Professor Yu Keping will systematically survey the dominant processes and key issues of China’s governance changes over the last 30 years since reform. His talk will summarize the major achievements and the ongoing problems of this 30 year long process. It will offer a brief analysis of the underlying reasons for these reforms and the main characteristics of China’s governance model. After enumerating an array of factual evidence, Yu will show that the drive behind China’s governance reforms stems from unitary governance to pluralist governance, centralization to decentralization, rule of man to rule of law, regulatory government to service oriented government, and from internal party democracy to the people’s democracy.

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Dr. YU Keping is the Deputy President of the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau (CCTB), and the founding Director of the China Center for Global Governance and Development (CCGGD). He also serves as Prof. and Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations at Peking University, and Prof. and Director of the Institute of Political Development at Tsinghua University. He was a visiting professor or senior fellow at many top universities, including Harvard University, Duke University in the US and Free University in Berlin. His fields of expertise include political philosophy, comparative politics, globalization, civil society, governance and politics in China. Among his many books are Governance and Rule of Law in China (ed., Brill, 2012) and Democracy Is A Good Thing (Brookings, 2010).  As a leading intellectual in China, Professor Yu was selected as one of the “30 most influential figures in the past 30 years since the reform in China” in 2008 and ranked 19 in “2011 Global Top 100 Thinkers” by Foreign Policy in the US.

Abstract:

On October 11 and 12th, the Democracy in Taiwan Project at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, in cooperation with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, will hold its 8th annual conference, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated by at least nine Pacific Rim countries that has the potential to re-shape economic relations in the region for the coming decades. This conference will bring together policymakers and scholars from Taiwan with leading specialists from other Asian countries and the U.S. to examine the evolution, geopolitics and future of the TPP, and also to consider how Taiwan is responding to the challenge of freer trade and what its strategy for deepening its trade relations and maintaining its economic development should be.

Among the issues to be addressed are:

• How the economic and trading environment of East Asia is evolving, and what Taiwan’s future place will be in that regional environment.
• The development of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a potentially far-reaching new economic and strategic framework for the region, including the origins and evolution of the TPP, US participation and China’s response, and the implications for the balance of power in East Asia.
• Taiwan’s response to the challenge of freer trade to date, including the impact on US-Taiwan relations and domestic constituencies for free trade in Taiwan.
• The perspectives of other key countries in the region toward the TPP, including Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China.

This event is co-sponsored by The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center

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