Han Wang is a Professor of Public Administration at Guangxi University and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions at Stanford University.
Join us for our first ever lightning round edition of the SCCEI Young Researcher Workshop series. Each presenter will have 30 minutes to share their research and field audience questions.
Presenter: Wei Wei, Lazear-Liang Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Presenter: Tian Xie, Doctor of the Science of Law (JSD) Candidate, Stanford Law School
Presenter: Hanmo Yang, Lazear-Liang Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.
Workshops are held on select Fridays starting at 12 pm. Lunch will be provided!
Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.
Goldman Room, Encina Hall, E409
Speaker: Yunwei Chen, Postdoctoral Scholar, Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
Inappropriate antibiotic use presents a unique challenge to global health. Despite the widespread practice of limiting antibiotic use through doctor-prescribed prescriptions in developed countries, this approach may not be effective in resource-limited settings where providers are unable to prescribe effectively. Investing in quality primary healthcare may offer an effective alternative to promoting effective antibiotic dispensing in community settings, but evidence remains limited and few studies are devoted to these settings. Using extensive data collected from approximately 100 rural villages in remote areas of Yunnan Province in southwest China, this paper investigates how the practicing quality of village providers affects family antibiotic consumption. Provider quality was assessed through unannounced clinical visits by standardized patients presenting consistent conditions, which were then linked to antibiotic consumption data obtained from household surveys in the same villages. We identified causal effects using the newly developed double/debiased machine learning approach, by leveraging extensive information collected from village providers to approximate the optimal instrument, using a variety of machine learning algorithms. Our analysis indicates that improving the practicing quality of village doctors significantly reduced inappropriate family use of antibiotics in remote rural areas of China.
Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.
Workshops are held on select Fridays starting at 12 pm. Lunch will be provided!
Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.
Goldman Room, Encina Hall, E409
Friday, October 25, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way
Authors: Keng-Chi Chang, Ruixue Jia, Steven Liao, Margaret E. Roberts
One of the most critical recent developments in the global economy is how U.S.-China tensions are reshaping cross-border economic integration. To date, however, our understanding of its impact has been mainly limited to international trade and finance, as opposed to migration. To fill this gap, we explore the effect of recent tensions on international student flows to the United States that are critical to U.S. higher education, knowledge production, and the broader economy. We construct a unique granular dataset that combines the universe of international students in the United States from 2000--2021 with specific information about their institution and novel measures of the sensitivity of students' study fields. Using a series of difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs, we find that tensions have not had a uniform effect on students across states, institutions and fields of study. Instead, we show that tensions have shifted international students from China toward private institutions in blue states, and away from sensitive fields, particularly at the PhD level. The findings reveal new patterns of uneven international student decline in recent years and extend policy debates on technology security and export controls to cross-border human capital barriers.
Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.
Margaret Roberts is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political methodology and the politics of information, with a specific focus on methods of automated content analysis and the politics of censorship in China. Much of her research uses social media, online experiments, and large collections of texts to understand the influence of censorship and propaganda on access to information and beliefs about politics.
She received a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, and a M.S. in statistics and a B.A. in international relations and economics from Stanford University.
A NOTE ON LOCATION
Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall
Friday, October 11, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way
This paper investigates the relationship between power and longevity among Chinese Communist Party elites. Using a unique dataset of 2,223 members of the Central Committee and Alternate Central Committee from 1921 to 2022, this study explores whether higher-ranking officials enjoy longer lifespans and are less likely to experience unnatural deaths. By relying on original data on the causes and years of death for these political figures, the analysis provides new insights into the survival advantages conferred by power within an autocratic regime. The findings have significant implications for understanding the dynamics of leadership stability and regime durability in authoritarian contexts.
Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.
Professor Yuhua Wang is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Tying the Autocrat’s Hands (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Rise and Fall of Imperial China (Princeton University Press, 2022). The Rise and Fall of Imperial China won the 2023 Lubbert Best Book Award in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association. His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and China Quarterly. Yuhua received his B.A. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
A NOTE ON LOCATION
Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall
Speaker: Yuli Xu, Ph.D. Candidate, Economics Department, University of California San Diego
Women at different life stages may respond differently to economic shocks as they face varying trade-offs. This paper examines the impact of privatization on gender inequality across the life cycle. We leverage a unique event in China: the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the 1990s, which resulted in over 35 million layoffs and disrupted the previously enforced gender equality in employment. Leveraging both regional variations in reform intensity, proxied by initial differences in SOE employment share, and temporal variation in the reform, our event study analysis shows that older women were more likely to be laid off and had greater difficulty finding re-employment than men. Middle-aged women were less likely than men to transition into the emerging private sector or pursue entrepreneurship. Younger women faced reduced opportunities in SOEs and prioritized education more than men. Both young men and women postponed marriage. Further mechanism analysis suggests that privatization has increased demand for high-skilled workers and reinforced traditional gender role attitudes.
Our Young Researcher Workshops offer emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each workshop features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.
Workshops are held on select Fridays starting at 12 pm. Lunch will be provided!
Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.
