David W. Brady is a political scientist whose work encompasses American politics and legislative bodies, international political trends, and comparative politics. Brady holds the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy endowed chair at the Graduate School of Business and is a professor of political science in Stanford University's School of Humanities and Sciences. A dedicated and popular teacher, Professor Brady is a past recipient of Stanford's Phi Beta Kappa Distinguished Teacher Award, presented for his work with undergraduates, and of the Robert K. Jaedicke Silver Apple Award, presented by the Stanford Business School Alumni Association for his participation in alumni activities.

Brady recently served as an associate dean for academic affairs at the Business School and continues to serve as director of the School's programs in executive education. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and senior fellow by courtesy at the Institute for International Studies, both on campus. David is also co-director of the University's Social Science History Institute and associate director of the University's Public Policy Program. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the advisory council for the Kansai Silicon Valley Venture Forum.

His publications include Change and Continuity in House Elections (eds. with J. Cogan), Stanford University Press (2000), Revolving Gridlock, Westview Press (1998); "Congress in the Era of the Permanent Campaign," Brookings Review, forthcoming 2000; "The Roots of Careerism in the U.S. House of Representatives," Legislative Studies Quarterly, (1999); "The SNTV and the Politics of Electoral Systems in Korea," in Electoral Systems in Asia (University of Michigan Press (1999); "Out of Step, Out of Office: Legislative Voting Behavior and House Election Outcomes," in Change and Continuity in House Elections, Stanford University Press (1999).

Internet use in China has recently grown at a tremendous pace, and today there are more than 17 million users. In this talk, Harwit examines government control over the physical data pipelines and network content. He explores the management and revenue flows from the information highway, and political efforts to regulate the content that appears on Chinese computer screens. He also analyzes the post-WTO role foreign companies may have in the network's future development. He concludes that, though the telecommunications bureaucracy is keen to extract monetary profit from the Internet, political drive for control over content is muted by schizophrenic government policy, user self-censorship and, in the short run, user demographics. Eric Harwit is an Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii, and a visiting scholar at Stanford's Asia / Pacific Research Center for the 2000-2001 academic year. A 1984 graduate of Cornell University, he received a diploma from the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing in 1990, and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. Professor Harwit is the author of China's Automobile Industry (M.E. Sharpe, 1995), and several other articles on industrial and economic development in Asia. He is currently writing a book about the politics of telecommunication in China, and has a Fulbright research grant to conduct a study of telecommunications in rural China in mid-2001.

Few will dispute that the essence of our times can be conveyed by two simple words: " Global" and "Change". Economies, technologies, information, media, culture, and indeed security issues have been vastly internationalized and transformed in the incredibly short period of the half century following World War II . The world is being consumed by the forces of change driven by the engines of technology and geoeconomics. Economic change and technological development, like wars or sports, are usually not beneficial to all. Progress only benefits those groups of nations that are able to take advantage of newer methods of science, just as they damage those that are less prepared technologically, culturally, and politically to respond to change. Only societies free of rigid doctrinal orthodoxy and possessing attributes such as the freedoms to inquire, dispute, and experiment; a belief in the possibilities of improvement; a concern for the practical rather than the abstract; and rationalism that defies mandarin codes, religious dogmas, and traditional folklore, are likely to prosper in the new millennium. In any case, we must look with caution into the future. History teaches us that the only thing we can be certain of is that we will be surprised; our vision may well turn out to be distorted and myopic, our best guesses will often be wrong and we are likely to be disappointed in our expectations. We can only be certain of continuing conflict on a technology-driven planet with concurrent dwindling resources and increasing population.

Since gaining its independence in 1965, the Republic of Singapore has attracted a level of scholarly and journalistic interest disproportionate to its tiny size. Singapore has defied categorization. Time and again it has seemed to swim against the tide of intellectual and ideological fashion. It practiced a market economy and free trade before these became the rage. It maintained one-party dominance long after pluralistic democracy became the global norm that it is today. Singapore's "uniquely anomalous status as the world's richest nondemocracy" (Larry Diamond) makes it a puzzling exception to the rule that economically advanced countries practice political pluralism. Most recently, financial and political turbulence elsewhere in East Asia have highlighted the extraordinary stability of the Singapore system. Has the ruling People's Action Party found the answer to successful governance in a global economy? Are the city-state's leaders forcibly postponing the inevitableÑperhaps even imminentÑonset of political liberalization? Or is there another way of resolving the "Singapore puzzle"? Chee Soon Juan joined the opposition Singapore Democratic Party in 1992. Three months later he was dismissed from his position as a lecturer at the National University of Singapore. His writings include To Be Free: Stories from Asia's Struggle against Oppression (1998) and Dare to Change: An Alternative Vision for Singapore (1994). Cherian George is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. From 1990 to 1999 he worked as a journalist for Singapore's leading English-language newspaper, The Straits Times. He is a founding member of The Roundtable, a nonpartisan discussion group in Singapore.

