This event is open only to Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, and students.

Bio:

Marc Lipsitch is Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics and the Interdisciplinary Program on Infectious Disease Epidemiology. He is an honorary faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. He is currently on part-time secondment to the US CDC as Senior Advisor for the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, for which he was the founding co-director (though this talk is in his personal and academic capacity). His scientific research concerns the effect of naturally acquired host immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, and other public health interventions on the population biology of pathogens and the consequences for human health. In the area of  biosafety and biosecurity, he co-founded the Cambridge Working Group, whose efforts led to the US government funding pause on gain-of-function research to enhance potential pandemic pathogens, and he has been writing and speaking on policy issues in this area in both popular and peer-reviewed forums for over a decade. He has authored 400 peer-reviewed publications on antimicrobial resistance, epidemiologic methods, mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission, pathogen population genomics, research ethics, biosafety/security, and immunoepidemiology of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Dr. Lipsitch is a leader in research and scientific communication on COVID-19. Dr. Lipsitch received his BA in philosophy from Yale and his DPhil in zoology from Oxford. He did postdoctoral work at Emory University and CDC. He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology and the National Academy of Medicine.

Abstract:

The growing ability of researchers to enhance potential pandemic pathogens' transmissibility or virulence has raised concerns about the risk that such research could lead to a pandemic through accidental or inadvertent release, or that the products of the research, including the knowledge it creates, could facilitate deliberate acts of bioterrorism. An incipient policy process to address these concerns in the mid-late 2010s was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and attention has recently returned to the topic especially in the US but also internationally. While the White House has been constructing guidance (not released as of this writing in January 2024), the scientific and wider community have reached a state of polarization, with many calling for an outright ban, and others claiming that scientific self-regulation is sufficient. This talk will describe the components of a middle way that acknowledges a legitimate public interest in restricting experiments that could heighten pandemic risks, in the absence of compelling and offsetting public health benefits. It will begin with a historical overview of the issue, consider informative and misleading parallels to the notion of restricting research with pandemic risks, and suggest ways forward to break this deadlock. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions is pleased to present a special conversation featuring Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Mark Lambert, who oversees the Office of China Policy Coordination at the US State Department. Lambert will be speaking on US-China Relations in an Era of Strategic Competition. This event is in-person only and will be off the record.

Mark Lambert’s presentation begins at 4:30 pm on Friday, February 16th, followed by a Q&A moderated by Scott Kennedy, CSIS Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics. You are invited to a welcome reception at 4:00 pm.

Registration is required for admission. No walk-ins.

No audio, video recording or photography will be permitted.  Please note, this event is closed to the media. 

About the Speaker
 

Mark Lambert is State Department China Coordinator and Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. He oversees the Office of China Coordination and the Office of Taiwan Coordination. Mark has extensive experience in China, cross-Strait, and Asia Pacific affairs. He most recently served as Deputy Assistant Secretary with responsibility for Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.  Earlier he established the International Organizations Bureau’s office aimed at protecting UN integrity from authoritarianism. As Special Envoy for North Korean Affairs, he participated in negotiations with the DPRK and devised and implemented a global pressure campaign to enforce UN Security Council Resolutions. As Director of the Office of Korean Affairs he helped shape the response to ballistic missile launches and nuclear tests conducted by North Korea. While Political Counselor in Hanoi he helped to devise a South China Sea maritime strategy and led a team that won recognition for dramatically improving U.S. relations with Vietnam. He served twice in Beijing, most recently managing U.S. political military affairs with China. Previously, he was named the State Department’s human rights officer of the year for devising a strategy to release Chinese political prisoners and promote religious freedom. He has served as Political Military officer in Bangkok and Tokyo and as a science and technology officer on the State Department’s Japan Desk. He was a weapons inspector in Iraq. His first tour was in Bogota, Colombia, during the era of Pablo Escobar. He received a Meritorious Presidential Rank Award for helping to design and implement a plan to elect the leader of the World Intellectual Property Organization. He has been awarded for efforts bringing the United States and Vietnam closer together, for his voluntary efforts responding to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, for helping to shape the U.S. response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and for his work helping to resolve the 2001 EP-3 crisis involving a U.S. naval aircraft forced down on China’s Hainan Island. He has studied Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Spanish. He is married to Laura Stone, a senior State Department official. They have two daughters.

