Abstract

Speculation about the course of cross-Strait relations after the upcoming 19^th Chinese Communist Party Congress ranges from greater PRC flexibility to substantially increased pressure on Taiwan. The Mainland’s persistent suspicion about President Tsai Ing-wen’s motives has only deepened with her appointment of avowed independence supporter Lai Ching-te as premier, especially because of the prospect that Lai could eventually become president. As a result, once the internal tugging and hauling leading up to the Party Congress has been settled, some people predict that Beijing will resort to military intimidation or even actual use of force to bring Tsai to heel. What are the PRC’s goals? What are Taipei’s? What role can and should the United States play in seeking not only to avoid conflict but to reestablish a reliable level of stability in cross-Strait relations and to prevent Taiwan from once more becoming a highly divisive issue in U.S.-PRC relations? Alan Romberg will address these issues in his talk on October 30^th.

Bio

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Alan Romberg is a Distinguished Fellow and the Director of the East Asia program at Stimson. Before joining Stimson in September 2000, he enjoyed a distinguished career working on Asian issues including 27 years in the State Department, with over 20 years as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. Romberg was the Principal Deputy Director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Deputy Spokesman of the department. He served in various capacities dealing with East Asia, including director of the Office of Japanese Affairs, member of the Policy Planning staff for East Asia, and staff member at the National Security Council for China. He served overseas in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Additionally, Romberg spent almost 10 years as the CV Starr Senior Fellow for Asian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and was special assistant to the secretary of the navy.

Romberg holds an M.A. from Harvard University, and a B.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), both part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Abstract 

Scholars have credited a model of state-led capitalism called the developmental state with producing the first wave of the East Asian economic miracle. Using historical evidence based on original archival research, this talk offers a geopolitical explanation for the origins of the developmental state. In contrast to previous studies that have emphasized colonial legacies or domestic political factors, I argue that the developmental state was the legacy of the rivalry between the United States and Communist China during the Cold War. Responding to the acute tensions in Northeast Asia in the early postwar years, the United States supported emergency economic controls in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan to enforce political stability. In response to the belief that the Communist threat would persist over the long term, the U.S. strengthened its clients by laying the foundations of a capitalist, export-oriented economy under bureaucratic guidance. The result of these interventions was a distinctive model of state-directed capitalism that scholars would later characterize as a developmental state.

I verify this claim by examining the rivalry between the United States and the Chinese Communists and demonstrating that American threat perceptions caused the U.S. to promote unorthodox economic policies among its clients in Northeast Asia. In particular, I examine U.S. relations with the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan, where American efforts to create a bulwark against Communism led to the creation of an elite economic bureaucracy for administering U.S. economic aid. In contrast, the United States decided not to create a developmental state in the Philippines because the Philippine state was not threatened by the Chinese Communists. Instead, the Philippines faced a domestic insurgency that was weaker and comparatively short-lived. As a result, the U.S. pursued a limited goal of maintaining economic stability instead of promoting rapid industrialization. These findings shed new light on the legacy of statism in American foreign economic policy and highlight the importance of geopolitics in international development.

Bio

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James Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He specializes in International Relations with a focus on U.S. foreign policy in East Asia and relations across the Taiwan Strait. James also serves as the Senior Editor for Taiwan Security Research, an academic website that aggregates news and commentary on the economic and political dimensions of Taiwan's security.

This event is co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative in the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), both part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

This event has reached full capacity, please email Shannon at sj1874@stanford.edu to get on the waitlist.

Mikhail Zygar will talk about the perception of the Russian revolution of 1917 a hundred years later. He will explore how the centenary of the revolution is ignored by the Russian government and about the evolution of the attitude of the Russian society towards the revolution.

Mikhail Zygar is a Russian journalist, writer and filmmaker, and the founding editor-in-chief of the Russian independent news TV-channel, Dozhd (2010 - 2015). Prior to Dozhd, Zygar worked for Newsweek Russia and the business daily Kommersant, where he covered the conflicts in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Serbia, and Kosovo. His recent book All the Kremlin’s Men is based on an unprecedented series of interviews with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, presenting a radically different view of power and politics in Russia. Zygar is the founder of Project1917. Free History, an online project that enables participants to learn about the events of 1917 from those who lived during this defining moment of history. He is also the founder of Future History Lab - the team behind Project1917. His new book, The Empire Must Die, will be released in the US on November, 7th. It portrays the years leading up to the Russian revolution and the vivid drama of Russia's brief and exotic experiment with civil society before it was swept away by the Communist Revolution.