In 1975Ð76 the fall of Saigon was followed by national reunification and the establishment of the Socialist Republic. Access to the Mekong Delta was widely expected to facilitate rapid neo-Stalinist industrialization and the appearance of a powerful military threat to capitalist SEA. But this did not happen. By 1981 partial reforms had permitted all state enterprises to operate in markets and some degree of agricultural decollectivisation. In the second half of the 1980s there was a clear de-Stalinization of everyday life. And by 1989Ð90 a recognizable market economy had emerged. Since then the Vietnamese Communist Party has, with some success, negotiated a major opening-up of the country to foreign contacts. Vietnam has joined ASEAN, and has seen the emergence of land, labor, and capital markets, and the confused processes by which classes form. Fundamental economic and political change has therefore occurred. Growth has been rather fast and the use of state violence minimal. Politically, for the still-Leninist VCP, the shift from Plan to Market has been a great success. What is the political economy basis for this? Despite emergent capitalist classes and a market economy, the political economy of "post-transition" Vietnam is heavily marked by its recent history, and remains very different from other ASEAN members. Notwithstanding revolutionary change, dualities common to both the traditional and modern political economies have offered great potential for political restructuring. In this sense "development doctrines" are perhaps less exotic and more indigenous than elsewhere in SEA. This facilitates relatively harmonious political adaptation and is the key to understanding change. For example, wide rural land access, with a collective tinge in the most densely populated areas, has a strong and pervasive effect upon the macro political economy. "Voice and exit" are enhanced. Thus we see rather high levels of migration, and risk bearing be farmers. Rural GDP has grown fast through the 1990s. Also, real wages in urban areas tend to be higher and the labor regime less brittle. What are the political implications of such a land regime? At the end of the day, one reason for the lack of extensive state violence against the population seems to be that the party/state has sufficient sources of support and power for tense economic issues in the rural areas to be fought out without property rights needing violence to enforce them. These issues are fought out locally (within cooperatives and communes) and in macro contexts (access to world markets). But in the rural areas the state does not, apparently, need to support particular economic interests for its survival. One reason for this is that the "land issue" has been addressed through the adaptation of socialist models, so that large-scale land property is not (yet?) a major issue. Dominant groups in the rural areas do not depend upon land access for their incomes. Adam Fforde is a development economist. He holds an Oxford MA (Engineering Science and Economics), a London MSc (Economics) and a Cambridge PhD (Economics). He studied Vietnamese in Hanoi during 1978/79 and was a visiting scholar at the National Economics University (Hanoi) in 1985Ð86. He lived in Vietnam from 1987 to 1992 while working as an advisor to the Swedish aid program, and in Australia from 1992 to 1999, where he was a visiting fellow at the ANU and Chairman of Aduki Pty Ltd (Consultants). He is now senior fellow at the SEA Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. He has published on topics including the economic development of north Vietnam prior to 1975, agricultural cooperatives, and the transition from plan to market. He is currently working on class formation and the emergence of factor markets in the 1990s, industrial reform since the early 1960s, and Vietnamese development doctrine.

As generally described, Japan's development of the internet industry has fallen behind even other Asian economies. Even though Japan's first trial of policy reformation in the mid 1980s was relatively early, what made this critical delay? Shin Yasunobe will present and evaluate Japan's policy track record in the 1990s. He will also present unique aspects of Internet development recently observed in Japan, and their implications for the future. Shin Yasunobe, formerly a high-ranking official with the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) has been appointed executive director at Stanford Japan CenterÑResearch, located in Kyoto. Yasunobe is a twenty-two year veteran of MITI who left his post as director of its Electronic Policy Division in the Machinery and Information Industries Bureau to take the reins of a new project at Stanford Japan CenterÑResearch. This project will be a set of comparative studies on the international dimensions of the Internet and e-commerce, with particular focus on the Asian economies.

Since the 1960s, television has been a fixture of the Japanese household, and NHK's TV news has until very recently been the dominant, and most trusted, source of political information for the Japanese citizen. NHK's news style is distinctive among the broadcasting systems of industrialized countries; it emphasizes facts over interpretation and gives unusual priority to coverage of the national bureaucracy. In his talk, Krauss will argue that this approach is not simply a reflection of Japanese culture, but a result of the organization and processes of NHK and their relationship with the state. These factors had profound consequences for the state's postwar re-legitimization, while the commercial networks' recent challenge to NHK has helped engender the wave of cynicism currently faced by the state. Professor Krauss is a leading expert on Japanese Politics, U.S.-Japan relations, and Japan's political economy. He also is the director of the International Career Associates Program (ICAP) at IR/PS. His most recent book, Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News (Cornell University Press, 2000), discusses Japan's mammoth public broadcaster, and its relationship to and consequences for politics. He recently received a prestigious Abe Fellowship to conduct research on Japanese foreign policy decision making in APEC and its impact on U.S.-Japan relations. Krauss is co-editor of Media and Politics in Japan and has co-edited and written contributing articles for Democracy in Japan and Conflict in Japan. He wrote a monograph for the Foreign Policy Association, entitled Japan's Democracy: How Much Change? and has authored many articles in professional journals of political science and Asian studies.