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Donald K. Emmerson is a professor at Stanford University, where he heads the Southeast Asia Forum in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and is affiliated with the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. 

Prior to joining Stanford’s faculty, Emmerson taught political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and spent time as a visiting scholar at the Australian National University (Canberra), the Institute of Advanced Studies (Princeton), and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC), among other institutions.  He received his Yale University PhD in political science following a Princeton University BA in international affairs.

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Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Affiliated Faculty, CDDRL
Affiliated Scholar, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies
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At Stanford, in addition to his work for the Southeast Asia Program and his affiliations with CDDRL and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Donald Emmerson has taught courses on Southeast Asia in East Asian Studies, International Policy Studies, and Political Science. He is active as an analyst of current policy issues involving Asia. In 2010 the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars awarded him a two-year Research Associateship given to “top scholars from across the United States” who “have successfully bridged the gap between the academy and policy.”

Emmerson’s research interests include Southeast Asia-China-US relations, the South China Sea, and the future of ASEAN. His publications, authored or edited, span more than a dozen books and monographs and some 200 articles, chapters, and shorter pieces.  Recent writings include The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21st Century (ed., 2020); “‘No Sole Control’ in the South China Sea,” in Asia Policy  (2019); ASEAN @ 50, Southeast Asia @ Risk: What Should Be Done? (ed., 2018); “Singapore and Goliath?,” in Journal of Democracy (2018); “Mapping ASEAN’s Futures,” in Contemporary Southeast Asia (2017); and “ASEAN Between China and America: Is It Time to Try Horsing the Cow?,” in Trans-Regional and –National Studies of Southeast Asia (2017).

Earlier work includes “Sunnylands or Rancho Mirage? ASEAN and the South China Sea,” in YaleGlobal (2016); “The Spectrum of Comparisons: A Discussion,” in Pacific Affairs (2014); “Facts, Minds, and Formats: Scholarship and Political Change in Indonesia” in Indonesian Studies: The State of the Field (2013); “Is Indonesia Rising? It Depends” in Indonesia Rising (2012); “Southeast Asia: Minding the Gap between Democracy and Governance,” in Journal of Democracy (April 2012); “The Problem and Promise of Focality in World Affairs,” in Strategic Review (August 2011); An American Place at an Asian Table? Regionalism and Its Reasons (2011); Asian Regionalism and US Policy: The Case for Creative Adaptation (2010); “The Useful Diversity of ‘Islamism’” and “Islamism: Pros, Cons, and Contexts” in Islamism: Conflicting Perspectives on Political Islam (2009); “Crisis and Consensus: America and ASEAN in a New Global Context” in Refreshing U.S.-Thai Relations (2009); and Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (edited, 2008).

Prior to moving to Stanford in 1999, Emmerson was a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he won a campus-wide teaching award. That same year he helped monitor voting in Indonesia and East Timor for the National Democratic Institute and the Carter Center. In the course of his career, he has taken part in numerous policy-related working groups focused on topics related to Southeast Asia; has testified before House and Senate committees on Asian affairs; and been a regular at gatherings such as the Asia Pacific Roundtable (Kuala Lumpur), the Bali Democracy Forum (Nusa Dua), and the Shangri-La Dialogue (Singapore). Places where he has held various visiting fellowships, including the Institute for Advanced Study and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. 



Emmerson has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale and a BA in international affairs from Princeton. He is fluent in Indonesian, was fluent in French, and has lectured and written in both languages. He has lesser competence in Dutch, Javanese, and Russian. A former slam poet in English, he enjoys the spoken word and reads occasionally under a nom de plume with the Not Yet Dead Poets Society in Redwood City, CA. He and his wife Carolyn met in high school in Lebanon. They have two children. He was born in Tokyo, the son of U.S. Foreign Service Officer John K. Emmerson, who wrote the Japanese Thread among other books.

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Donald Emmerson Speaker
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This lecture will examine the origins of the Cold War in East Asia, how early the Cold War came to Korea, how the Korean War transformed the containment doctrine, how it solidified the continuing divisions in East Asia, and how it transformed defense policy in the United States, leading to a far-flung structure of seemingly permanent military bases in South Korea, Japan, Germany, and many more countries that lasts down to 2010.  Professor Cumings will also examine problems of history and memory regarding what most Americans call "the forgotten war."

