The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is often labeled a hermit kingdom, supposedly one of the most isolated, mysterious, and inaccessible countries on earth. A world in black and white. Reaffirming this notion, many who travel there, journalists, academics, and tourists alike, carry a duty to expose hidden truths, to capture “real” life outside of state curated itineraries and staged performances. Photojournalist David Guttenfelder, for example, who spent several years in the Pyongyang bureau of the Associated Press, “felt it was his responsibility to show the outside world the reality away from stage-managed events.” Aside from the obvious problem of separating real life from staged life, the trouble seems to manifest in relentless attempts to reveal the secrets behind the totalitarian curtain. But what if the question is not where one looks, but rather, how?
Like the red safelight in a photographic darkroom, red is the only color that can operate within the logic of silver halide coated papers and chemistries that facilitate the emergence and fixing of an image. With a red light, latent images can come to life, whereas natural light or incandescent light would destroy them. It is the mode of a red safelight, then, that illuminates Laibach’s provocative Pyongyang concert in August 2015. Their controversial performance was not simply the first avant-garde rock concert in one of the most restrictive societies, as is frequently described, but in fact a larger collective performance that transcends the boundaries of north and south, darkness and light, totalitarianism and democracy, what Slavoj Zizek describes as bringing the authoritarian streak out. This talk explores the anxieties, desires, and ambiguities that proliferate at the edges of this event—going to the stage, a Red Stage, that enables the encounter between worlds imagined as radically different.
For more information about this event, please visit the event website:
This event is now full. Please send an email to sj1874@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the wait list.
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How the kibbutz movement thrived despite its inherent economic contradictions and why it eventually declined.
The kibbutz is a social experiment in collective living that challenges traditional economic theory. By sharing all income and resources equally among its members, the kibbutz system created strong incentives to free ride or—as in the case of the most educated and skilled—to depart for the city. Yet for much of the twentieth century kibbutzim thrived, and kibbutz life was perceived as idyllic both by members and the outside world. In The Mystery of the Kibbutz, Ran Abramitzky blends economic perspectives with personal insights to examine how kibbutzim successfully maintained equal sharing for so long despite their inherent incentive problems.
Weaving the story of his own family’s experiences as kibbutz members with extensive economic and historical data, Abramitzky sheds light on the idealism and historic circumstances that helped kibbutzim overcome their economic contradictions. He illuminates how the design of kibbutzim met the challenges of thriving as enclaves in a capitalist world and evaluates kibbutzim’s success at sustaining economic equality. By drawing on extensive historical data and the stories of his pioneering grandmother who founded a kibbutz, his uncle who remained in a kibbutz his entire adult life, and his mother who was raised in and left the kibbutz, Abramitzky brings to life the rise and fall of the kibbutz movement.
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Ran Abramitzky is Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford University. His research is in economic history and applied microeconomics, with focus on immigration and income inequality. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is the vice chair of the economics department, and the co-editor of Explorations in Economic History. He was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, as well as National Science Foundation grants for research on the causes and consequences of income inequality and on international migration. He has received the Economics Department’s and the Dean’s Awards for Distinguished Teaching. He holds a PhD in economics from Northwestern University.
Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event.
William J Perry Conference Room Encina Hall Central, 2nd floor 616 Serra Street
Associate Professor of Economics
Speaker
Stanford University
The Oksenberg Lecture, held annually, honors the legacy of Professor Michel Oksenberg (1938–2001). A senior fellow at Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Professor Oksenberg served as a key member of the National Security Council when the United States normalized relations with China, and consistently urged that the United States engage with Asia in a more considered manner. In tribute, the Oksenberg Lecture recognizes distinguished individuals who have helped to advance understanding between the United States and the nations of the Asia-Pacific.