Goldman Room, Encina Hall, E409
In 2024, SCCEI launched its inaugural Summer Study Program, marking the center’s first intensive field excursion in China with Stanford undergraduate students. To gain a deeper understanding of China, program participants traveled across urban and rural China, embarking on field visits focusing on a wide cross-section of issue areas, including education, healthcare, retail technology, and manufacturing.
Under the guidance of SCCEI’s faculty directors Hongbin Li and Scott Rozelle, program participants explored the key issues, challenges, and opportunities that China faces today. Sixteen students participated in this year’s program and hailed from multidisciplinary backgrounds, including economics, international relations, electrical engineering and computer science. Each student exhibited a passion for gaining a nuanced understanding of China and its role on the global stage as the world’s second largest economy.
On June 24, the student cohort gathered in Shanghai for the program’s kickoff. While in Shanghai, students toured the store and warehouse of the innovative grocery chain model, Freshippo. Next, students learned about cutting-edge environmental initiatives and spoke directly with young professionals at Ant Finance. The Shanghai leg of the trip also featured a tour of the Luckin Coffee factory, which is the largest roastary in Asia, and a networking dinner with local Stanford alumni.
“It was incredible talking to people in very high positions of power in these digital companies that we took tours of, for example, the Ant group or even some of the manufacturing companies we went to...that the core thesis of their drive for profit, it's underpinned by, ‘we need to be environmentally friendly.’” Arshia Mehta, a management science and engineering major going into consulting, reflected on these visits.
From Shanghai, students traveled to Deqing, a prosperous rural county in the Yangtze river delta region, where they explored a local health clinic and a pearl farm responsible for a sizable portion of global pearl production. From Deqing, students traveled to the nearby township of Tongxiang, where they dove into China’s dynamic manufacturing sector through informative conversations with factory personnel and tours of a conveyor belt factory and fiber glass company.
The program cohort then traveled to Xi’an, where they had the opportunity to marvel at the Terracotta Warriors and explore the city’s Muslim Quarter. From urban Xi’an, students rode a bus through tunnels and over mountains towards the rural county of Ningshan, where they visited a local parenting center, rural agricultural communities, and local hospitals. Students also visited local households where they conversed with villagers and families to learn more about rural life in Ningshan.
“Everybody wanted their children to go to college, everybody wanted to see a better future and how to help for that future,” said first year political science major Garrett Molloy, “that reminds me – no matter how distant we seem politically, people are actually very similar.”
Finally, after traveling overnight on a sleeper train, students arrived in Beijing. While in China’s capital, the cohort toured the newly operational Xiaomi EV factory, engaged with students from Tsinghua University High School and Peking University, and spoke directly with the country’s stock market regulators. Students also joined the 4th of July celebration hosted by the U.S. Embassy, where they were greeted by the U.S. Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns.
Reflecting on her conversation with the Ambassador, Amaya Marion, a junior studying international relations, said, “This trip makes me more certain that I do want to do something in the future with U.S.-China relations.”
The student cohort also had ample opportunity to explore China’s culture and history throughout the program. They visited a paleolithic archaeological site, learned to make traditional Chinese rice cakes, practiced the art of Chinese calligraphy, and visited the Zhujiajiao Water Town. The cohort also explored traditional indigo tye-dyeing practices and cloisonné, an ancient technique for decorating metalwork with colored enamel material.
Students not only gained new insights from the cultural and business visits, they also learned from one another. Stella Meier, Stanford junior studying international relations, remarked, “this is a really remarkable opportunity to see parts of China that otherwise wouldn't be accessible to me.”
Having experienced urban and rural China firsthand over the course of two weeks, students walked away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of China’s economy and people that, according to one student, “fundamentally reshaped my global perspective.” To continue facilitating transformative student exchanges with China, planning for SCCEI’s second annual Summer Program is already well underway.
Under the guidance of SCCEI’s faculty directors, 16 students traveled across urban and rural China, embarking on field visits including education, healthcare, retail technology, and manufacturing to gain a deeper understanding of China’s economy.
*This event is at capacity and registration has closed*
In three decades of reporting in China, and now Taiwan, Chris Buckley has often grappled with how memories of war, revolution, famine, massacre and extraordinary change are preserved, erased, rewritten and fought over. In this talk, he will discuss the power of the past in China under Xi Jinping, and the challenges and rewards of reporting on — and trying to understand — China in an age of shrinking access.
Join APARC as we honor Buckley, winner of the 2024 Shorenstein Journalism Award for his exemplary reporting on societal, cultural, political, foreign policy, and security issues in China and Taiwan.
Buckley's keynote will be followed by a conversation with two experts: Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Xueguang Zhou, the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session.
Moderator: William Dobson, coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and a member of the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award.
Chris Buckley grew up in Sydney, Australia, and began studying Chinese at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University. After graduating with a degree in history and abandoning the beginnings of a law degree, he went to Renmin University in Beijing, where he studied Chinese Communist Party history. He later returned to the Australian National University where he did graduate studies at the Contemporary China Center.
Chris has been the Chief China Correspondent for the New York Times since 2019. Before joining the Times in 2012, he was a senior correspondent in Beijing for Reuters News Agency for 7 years, and before that worked as a researcher and reporter for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune in Beijing. He has covered Chinese politics, foreign policy, social change and environmental issues for over 20 years, but is a newcomer to Taiwan where he now lives.