Bruce Cumings teaches international history, modern Korean history and East Asian political economy at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1987 and where he is the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor and the chairman of the History Department.  He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975. He has taught at Swarthmore College (1975-77), the University of Washington (1977-86), and Northwestern University (1994-97). He is the author of the two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990), War and Television (Visal-Routledge, 1992), Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (W. W. Norton, 1997; updated ed. 2005), Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American—East Asian Relations (Duke University Press, 1999; paperback 2002), North Korea: Another Country (New Press, 2003), co-author of Inventing the Axis of Evil  (New Press, 2004), and is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea (forthcoming). He is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Nation, Current History, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Le Monde Diplomatique. The first volume of his Origins won the John King Fairbank book award of the American Historical Association for the best book on East Asia in the previous two years, and the second volume won the Quincy Wright book award of the International Studies Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999, and is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation-funded Foreign Area Fellows program, NEH, the MacArthur Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, and the Abe Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council. He was also the principal historical consultant for the Thames Television/PBS 6-hour documentary, Korea: The Unknown War. He recently published Dominion From Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power, which was ranked as one of the top 25 books of 2009 by the Atlantic Monthly. Random House will publish his short book, The Korean War, on the war’s 60th anniversary in 2010. He is also contracted to publish a new, single-volume synoptic edition of The Origins of the Korean War.

Philippines Conference Room

Bruce Cumings Professor and Chairman of the History Department, University of Chicago Speaker
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Since the inception of reform and opening-up thirty years ago, China has established a record of astonishing economic achievements and is, or will soon be, surpassing Japan as the world's second largest economy, something few people would have imagined three decades ago.

The information and communications technologies (ICT) industry is the backbone of the Chinese export driven growth strategy, which many argue as the primary driver of China's economic growth. Recent ICT policy initiatives demonstrate China's shifting strategy in pursuing a different path for the next phase of economic growth.

Promoting indigenous innovation and strengthening information security may be considered the two major thrusts of Chinese ICT policy initiatives. Technical standards, IPR treatments, government procurement, and special industry incentives are some examples of the former domain; internet filtering, compulsory certification of information security product, and encryption control are examples of the latter.

Many of these initiatives are controversial in the international trade arena. However, the real challenges of these policy initiatives concern whether they work to achieve the Chinese government's goal of maintaining sustainable growth. This presentation will attempt to evaluate these challenges.

Dr. John C. Chiang was appointed as Director of Global Innovation Research Center at Peking University in June 2008. He joined PKU in February 2006 as Professor in the Department of Management of Technology at the School of Software and Microelectronics. Dr. Chiang is also President of USITO, the organization representing five major US IT industry trade associations and close to 50 individual U.S. IT companies in China, a role he has held since October 2008.

Dr. Chiang came to China in 2000, joining Motorola China as Deputy GM of the infrastructure business unit, spearheading its post-WTO strategy. He then moved to Motorola China HQ, serving as Senior Director of Strategy and Business Development. In 2003, he served as Director of Motorola China R&D Institute, and in 2004, he became the founding president of Motorola (China) Technologies, Limited.

From October 2006 to September 2008, Dr. Chiang was a Partner in DragonBridge Capital, a U.S.-based merchant bank with China as its primary serving market.

Dr. Chiang was born in Beijing, raised in Taiwan, and received the Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1975. He received the EMBA from Georgia State University in 1989.

After his academic career, Dr. Chiang joined Bell Laboratories in 1979, and later held progressive technical and managerial positions at Racal-Milgo, Hayes, and GTE. He was Senior Vice President of Operations at KG Telecom and led the launch of the first private mobile services in Taiwan, during 1997-2000.

Dr. Chiang currently also serves as the Vice Chair of the China Association of Standards and as an Investment Advisor to the Beijing Municipal Government.

Philippines Conference Room

John C. Chiang Director, Global Innovation Research Center Speaker Peking University
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The Stanford China Program in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies will host a special series of seminars to mark 60 Years of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Over the course of the winter and spring terms, we will have six leading scholars, each examining one of the six decades of the PRC's history. Our premise is that history matters. The speaker on each decade will characterize their decade, note shifts within that time, identify the pivotal events, and discuss how the decade shaped what happened afterwards.

Professor Teiwes is a scholar with an international reputation in his main area of research, Chinese elite politics. He has written extensively on re-evaluations of Chinese Communist Party history, 1935-76, and is currently researching leadership politics in the post-Mao era. His wider areas of interest lie in Chinese politics more broadly, communist and post-communist systems, the international communist movement, and American foreign policy. He is the author of several works, including Politics and Purges in China (1979, 2nd ed. 1993), Politics at Mao's Court (1990), The Tragedy of Lin Biao (1996), China's Road to Disaster (1999), and The End of the Maoist Era (2007) (the latter three studies co-authored with Warren Sun).