Scott Kennedy is senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). A leading authority on Chinese economic policy, Kennedy has been traveling to China for over 30 years. His specific areas of expertise include industrial policy, technology innovation, business lobbying, U.S.-China commercial relations, and global governance. From 2000 to 2014, Kennedy was a professor at Indiana University (IU), where he established the Research Center for Chinese Politics & Business and was the founding academic director of IU’s China Office. Kennedy received his PhD in political science from George Washington University, his MA in China studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and his BA from the University of Virginia.

Parking & Directions

Parking meters are enforced Monday - Friday 8 AM to 4 PM, unless otherwise posted.

The event will take place in the Koret-Taube Conference Center located within the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building. The closest visitor parking to the Gunn-SIEPR building is:

• Galvez Lot, located across from the Stadium lot
• Track House Visitor Lot at the corner of Galvez Street and Campus Drive
• Knight Management Parking structure on Campus Drive East (this is an underground option)

Please visit the this website for more detailed parking options and directions to the venue.

Questions? Contact Heather Rahimi at hrahimi@stanford.edu

Join the Visiting Fellows in Israel Studies Program for a discussion about the roots and causes of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news in times of war. Learn more about the informational contents of foreign and domestic actors when addressing the informational threats. How it must be faced for the future of democracy, and is at stake when protecting media freedoms and civil liberties in Israel.

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Omer Benjakob is an investigative journalist for Haaretz, Israel's sole newspaper of record, focused on the intersection of politics and technology. He covers disinformation, cyber, and surveillance and has participated in several international investigations, including the Project Pegasus — the misuse of spyware made by the NSO Group — and “Team Jorge,” a groundbreaking undercover investigation into the private disinformation market and digital mercenaries offering election interference as a service. His investigation into the sale of spyware to a militia in Sudan was shortlisted for the EU's European Press Prize for investigative journalism (2023).

He is also a researcher and his writing on Wikipedia has been published in Wired UK, the Columbia Journalism Review and MIT Press, as well as academic journals. Born in New York and raised in Tel Aviv, he lives in Jaffa with his wife and teaches in a local college in Israel. He is also an associate research fellow at the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (LPI) in Paris, a research institute affiliated with the Université Paris Cité focused on open science.
 

Tomer Naor is a father, educator, lawyer, and a well-known social activist in Israel. Tomer holds an LLB in Law from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an LLM graduate degree in Public Law from Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University. For the past ten years Tomer has been working for The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, one of Israel’s leading grass roots organizations, fighting corruption and promoting the values of democracy, transparency, good governance and civic participation and volunteerism in Israeli society.

Tomer has led multiple legal cases discussed in the Supreme Court that are pertinent to the core issues of preserving democracy in Israel, and has frequently appeared before the Supreme Court to argue constitutional and administrative petitions as well as before Knesset committees on various issues. In 2020, Marker magazine named Tomer as one of their "40 Under 40" influencers, and he continues to feature as a regular guest in the Israeli and international media. In addition to his legal work, Tomer is involved in a variety of social initiatives in Israel and won the Civil Society Award in 2015.
 

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the The Europe Center (TEC) are pleased to host President Zuzana Čaputová of the Slovak Republic for a fireside chat with Michael McFaul, director of FSI, with welcome remarks by Anna Grzymała-Busse, director of TEC. 

President Čaputová will speak about the impact Russia's war on Ukraine is having on Central European countries.

About President Zuzana Čaputová 

Elected on June 15, 2019, Slovak President Zuzana Čaputová is the first woman to hold the presidency as well as the youngest president in Slovakia's history. President Čaputová's political career began in 1996, after graduating from the Comenius University Faculty of Law in Bratislava. After her studies, Čaputová worked in the local government of Pezinok and then transitioned into the non-profit sector working at the Open Society Foundations. At the Open Society Foundations, she worked closely on the issue of abused and exploited children. In 2017, Čaputová joined the Progressive Slovakian political party and was elected as a Vice-Chairwoman for the party. She also served as the Deputy Chair until 2019, when she resigned to launch her presidential campaign.

In 2016, she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work in addressing the toxic landfill in Pezinok. In addition, in 2020, Čaputová ranked #83 on the Forbes’ World's 100 Most Powerful Women list.

Please note, registration for this event is now closed, we have reached capacity, space is limited. 

Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions and China’s Global Sharp Power Project at the Hoover Institution are pleased to present a special lecture featuring Professor Minxin Pei who will be speaking on How Does China Spy on Its People? and his newly released book, The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China. This is an in-person event. 