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This year, the Oksenberg Conference will be organized around the publication of Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County that has just been published by Stanford University Press. The rural Chinese county of Zouping was a place and topic very dear to Professor Michel Oksenberg’s heart. In 1984, Professor Oksenberg achieved a milestone--obtaining official access for foreign scholars to do research in a rural site in China—the first after Opening and Reform. Since its opening, eighty-seven U.S. academics have conducted fieldwork in Zouping, generating waves of serious scholarship, resulting in numerous books and articles. This new volume includes the extensive research notes of Michel Oksenberg, which he sadly was unable to use before he passed away. These notes were used to complete this volume, supplemented with new research by a number of Oksenberg’s own students and his “academic grandchildren.” It provides a big and clear window onto the surprising changes that have taken place in China over the last two decades of reform.
The conference will convene a panel of China specialists with deep personal and scholarly connections to Zouping who will provide insights into the unfolding history of doing research and fieldwork in China. The panel will also assess through this rural Shandong county the breathtaking as well as surprising changes China has experienced from the 1980s until the present.
For directions to the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center, please click here.
Agenda
2:00-2:15 PM: Welcome and Introduction
2:15-3:35 PM: Panel I: Doing Fieldwork in China: How We Got There and Its Impact
Chair: Prof. Steven Goldstein (Smith College)
· Prof. Mary Brown Bullock (Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC) · Prof. Thomas Gold (U.C. Berkeley) · Prof. Thomas Bernstein (Columbia University) · Prof. Andrew Walder (Stanford University)
3:35-4:55 PM: Panel II: A Window onto China: Understanding Continuity and Change
Chair: Prof. Jean Oi (Stanford University)
· Prof. Jean Oi (Stanford University) · Dr. Douglas Grob (Albright Stonebridge Group) · Prof. Charlotte Lee (Berkeley City College)
5:00-5:30 PM: Book signing and sale of Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County
Speakers
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Thomas P. Bernstein taught Chinese politics and comparative communism at Indiana, Yale, and Columbia from 1966 to 2007. After retirement, he moved to Irvine, California with an affiliation at University of California, Irvine. He has published on Chinese and Soviet collectivization of agriculture, the Great Leap Forward famine and its Soviet counterpart, Chinese youth and education, and on reform era rural politics. He did research in Zouping in 1985. Most recently he co-edited (with Hua-yu Li) China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949-Present (2010).
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Mary Brown Bullock, president emerita of Agnes Scott College, is an educator and scholar of U.S. – China relations. She served as the founding executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University from 2012-2015. Previous positions include distinguished visiting professor Emory University, director of the Asia Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and director of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China.She is vice-chair of the Asia Foundation, a trustee of the Henry Luce Foundation, and a member of the Schwarzman Academic Advisory Committee and the Council on Foreign Relations. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Chinese history from Stanford University. Her most recent publications include The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy in China (2011) and as co-editor of Medical Transitions in Twentieth Century China (2014).
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Thomas B. Gold is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He also served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies. From 2000-2016 he was Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies. His research addresses issues of social and political change on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. He was a member of the first group of American government-sponsored exchange students to China, spending February 1979-February 1980 at Fudan University. He spent a month in Fengjiacun/Zouping County in 1986 looking at sprouts of private entrepreneurship.
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Steven M. Goldstein was the Sophia Smith Professor of Government at Smith College from 1968 to 2016. He is now an Associate of the Fairbank Center and the director of the Taiwan Studies Workshop at Harvard University. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Columbia University and United States Naval War College. Goldstein's research interest has been largely related to issues of Chinese domestic and foreign policy. He has published studies of Sino-American relations; Sino-Soviet relations; and the emergence of a Chinese Communist view of world affairs. His current research focus is on the relations between the mainland and Taiwan as well as the evolution of U.S.-Taiwan relations.
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Douglas Grob is a Senior Vice President at Albright Stonebridge Group. He previously served as head of the Asia Section of the Congressional Research Service. Prior to that, he served at the U.S. Department of State as a senior advisor on East Asia to the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights. He also served as Staff Director of the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, established by statute as the United States and China normalized trade relations prior to China’s accession to the WTO. Prior to entering public service, he was on the faculty at the University of Maryland, a senior research scholar at the School of Law of Peking University, and a research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center of Stanford University.