Philippines Conference Room

Frederick Teiwes Professor, Department of Government and International Relations Speaker University of Sydney, Australia
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The health sector's successes in Vietnam have been described as "legendary" by international donors, but there is always the other side of the story. One can question the objectivity of reports from the government of Vietnam, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. One can wonder in what areas the health sector has failed, who has paid for a "success story" and at what cost, and how much information is well documented and has been made public. Are there "stylized facts" regarding those aspects of health that have been successfully reformed compared with those where reform has lagged? Given these concerns, how can the research community contribute to improving health policy in Vietnam?

Dr. Truong will share his thought on recent socioeconomic development in Vietnam, discuss key health policy issues, and reflect upon his experiences including a research project in which the University of Queensland collaborated with Ministry of Health of Vietnam. Additional evidence will be drawn from a study of the cost-effectiveness of interventions to reduce tobacco use in Vietnam.

Khoa Truong was a visiting faculty member at the Hanoi School of Public Health and a research fellow at the Health Strategy and Policy Institute in 2008-2009.  Prior to that he spent six years as a doctoral fellow at the RAND Corporation.  His research interests include tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug control policies; the impacts of built environments on health; international health issues; and economic development.

He received his doctorate and master of philosophy in policy analysis from the Pardee RAND Graduate School and earned a master's degree in development economics from Williams College. A native of Vietnam, he began his career working with NGOs in bilateral and multilateral development projects in Southeast Asia. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and wrote “most outstanding paper” submitted at an AcademyHealth's Annual Research Meeting (acknowledged as the premier forum for sharing the results of scholarship on health services).

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Dr. Khoa Truong Assistant Professor of Department of Public Health Sciences Speaker Clemson University
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Daniel C. Sneider: Since the Democratic Party of Japan won in the country's August national election, Japan watchers have worried that the new government might try to upset the status quo and ease away from the United States. The DPJ is implementing a new paradigm -- but not the one people think.

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The coming to power of a new party in Japan, with a strong mandate to rule, is unprecedented in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the Japanese elections in August of this year, there has been much discussion, particularly in the Japanese media, about the foreign policy orientation of the new Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)-led administration. Some commentators see an “anti-American” tilt—evidenced by differing views on the relocation of U.S. bases in Okinawa and the renewal of Japanese naval refueling operations in the Indian Ocean.

This viewpoint misses the foreign policy forest for its trees. The paradigm-shifting potential of this change lies much more in the DPJ’s desire to re-center Japan’s foreign policy on Asia. Across the spectrum of the DPJ, from former socialists on the left to those who came out of the conservative Liberal Democratio Party (LDP), there is broad agreement on the need to put much greater emphasis on Japan’s ties to the rest of Asia, particularly to China and South Korea.

The new Asianism in Japanese foreign policy was on display at the October 10 triangular summit of the Chinese, South Korean, and Japanese leaders, held in Beijing. It was only the second time these three have met on their own and the meeting was substantive, covering everything from coordinating on North Korea and economic stimulus policy to taking initial steps toward formation of a new East Asian Community. “Until now, we have tended to be too reliant on the United States,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama told reporters after the meeting, adding that “The Japan-U.S. alliance remains important, but as a member of Asia, I would like to develop policies that focus more on Asia.”

The dominant foreign policy camp in Japan has been what Hitoshi Tanaka, a former senior foreign ministry official and close advisor to the DPJ, calls “alliance traditionalists,” whom he defines as those who “place the maintenance of a robust alliance with the United States above all other foreign policy priorities.” In the view of some DPJ policy advisors, the previous conservative governments mistakenly tried to cope with the challenge of a rising China by getting as close to the United States as possible. The decision to send troops to Iraq and the Indian Ocean was prompted not by any deep support for those causes but rather by the belief that this would ensure U.S. support in any tensions with China, and with North Korea.

All this took place as Sino-Japanese relations descended into their most troubled phase in the postwar period, prompted by former Prime Minister Koizumi’s provocative visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead. High-level contacts with China were frozen, tensions rose over territorial issues in the East China Sea, and rising nationalism on both sides culminated in the outbreak of government-sanctioned anti-Japanese riots in 2005 and a Chinese campaign to block Japan’s permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council.

There was an attempt by Koizumi’s conservative successors to roll back some of these tensions. But those signals were always mixed with the persistence of anti-Chinese views and the powerful camp of rightwing nationalists in and around the LDP who cling to a revisionist view of Japan’s wartime role, some even indulging in a vigorous defense of Japanese imperialism.

In the view of DPJ policy advisers, this pseudo-containment strategy is doomed to failure. Given the increasing economic interdependence between the United States and China, and their overlapping strategic interests, the United States will never form an anti-China front. Japan cannot rely solely, these advisers argue, on the U.S.-Japan security alliance to deal with China’s bid for regional hegemony.