Co-sponsored by The Europe Center, European Security Initiative and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

Between 2010 and 2015, EU governments negotiated consecutive reforms to the governance of the eurozone which, taken together, represent perhaps the most significant deepening of European integration in modern times. What factors determined the outcome of these negotiations? Did some countries exert greater influence than others? This paper offers the first systematic assessment of bargaining success in the reform of the eurozone. It evaluates the explanatory power of three potential sources of bargaining success – power, preferences, and coalitions – based on an analysis of new and unique data on the positions of all EU member states on all key reform proposals. Its conclusions carry general importance for our understanding of power and negotiation in Europe.

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Jonas Tallberg is Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University, where he directs the research group on global and regional governance, selected as a leading area of research at Stockholm University. His primary research interests are global governance and European Union politics. His most recent book is the The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013), co-authored with Thomas Sommerer, Theresa Squatrito and Christer Jönsson. Earlier books include Leadership and Negotiation in the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Tallberg has won numerous awards for his research, including the Forskraft Award for the best Swedish dissertation on international relations, the JCMS Prize for the best article in Journal of Common Market Studies, and the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the German Humboldt Foundation. He has been awarded research grants from, among others, the European Research Council, Fulbright Commission, Swedish Research Council, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and Nordic Research Academy.

Headquartered in Riga, Latvia, Meduza.io is the world’s number one independent source for professional reporting on Russia. The site also operates an ambitious translation project, making its content available to the global community at Meduza.io/en. Meduza launched in October 2014 and by August 2017 the monthly readership of Meduza exceeded 7.5 million unique visitors, with more than 700,000 app downloads and more than 2,000,000 followers on social media. Meduza and Buzzfeed recently announced an editorial partnership focused on joint investigative reports. Ilya Krasilshchik, Meduza’s publisher, will explain what it takes to mount such a project in an environment flooded by the Kremlin’s propaganda, and Anna Veduta, Meduza’s global outreach director, will discuss Meduza’s English-language edition.

Meduza is an online newspaper and news aggregator covering Russia and the Eurasian region, headed by Galina Timchenko, the former chief editor of the news website Lenta.ru, which during her tenure became the most popular news outlet on the Russian Internet. Meduza is run by a team of Russian journalists who resigned from their jobs at Lenta.ru, following Timchenko’s unexpected removal from her post by Alexander Mamut, the Putin-connected oligarch who owns the website.

Not long before the annexation of Crimea, Mamut fired Timchenko and replaced her with Alexey Goreslavsky, who had previously managed the pro-Kremlin website Vzglyad and later was a high-level official at the state-run news agency Interfax. The reason given for Timchenko’s dismissal was an official warning issued to Lenta.ru by Russia’s state censor because one of Lenta’s stories (an interview with a Ukrainian nationalist leader) contained a hyperlink to materials deemed extremist. More than 80 editors and reporters – nearly Lenta’s entire newsroom – quit in protest, publishing an open letter calling Timchenko’s ouster “an act of censorship” and a violation of Russia’s media laws. Timchenko and most of the staff who resigned with her went on to found Meduza. Explaining the decision to base Meduza in Latvia and register it outside the .RU domain zone, Timchenko told Forbes: “Right now, establishing an independent Russian-language news outlet in Latvia is possible, while in Russia it is not.”

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Anna Veduta is Meduza’s global outreach director, and also heads Meduza in English in Washington, D.C. Prior to Meduza, Anna served as Press Secretary to Alexey Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition politician and 2018 presidential hopeful. Anna headed Navalny's press office during his Moscow mayoral campaign in 2013, when he leveraged social media channels to break a blockage by Russia’s traditional media, nearly forcing a runoff vote. Anna holds degrees in political science and international relations from Moscow State University and Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

A growing body of evidence suggests that China’s schooling system, as it stands today, is unable to produce the high-skilled labor that will be needed if the nation is to avoid the middle-income trap. How does poor parenting and inadequate early childhood development attribute to this problem? Prof. Rozelle will discuss his research on cognitive delays among toddlers in rural China, and the national crisis that the country faces due to inadequate childhood development.  

Scott Rozelle holds the Helen Farnsworth Endowed Professorship at Stanford University and is Senior Fellow in the Food Security and Environment Program and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies. 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. Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for the past 20 years. He is the co-director of the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). 