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Charlotte Lee is the faculty coordinator of the Global Studies Program at Berkeley City College. Prior to that she was the associate director of the China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) at Stanford University and was an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Hamilton College. From 2012-14, she was Minerva Chair in the Department of Political Science at the U.S. Air Force Academy. As Minerva Chair, she conducted research and briefings on issues in U.S.-China relations. In 2013, she was a visiting assistant professor at Shorenstein APARC. Her book, Training the Party: Party Adaptation and Elite Training in Reform-Era China, was released by Cambridge University Press in 2015. She has taught classes on Chinese politics, international relations, geopolitics and comparative politics. She holds a doctorate and master’s degree in political science from Stanford where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her bachelor’s degree is in Asian studies and political economy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Jean C. Oi, director of the Stanford China Program
Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at Shorenstein APARC. Professor Oi also is the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University. Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on political economy and the process of reform in transitional systems. Oi has written extensively on China’s political economy. Her most recent works include, Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County, with Steven Goldstein (2018); Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization, with Karen Eggleston and Yiming Wang (2017); Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform (2011); and Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China’s Transformation, with Scott Rozelle and Xueguang Zhou (2010).
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Andrew G. Walder is the Denise O’Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he is a member of the Department of Sociology and a Senior Fellow at FSI. He has previously taught at Columbia, Harvard, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has published widely on political economy, social structure, inequality, social mobility, and political conflict under state socialism and afterwards, with a special emphasis on contemporary China. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. His most recent books are Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009), and China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (2015).
Charlotte Lee was the associate director of the China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Prior to that she was an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Hamilton College. From 2012-14, she was Minerva Chair in the Department of Political Science at the U.S. Air Force Academy. As Minerva Chair, she conducted research and briefings on issues in U.S.-China relations. In 2013, she was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.
Her research on China has been published in peer-reviewed journals. She recently completed a book manuscript on reforms taking place in the Chinese Communist Party entitled Training the Party: Party Adaptation and Elite Training in Reform-Era China (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).
She has taught classes on Chinese politics, international relations, geopolitics and comparative politics. She holds a doctorate and master’s degree in political science from Stanford, where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her bachelor’s degree is in Asian studies and political economy from the University of California, Berkeley.
<i>Faculty Coordinator, Global Studies Program, Berkeley City College</i><br><br>
Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Professor Oi is also the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University.
A PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, Oi first taught at Lehigh University and later in the Department of Government at Harvard University before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997.
Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on political economy and the process of reform in transitional systems. Oi has written extensively on China's rural politics and political economy. Her State and Peasant in Contemporary China (University of California Press, 1989) examined the core of rural politics in the Mao period—the struggle over the distribution of the grain harvest—and the clientelistic politics that ensued. Her Rural China Takes Off (University of California Press, 1999 and Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 1999) examines the property rights necessary for growth and coined the term “local state corporatism" to describe local-state-led growth that has been the cornerstone of China’s development model.
She has edited a number of conference volumes on key issues in China’s reforms. The first was Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation (Brookings Institution Press, 2010), co-edited with Scott Rozelle and Xueguang Zhou, which examined the earlier phases of reform. Most recently, she co-edited with Thomas Fingar, Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future (Stanford University Press, 2020). The volume examines the difficult choices and tradeoffs that China leaders face after forty years of reform, when the economy has slowed and the population is aging, and with increasing demand for and costs of education, healthcare, elder care, and other social benefits.
Oi also works on the politics of corporate restructuring, with a focus on the incentives and institutional constraints of state actors. She has published three edited volumes related to this topic: one on China, Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform (Shorenstein APARC, 2011); one on Korea, co-edited with Byung-Kook Kim and Eun Mee Kim, Adapt, Fragment, Transform: Corporate Restructuring and System Reform in Korea (Shorenstein APARC, 2012); and a third on Japan, Syncretism: The Politics of Economic Restructuring and System Reform in Japan, co-edited with Kenji E. Kushida and Kay Shimizu (Brookings Institution, 2013). Other more recent articles include “Creating Corporate Groups to Strengthen China’s State-Owned Enterprises,” with Zhang Xiaowen, in Kjeld Erik Brodsgard, ed., Globalization and Public Sector Reform in China (Routledge, 2014) and "Unpacking the Patterns of Corporate Restructuring during China's SOE Reform," co-authored with Xiaojun Li, Economic and Political Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2018.
