America’s preeminence in higher education is relatively new, and there is no reason to assume that U.S. schools will continue to lead the world a century from now. Will China challenge its position in the twenty-first? The modern university was born in Germany. In the twentieth century, the United States leapfrogged Germany to become the global leader in higher education. Today, American institutions dominate nearly every major ranking of global universities. However, America’s supremacy in higher education is under great stress, particularly at its public universities. At the same time Chinese universities are on the ascent. Thirty years ago, Chinese institutions were reopening after the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution; today they are some of the most innovative educational centers in the world. Will China threaten American primacy?

Please join us for the China Program’s Author Series.

The book is available for purchase here. 

Speaker

William C. Kirby is T. M. Chang Professor of China Studies at Harvard University and Spangler Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is a University Distinguished Service Professor. Professor Kirby serves as Chairman of the Harvard China Fund and Faculty Chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai. At Harvard he has served as Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Chairman of the History Department, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His current projects include case studies of trend-setting Chinese businesses and a comparative study of higher education in China, Europe, and the United States. His recent books include Can China Lead? (Harvard Business Review Press) and China and Europe on the New Silk Road (Oxford University Press). His latest book, Empires of Ideas: Creating Modern Universities from Germany to America to China (Harvard University Press), is now available.

Discussant

Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Previously, he served as chair of the Department of Sociology, and as director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

SCCEI Fall Seminar Series 

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Tuesday, November 15, 2022      11:00 am -12:15 pm Pacific Time

Goldman Room E401, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way | Zoom Meeting 

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Inequality by Design: China’s Distinctive Political Economy

With modest income differences and virtually no private wealth four decades ago, China’s inequalities of income and wealth are now almost as extreme as in the United States and Russia. This development is more puzzling than commonly recognized, and analyses of the determinants of household income do not address its institutional origins. Widening inequality is a byproduct of China’s highly distinctive political economy, which is designed to preserve communist party control and enforce the priorities of the central state. These include an enduringly large capital-intensive state sector supported by a financial system unusually reliant on state-owned banks; a tax base highly dependent on business volume rather than profits; a distorted fiscal system that drives local governments into property development; and political constraints on documenting and taxing private assets. These structures create large concentrations of capital and favor those with access to it, transferring incomes from households to corporations while crippling the state’s capacity to remediate resulting inequalities.

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About the Speaker 
 

Andrew Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute. Previously, he served as chair of the department of sociology, and as director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies.

A political sociologist, Walder has long specialized on the sources of conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His publications on China have ranged from the political and economic organization of the Mao era to changing patterns of stratification, social mobility, and political conflict in the post-Mao era. His current research focuses on popular political mobilization in late-1960s China and the subsequent collapse and rebuilding of the Chinese party-state. He holds an AB from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Michigan.

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Seminar Series Moderators

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Most recently, Rozelle's research focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition in China. In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner. 

 

Hongbin Li is the Co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

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A NOTE ON LOCATION

This seminar is a hybrid event. Please join us in person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing, or join remotely via Zoom.

Questions? Contact Heather Rahimi at hrahimi@stanford.edu

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In this talk, Hyunjoon Park will give a brief overview of how Korean families have changed over the last three decades in various family behaviors. Although the trends of falling marriage rates and rising divorce rates, along with the increase in the population living alone, are well known, less known is divergence in those family behaviors between the more and less educated. Tracing family changes differently for those at higher and lower ends of the educational hierarchy highlights growing educational differentials in family life. Compared to their college-educated counterparts, it is increasingly difficult for those without a college degree to form and maintain a family in Korea, making the Korean family a 'luxury good.'

Hyunjoon Park is Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology and director of the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Park is interested in education, inequality and family in cross-national comparative perspective, focusing on South Korea and other East Asian societies. In recent years, he has studied changes in marriage, divorce, and living arrangements as well as consequences of demographic and economic trends for education, well-being, and socioeconomic outcomes of children, adolescents, and young adults in Korea. Park has published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals. He is the author of the book, Re-Evaluating Education in Japan and Korea: De-mystifying Stereotypes (2013 Routledge) and a Korean-language book, Changes in Intergenerational Social Mobility: Has Korean Society Become More Open? (2021, Pakyoungstory). A new book, Diversity and the Transition to Adulthood in America, coauthored with Phoebe Ho and Grace Kao, has been published this summer from the University of California Press.

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

Webinar recording: https://youtu.be/OuqgZCnXyo4 

When the U.S. government incarcerated over 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II (most of whom were U.S. citizens), Japanese Americans struggled to find a sense of normalcy behind the barbed wire. For some, this was achieved by playing baseball. 

Using baseball as a lens to explore the history of Japanese Americans and the U.S.–Japan relationship, this webinar offers K–12 educators a virtual tour of “Baseball’s Bridge to the Pacific,” a special exhibit currently on display at Dodger Stadium. The tour will be led by Kerry Yo Nakagawa, the founder and director of the Nisei Baseball Research Project (NBRP). The exhibit celebrates the 150th anniversary of U.S.–Japan diplomacy (1872–2022) and chronicles the introduction and development of baseball in Japan since the early 1870s. The exhibit’s photos, memorabilia, and artifacts offer a unique glimpse into key milestones of Japanese and Japanese Americans in baseball over the past 150 years. 

Join Nakagawa as he brings the legacy of Japanese Americans and baseball to life, live from Dodger Stadium! Attendees will receive a PDF of free curriculum materials on teaching about baseball and Japanese American incarceration, developed by SPICE and NBRP for high school and community college teachers.

This webinar is sponsored by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), the Nisei Baseball Research Project (NBRP), the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA), and the USC U.S.-China Institute.