Contrary to the widespread perception that advanced technology enables the Chinese state to maintain full-spectrum surveillance of its people, evidence collected from local yearbooks shows that the backbone of China's surveillance state consists of close bureaucratic coordination among security agencies, an extensive network of informants and labor-intensive surveillance tactics.   This system is made possible and run effectively by the party's Leninist organizational structure.  The hi-tech surveillance apparatus, which China began to construct in the late 1990s and did not become fully operational until probably around 2010, has given the ruling Communist Party a complementary, but not substitutive, tool.  The Chinese regime’s surveillance capabilities, unrivaled by other autocracies in history, may be one explanation why rapid economic development has not led to democratization.  Growth since the early 1990s has produced abundant resources for the regime to expand its labor-intensive network of surveillance, refine surveillance tactics, and adopt new technologies.  Its powerful surveillance state prevents the emergence of opposition despite the rapid growth of the middle class and other elements that can potentially threaten the party's hold on power.  Economic development alone is unlikely to promote democracy because an autocratic regime can take advantage of the growing resources to strengthen its capacity for preventive repression.  Economic failure, not success, is far more likely to trigger regime transition.

About the Speaker
 

Minxin Pei is Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. His areas of expertise include China, comparative politics, the Pacific Rim, U.S./Asia relations, and U.S./China relations. Pei has been a Robert McNamara Fellow at the World Bank (1994-1995), Edward Teller National Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University (1994-1995), and Olin Faculty Fellow at The Olin Foundation (1997-1998). Pei has written three books including “China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay” (Harvard University Press, 2016), “China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy'' (Harvard University Press, 2006), and “From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union” (Harvard University Press, 1994). Pei earned a B.A. from Shanghai International Studies University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Co-sponsored by:
 

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Questions? Contact Tina Shi at shiying@stanford.edu

Chinese Politics & Society: Public Lecture Series

This weekly lecture series provides an in-depth exploration of current issues in Chinese politics and society. Each week features an expert lecture from world-renowned China scholars. Topics covered include China's political economy, the Chinese Communist Party, reforms post-1980s, urban-rural divide, environmental challenges, media freedom, student movements, and higher education in China. This lecture series is open to the public and is run in conjunction with a course taught by Professor Yiqing Xu. 
 

About the Speaker

Zhang Taisu is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. He is the author of two books and numerous article. His book The Laws and Economics of Confucianism received the 2018 Presidents Award from the Social Science History Association and the 2018 Gaddis Smith Book Prize from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Zhang is a regular commentator on Chinese law, society, and politics in media outlets.

Chinese Politics & Society: Public Lecture Series

This weekly lecture series provides an in-depth exploration of current issues in Chinese politics and society. Each week features an expert lecture from world-renowned China scholars. Topics covered include China's political economy, the Chinese Communist Party, reforms post-1980s, urban-rural divide, environmental challenges, media freedom, student movements, and higher education in China. This lecture series is open to the public and is run in conjunction with a course taught by Professor Yiqing Xu. 
 

About the Speaker

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. His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards, including the Friendship Award in 2008, the highest award given to a non-Chinese by the Premier; and the National Science and Technology Collaboration Award in 2009 for scientific achievement in collaborative research.

Chinese Politics & Society: Public Lecture Series

This weekly lecture series provides an in-depth exploration of current issues in Chinese politics and society. Each week features an expert lecture from world-renowned China scholars. Topics covered include China's political economy, the Chinese Communist Party, reforms post-1980s, urban-rural divide, environmental challenges, media freedom, student movements, and higher education in China. This lecture series is open to the public and is run in conjunction with a course taught by Professor Yiqing Xu. 
 

About the Speaker

Perry Link is Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California, Riverside and Emeritus Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in modern Chinese literature and Chinese language. Link is a Harvard University alumnus who received his B.A. in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1976. He has published in the fields of modern Chinese language, literature, popular culture, intellectual history, art and politics.

Chinese Politics & Society: Public Lecture Series

This weekly lecture series provides an in-depth exploration of current issues in Chinese politics and society. Each week features an expert lecture from world-renowned China scholars. Topics covered include China's political economy, the Chinese Communist Party, reforms post-1980s, urban-rural divide, environmental challenges, media freedom, student movements, and higher education in China. This lecture series is open to the public and is run in conjunction with a course taught by Professor Yiqing Xu. 
 

About the Speaker

Jennifer Pan is a political scientist whose research focuses on political communication, digital media, and authoritarian politics. She is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor of Chinese Studies, Professor of Communication and (by courtesy) Political Science, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Pan's research uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity to answer questions about the role of digital media in authoritarian and democratic politics, including how political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result.