Oi continues her research on rural finance and local governance in China. She has done collaborative work with scholars in China, including conducting fieldwork on the organization of rural communities, the provision of public goods, and the fiscal pressures of rapid urbanization. This research is brought together in a co-edited volume, Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization (Brookings Institution Shorenstein APARC Series, 2017), with Karen Eggleston and Wang Yiming. Included in this volume is her “Institutional Challenges in Providing Affordable Housing in the People’s Republic of China,” with Niny Khor.
As a member of the research team who began studying in the late 1980s one county in China, Oi with Steven Goldstein provides a window on China’s dramatic change over the decades in Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County (Stanford University Press, 2018). This volume assesses the later phases of reform and asks how this rural county has been able to manage governance with seemingly unchanged political institutions when the economy and society have transformed beyond recognition. The findings reveal a process of adaptive governance and institutional agility in the way that institutions actually operate, even as their outward appearances remain seemingly unchanged.
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, Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and Head of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Walder has long specialized in the sources of conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His publications on Mao-era China have ranged from the social and economic organization of that early period to the popular political mobilization of the late 1960s and the subsequent collapse and rebuilding of the Chinese party-state. His publications on post-Mao China have focused on the evolving pattern of stratification, social mobility, and inequality, with an emphasis on variation in the trajectories of post-state socialist systems. His current research is on the growth and evolution of China’s large modern corporations, both state and private, after the shift away from the Soviet-inspired command economy.
Walder joined the Stanford faculty in 1997. He received his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1981 and taught at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 1987. From 1995 to 1997, he headed the Division of Social Sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Walder has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His books and articles have won awards from the American Sociological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the Social Science History Association. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His recent and forthcoming books include Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (Harvard University Press, 2009); China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard University Press, 2015); Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2019); and A Decade of Upheaval: The Cultural Revolution in Feng County (Princeton University Press, 2021) (with Dong Guoqiang); and Civil War in Guangxi: The Cultural Revolution on China’s Southern Periphery (Stanford University Press, 2023).
His recent articles include “After State Socialism: Political Origins of Transitional Recessions.” American Sociological Review 80, 2 (April 2015) (with Andrew Isaacson and Qinglian Lu); “The Dynamics of Collapse in an Authoritarian Regime: China in 1967.” American Journal of Sociology 122, 4 (January 2017) (with Qinglian Lu); “The Impact of Class Labels on Life Chances in China,” American Journal of Sociology 124, 4 (January 2019) (with Donald J. Treiman); and “Generating a Violent Insurgency: China’s Factional Warfare of 1967-1968.” American Journal of Sociology 126, 1 (July 2020) (with James Chu).
The Great War witnessed the most important military operation carried out by Portuguese troops outside the country’s borders during the first half of the 20th Century. Portugal was the only country involved in the conflict which, between 1914 and 1916, was able to preserve a position of undeclared neutrality in Europe and, simultaneously, wage war against Germany in Africa. The defense of the Portuguese colonial empire’s integrity has often been signaled by historians as one of the factors which justified the declaration of war against Germany, in March 1916, and Portugal’s participation in the European theatre of operations, alongside its ally, Great Britain, from early 1917 onwards. This article seeks to analyze the way in which the Great War was considered by the colonies, especially Mozambique, discussing the Portuguese military intervention and the way it was understood and witnessed by civilian and military figures alike.
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Ana Paula Pires is a researcher and member of the directors’ board of the Institute for Contemporary History at NOVA University of Lisbon. At NOVA she currently coordinates the research group “Economy, Society, Innovation and Heritage”.
Among her most important published works: Portugal e a I Guerra Mundial. A República e a Economia de Guerra (2011); “Between war and Peace: the Portuguese Experience in the Great War” (2015); “War and Empire: Portugal and the Portuguese Colonies in Africa in a Global War”(2015); and “The First World War in Portuguese East Africa: Civilian and Military Encounters in the Indian Ocean” (2017).