Chris was with colleagues a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2020 for coverage of mass detentions and repressive controls on Uyghurs and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang region. He was also one of the team of reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2021 for coverage of the COVID pandemic. Chris spent 76 days in Wuhan during the COVID lockdown there and was then obliged to leave China in May 2020. He spent two and half years working from southern Sydney, where he grew up, and moved to Taiwan in late 2022.
Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Mastro continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 and 2022 (FGO).
She has published widely, including in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Economist, and the New York Times. Her most recent book, "Upstart: How China Became a Great Power" (Oxford University Press, 2024), evaluates China’s approach to competition. Her book, "The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime" (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member.
She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.
Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. His main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.
One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy. Another ongoing project is an ethnographic study of rural governance in China.
The latest book, "The Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach," draws on more than a decade of fieldwork to offer a unified theoretical framework to explain how China's centralized political system maintains governance and how this process produces recognizable policy cycles that are obstacles to bureaucratic rationalization, professionalism, and the rule of law.
His other recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China, interactions among peasants, markets, and capital, access to financial resources in Chinese enterprises, multiple logics in village elections, and collusion among local governments in policy implementation.
Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the People's University of China. Zhou received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.
Will Dobson is the coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. Previously, he was the Chief International Editor at NPR where he led the network’s award-winning international coverage and oversaw a team of editors and correspondents in 17 overseas bureaus and Washington, DC. He is the author of The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, which examines the struggle between authoritarian regimes and the people who challenge them. It was selected as one of the “best books of the year” by Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic, The Telegraph, and Prospect, and it has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, German, Japanese, and Portuguese.
Prior to joining NPR, Dobson was Slate magazine’s Washington Bureau Chief, overseeing the magazine’s coverage of politics, jurisprudence, and international news. Previously, he served as the Managing Editor of Foreign Policy, overseeing the editorial planning of its award-winning magazine, website, and nine foreign editions. Earlier in his career, Dobson served as Newsweek International’s Asia Editor, managing a team of correspondents in more than 15 countries. His articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He has also served as a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dobson holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and a Master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Harvard University. He received his Bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from Middlebury College.
Bechtel Conference Center
Encina Hall Central (First Floor)
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Stanford CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Courtesy Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She is also a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was previously an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University. Mastro continues to serve in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as Deputy Director of Reserve Global China Strategy. For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, she won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016 and 2022 (FGO).
She has published widely, including in International Security, Security Studies, Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, the Economist, and the New York Times. Her most recent book, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (Oxford University Press, 2024), evaluates China’s approach to competition. Her book, The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019), won the 2020 American Political Science Association International Security Section Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member.
She holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University.
Her publications and commentary can be found at orianaskylarmastro.com and on Twitter @osmastro.
Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. His main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.
One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He works with students and colleagues to conduct participatory observations of government behaviors in the areas of environmental regulation enforcement, in policy implementation, in bureaucratic bargaining, and in incentive designs. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy.
Another ongoing project is an ethnographic study of rural governance in China. Zhou adopts a microscopic approach to understand how peasants, village cadres, and local governments encounter and search for solutions to emerging problems and challenges in their everyday lives, and how institutions are created, reinforced, altered, and recombined in response to these problems. Research topics are related to the making of markets, village elections, and local government behaviors.
His recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China (Modern China, 2011); interactions among peasants, markets, and capital (China Quarterly, 2011); access to financial resources in Chinese enterprises (Chinese Sociological Review, 2011, with Lulu Li); multiple logics in village elections (Social Sciences in China, 2010, with Ai Yun); and collusion among local governments in policy implementation (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2011, with Ai Yun and Lian Hong; and Modern China, 2010).
Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the People's University of China. Zhou received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.
Professor Yu Tiejun joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as China Policy Fellow for the 2024 fall quarter. He currently serves as President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies (IISS) and Professor at the School of International Studies (SIS), all at Peking University (PKU). Previously, he studied at the University of Tokyo in 1998-2000. He served as visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University in 2005, and also as visiting scholar at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University in 2005-06.
Dr. Yu has co-edited The Sino-Japanese Security and Defense Exchange: Past, Present, and Prospect (Beijing: World Affairs Press, 2012, with Zhu Feng and Akiyama Masahiro). He is also the Chinese translator of Myths of Empire by Jack Snyder (2007) and Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics by Arnold Wolfers (2006). His research interests include International Security, China-U.S.-Japan Relations, and China’s National Defense Policy. He won the Excellent Teaching Award of Peking University in 2010. Dr. Yu received his Ph.D., M.A. and B.A. from Peking University.
While at APARC, he conducted research on contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.
Brandon Yoder joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Stanford Next Asia Policy Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year. He currently serves as Senior Lecturer at Australian National University in the School of Politics and International Relations, Australian Centre on China in the World, as well as non-resident Research Fellow at National University of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Centre on Asia and Globalisation. While at APARC, he will be working with the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL) on U.S.-Asia relations.