Nor can Japan afford to indulge fantasies of confrontation with China, given its own extensive ties to its economy and society. Rather, the greater threat, in the view of many Japanese analysts, is being abandoned by the United States through the formation of a U.S.-China “Group of Two” that effectively excludes Japan, or relegates it to second-level status in the region.

Japan, those policymakers argue, needs to preempt that threat by engaging Asia on its own—not only China, but the entire region, from India back to Korea. The DPJ’s own policy vision, articulated by Prime Minister Hatoyama, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada, and party strongman Ichiro Ozawa, remains vaguely defined but has three clear elements:

  • The U.S.-Japan security alliance remains the cornerstone, but with limits.
  • Japan plays a leadership role in East Asian regionalism.
  • The “history” question must be resolved.

What does this mean? There should be little question, particularly after the initial meetings between the new government and the Obama administration, that the DPJ seeks to back away from the security alliance. Over the past fifteen years, the DPJ leadership has not only supported, but even led, the expansion of Japan’s security role, beginning with the passage of the 1992 law permitting Japanese participation
in peacekeeping operations and including the initial dispatch of naval forces to the Indian Ocean in response to 9/11. Though the DPJ has made commitments to reduce the U.S. presence in Okinawa, it is already realizing how difficult that is to accomplish; some kind of compromise on this issue is imminent. Similarly, Foreign Minister Okada’s visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan demonstrated a willingness to contribute, mostly through economic aid, to the security effort in both countries.

Prime Minister Hatoyama presented his somewhat romantic desire to reproduce the European experience to create an East Asian Community in September before the United Nations General Assembly. Hatoyama has indicated that he understands this is a long process, and has been careful to make clear that Japan has no intention of excluding the United States’ role in the region, nor the use of the dollar as a reserve currency. As Hatoyama put in his UN address:

Today, there is no way that Japan can develop without deeply involving itself in Asia and the Pacific region. Reducing the region’s security risks and sharing each other’s economic dynamism based on the principle of “open regionalism” will result in tremendous benefits not only for Japan but also for the region and the international community.

Given the historical circumstances arising from its mistaken actions in the past, Japan has hesitated to play a proactive role in this region. It is my hope that the new Japan can overcome this history and become a “bridge” among the countries of Asia.

I look forward to an East Asian community taking shape as an extension of the accumulated cooperation built up step by step among partners who have the capacity to work together, starting with fields in which we can cooperate—free frade agreements, finance, currency, energy, environment, disaster relief and more. Of course, Rome was not built in a day, so let us seek to move forward steadily on this, even if at a moderate pace.

DPJ policymakers advocate pursuit of an East Asian community as only one of a nest of regional structures, including a regional security system that might grow out of the Six Party talks on North Korea. They also embrace the idea of a Japan-U.S.-China strategic dialogue, based on their own perception that without the combined muscle of the United States and Japan, they cannot bring China to the table on a range of issues from energy to intellectual property.

The last element of the DPJ’s policy vision is to take another major step in clearing away the legacy of the wartime past. Hatoyama personally reaffirmed his government’s adherence to the statement on war responsibility issued by then Prime Minister Murayama in 1995, at the time of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war.

Hatoyama, Ozawa and others in the DPJ leadership are determined to confront the history issue in a way that eases tensions with China and South Korea and also closes doors backward. They will not only refuse to go to the Yasukuni Shrine but also want to remove the Class A war criminals whose “souls” are enshrined there by decision of the shrine authorities, to the consternation of the Emperor, among others. The DPJ led the hue and cry over the unapologetic revisionism of former Japanese air force chief of staff, General Toshio Tamogami, who wrote an essay justifying Japan’s colonialism and wartime aggression, including the attack on Pearl Harbor. Foreign Minister Okada has backed the creation of a joint history textbook by China, Japan and South Korea, based on the model followed by France and Germany. These are stances the LDP has been historically incapable of taking.

The DPJ draws some inspiration from the anti-imperial form of Asianism—“Small Nipponism”—championed by the late Tanzan Ishibashi, who served briefly as premier in the mid-1950s and who was allied to Hatoyama’s beloved grandfather, and former premier, Ichiro Hatoyama.

In the coming months, the Hatoyama government will have numerous opportunities to develop its new policies, particularly in the run-up to Japan’s hosting of the APEC summit next year. Undoubtedly, it will be difficult to implement in practice, but this new Asianism marks a clear turning point in Japan’s postwar foreign policy.

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Daniel C. Sneider: Since the Democratic Party of Japan won in the country's August national election, Japan watchers have worried the new government might try to upset the status quo and ease away from the United States. The DPJ is implementing a new paradigm -- but not the one people think.
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