Ana Paula Pires was recently appointed member of an inter-ministerial commission to the study of military tourism in Portugal.
Reuben Hills Conference Room Encina Hall, East Wing (2nd Floor) 616 Serra Street
Ana Paula Pires
Researcher and Board Member
Speaker
Institute for Contemporary History at NOVA University of Lisbon
This event is sponsored by: Stanford University Libraries, East Asia Library, History Department, Center for East Asian Studies, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Vera Zakem has been leading work at CNA Center for Stability and Development on how Russia and other actors use propaganda and disinformation to influence and target populations in Europe. She will highlight how Russia and other actors exploit internal sources of vulnerabilities and instability to target vulnerable populations in Europe via disinformation and influence campaigns. Vera's work includes conducting in-country field work in many of the countries in the region.
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Vera Zakem specializes in developing innovative solutions, analytics, and partnerships in assessing root causes of conflict and instability for vulnerable populations, information warfare, social media, and disinformation, and civil-military operations. She incorporates development, diplomacy, and civil-military operations in assessing today’s security environment. She currently leads CNA’s work in assessing internal vulnerabilities to vulnerable populations, Europe and Russia, disinformation and propaganda, technology, and influence.
Zakem has conducted in-country fieldwork in the Balkans, Baltics, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Earlier in her career, she has collaborated multinational and government organizations in analyzing and assessing human security. She taught adversary, futures analytics and red teaming at the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Throughout her career, Zakem has worked with diverse sectors in promoting the role of women in security and development.
Zakem has an M.A. in Government from Johns Hopkins University, a B.A. in Politics and Economics from the University of San Francisco and has also spent a year at Tel Aviv University in Israel. She speaks Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew. She is a Term Member, Council on Foreign Relations.
William J. Perry Conference Room Encina Hall, 2nd floor
Vera Zakem
Director of Strategy and Partnerships and Project Director
Guest speaker
CNA Center for Stability and Development
Making Money: How Taiwanese Industrialists Embraced the Global Economy is a record of a thirty-year research project that Gary G. Hamilton and Kao Cheng-shu began in 1987. A distinguished sociologist and university administrator in Taiwan, Kao and his research team (which included Prof. Hamilton during his frequent visits to Taiwan) interviewed over 800 owners and managers of Taiwanese firms in Taiwan, China, and Vietnam. Some were re-interviewed over ten times during this period. The length of this project allows them a vantage point to challenge the conventional interpretations of Asian industrialization and to present a new interpretation of the global economy that features an enduring alliance between, on the one hand, American and European retailers and merchandisers and, on the other hand, Asian contract manufacturers, with Taiwanese industrialists becoming the most prominent contract manufacturers in the past forty years.
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Gary G. Hamilton is a Professor Emeritus of International Studies and Sociology at the University of Washington. He specializes in historical/comparative sociology, economic sociology, with a special emphasis on Asian societies. He is an author of numerous articles and books, including most recently Emergent Economies, Divergent Paths, Economic Organization and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan (with Robert Feenstra) (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies (London: Routledge, 2006), The Market Makers: How Retailers Are Changing the Global Economy (co-editor and contributor, Oxford University Press, 2011; paperback 2012), and Making Money: How Taiwanese Industrialists Embraced the Global Economy (with Kao Cheng-shu, Stanford University Press, 2018).
For a democracy, a necessary condition is openness to new political ideas. New ideas are often carried by new political parties. New parties are confronted with all kinds of reactions by established actors. What electoral effects do political, legal and media reactions have? Joost will present empirical evidence from experimental and non-experimental studies (in 15 countries since 1944) on reactions to various new parties, including anti-immigration parties.