Registration: 

https://www.eventbank.cn/event/9642/

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This event is co-sponsored by the Taiwan Democracy Project and the U.S.-Asia Security Initiative.

Abstract

Taiwan's defense policy faces several daunting challenges. President Tsai has inherited a complex security situation from her predecessors. The DPP's defense policy blue papers, published prior to Taiwan's January 2016 election, and Taiwan's newly published Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) outline President Tsai's plans for Taiwan's defense policy. Some of the major defense policy issues Taiwan must face under President Tsai include uncertainties about US Asia policy and Trump's approach to handling relations with China, growing Chinese military capabilities and increasing Chinese air and naval activities around Taiwan, defense budget constraints, and problems associated with Taiwan's attempt to transition to an all-volunteer military. Taiwan's proposed responses as outlined in the 2017 QDR include a defense strategy of "Resolute defense, multi-domain deterrence" and strengthening the island's domestic defense industries, a project that has both defense policy and economic implications. This presentation will assess Taiwan's approach and consider the implications for US policy in Asia.

Bio

Michael S. Chase is a senior political scientist at RAND, a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and an adjunct professor in the China Studies and Strategic Studies Departments at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.

A specialist in China and Asia-Pacific security issues, he was previously an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC) in Newport, Rhode Island, where he served as director of the strategic deterrence group in the Warfare Analysis and Research Department and taught in the Strategy and Policy Department. Prior to joining the faculty at NWC, he was a research analyst at Defense Group Inc. and an associate international policy analyst at RAND. He is the author of the book Taiwan's Security Policy and numerous chapters and articles on China and Asia-Pacific security issues. His work has appeared in journals such as Asia Policy, Asian Security, China Brief, Survival, and the Journal of Strategic Studies.

His current research focuses on Chinese military modernization, China's nuclear policy and strategy and nuclear force modernization, Taiwan's defense policy, and Asia-Pacific security issues. Chase holds a Ph.D. in international affairs and M.A. in China Studies from SAIS and a B.A. in politics from Brandeis University. In addition, he studied Chinese at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China.

Although sheep are only one of the important domesticates exploited in many parts of the world, it has played a near-paradigmatic role throughout the emergence and spread of European civilization. Domestic sheep and goat unambiguously originate from Southwest Asia where their wild ancestors live. Therefore sheep distributions across Europe represent an element of evident diffusion in the otherwise complex neolithization process. The numerical increase in sheep remains can be spectacular at Early Neolithic sites in Central Europe, even in habitats less than favorable for sheep. In various instances mutton outcompeted locally available pork in the diet as shown by animal remains from archaeological sites across Eurasia. Reasons for this trend seem to be diverse, ranging from greater pastoral mobility through secondary products (wool and dairy) to side effects of religious regulations such as the Iron Age taboo imposed on pork first documented in Judaism. Concomitant strict regulations concerning the “proper” way of slaughtering livestock link the increased dietary importance of sheep to the emergence of metallurgy, i.e. availability of quality blades.

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László Bartosiewicz has worked as an archaeozoologist since 1979. He has studied animal-human relationships during various time periods in several countries of Europe and some in the Near East as well as South America. His research often has a cultural anthropological focus viewing animals as material culture. Recently he has specialized in animal palaeopathology. He published three books and over 350 academic papers. Following teaching positions at the Universities of Budapest (Hungary) and Edinburgh (UK), he currently heads the Osteoarchaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University (Sweden). He was twice elected president of the International Council for Archaeozoology (2006–2014).

This event is part of the Origins of Europe Series and is sponsored by the Stanford Archaeology Center and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

The Center for Latin American Studies invites you to join us for a lecture with Professor Beatriz Magaloni on criminal violence in Latin America. Lunch will be served. 

Beatriz Magaloni is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is also an affiliated faculty member of the Woods Institute of the Environment (2011-2013) and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Development. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of the American Political Science Association and the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations. Her second book, Strategies of Vote Buying: Democracy, Clientelism, and Poverty Relief in Mexico (co-authored with Alberto Diaz Cayeros and Federico Estévez), studies the politics of poverty relief. In 2010 she founded the Program on Poverty and Governance (POVGOV) within FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. There she pursues a research agenda focused on governance, poverty reduction, electoral clientelism, the provision of public goods and criminal violence. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Latin American Research Review, Journal of Theoretical Politics and other journals.Prior to joining Stanford in 2001, Professor Magaloni was a visiting professor at UCLA and a professor of Political Science at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. She also holds a law degree from ITAM.