, and his policy pronouncements so far demonstrate few deviations from Abe’s agenda, which Suga helped shape. Suga will first focus on measures to address health and economic setbacks caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and then will pursue other goals such as regulatory reform, digitalization to improve efficiency in government agencies, and the reorganization of small firms and local banks to increase their productivity. 

None of these is a radically new idea and, at least initially, Suga is unlikely to steer Japan away from the direction that Abe set over the past seven years and eight months. However, there are some key differences between the two men that could produce different electoral and policy outcomes for Suga’s administration.

Continue reading this article in The Hill >>

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The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) invites applications for three types of postdoctoral fellowship in contemporary Asia studies for the 2021-22 academic year. Appointments for all three fellowship offerings are for one year beginning in fall quarter 2021.

APARC is committed to supporting junior scholars in the field of Asia studies to the greatest extent possible and that has become even more important during COVID-19, as graduate students are especially vulnerable to the adverse impacts of the pandemic, facing the loss of funding opportunities and access to field research.

The Center offers postdoctoral fellowships that promote multidisciplinary research on contemporary Japan, contemporary Korea, and contemporary Asia broadly defined. Learn more about each fellowship and its eligibility and specific application requirements:

Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Japan

The fellowship supports multidisciplinary research on contemporary Japan in a broad range of disciplines including political science, economics, sociology, law, policy studies, and international relations. The application deadline is January 4, 2021.