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Joost van Spanje is associate professor in the University of Amsterdam communication science department. This department ranks second worldwide (2017 QS Rankings by subject). Joost previously conducted research at the University of Oxford, the EUI in Florence, and New York University. His current research team investigates legal action against anti-immigration parties in 21 European countries since 1965, and its effects on citizens. Joost currently also studies how news media in established democracies cover new political parties. He has published 27 ISI-ranked journal articles as well as the monograph "Controlling the Electoral Marketplace: How Established Parties Ward Off Competition" (2017).
William J. Perry Conference Room Encina Hall, 2nd floor 616 Serra Street
Joost van Spanje
Associate Professor
Guest speaker
Communication Science Department, University of Amsterdam
While much of the existing literature examines vote buying in the context of party systems, including both competitive and hegemonic party systems, this talk, based on a study coauthored by Professor Susan Whiting, addresses vote buying in a context in which no political party effectively structures electoral competition—village elections in China. This study argues that the lure of non-competitive rents explains variation over time and space in the phenomenon of vote buying. It tests this hypothesis, derived from an in-depth case study, in a separate sample of 1200 households in 62 villages in five provinces, using villagers’ reports of vote buying in elections and survey data on land takings as an indicator of available rents. While the literature views the introduction of elections as increasing accountability of village leaders to voters, vote buying likely undermines accountability. This study suggests that the regime has tolerated vote buying as a means of identifying and coopting influential economic elites in rural communities.
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Susan Whiting is Associate Professor of Political Science and Adjunct Associate Professor of Law and International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She specializes in Chinese and comparative politics, with particular emphasis on the political economy of development. Her first book, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. She has contributed chapters and articles on property rights, fiscal reform, governance, contract enforcement and dispute resolution to numerous publications. She has done extensive research in China and has contributed to studies of governance, fiscal reform, and non-governmental organizations under the auspices of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Ford Foundation, respectively. She, along with colleagues in the law school, is participating in a project on access to justice and legal aid provision in rural China. Professor Whiting’s current research interests include property rights in land, the role of the courts in economic transition, as well as the politics of fiscal reform in transition economies. Among her courses, she teaches Comparative Politics, Chinese Politics, Qualitative Research Methods, and Law, Development, & Transition, a course offered jointly in the Department of Political Science, the Jackson School of International Studies, and the Law, Societies and Justice Program.
China has undergone historic economic, social and cultural transformations since its Opening and Reform. Leading scholars explore expanding repertoires of control that this authoritarian regime – both central and local – are using to manage social fissures, dislocation and demands. What new strategies of governance has the Chinese state devised to manage its increasingly fractious and dynamic society? What novel mechanisms has the state innovated to pre-empt, control and de-escalate contention? China Program’s 2018 Winter Colloquia Series highlights cutting-edge research on contemporary means that various levels of the Chinese state are deploying to manage both current and potential discontent from below.
Susan Whiting
<i>Associate Professor of Political Science, Adjunct Associate Professor of Law and International Studies, University of Washington</i>
Who watches over the party-state? In this talk, Maria Repnikova examines the uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. More than a passive mouthpiece or a dissident voice, the media in China also plays a critical oversight role, one more frequently associated with liberal democracies than with authoritarian systems. Chinese central officials cautiously endorse media supervision as a feedback mechanism, as journalists carve out space for critical reporting by positioning themselves as aiding the agenda of the central state. By comparing media politics in the Soviet Union, contemporary Russia and China, her talk will highlight the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as renewed pressures facing journalists in the Xi era.
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China has undergone historic economic, social and cultural transformations since its Opening and Reform. Leading scholars explore expanding repertoires of control that this authoritarian regime – both central and local – are using to manage social fissures, dislocation and demands. What new strategies of governance has the Chinese state devised to manage its increasingly fractious and dynamic society? What novel mechanisms has the state innovated to pre-empt, control and de-escalate contention? China Program’s 2018 Winter Colloquia Series highlights cutting-edge research on contemporary means that various levels of the Chinese state are deploying to manage both current and potential discontent from below.
Maria Repnikova
<i>Assistant Professor in Global Communication, Director, Center for Global Information Studies, Georgia State University</i>
Jean C. Oi, director of the Stanford China Program
