For many years now, U.S.-China relations could reasonably be described as strained. Frequent public and private talks and bilateral communications that were once a normal part of the relationship are challenging with public rebukes and mutual recriminations becoming increasingly frequent. Was this inevitable? How do we explain this development? And are the U.S. and China destined for a cold war?

Professor Jia Qingguo, Visiting Scholar and Payne Distinguished Fellow for the 2022 fall quarter at Stanford, will address these points, present a vision for the bilateral relationship in the foreseeable future, and discuss what can be done to avoid a disastrous confrontation between the two powers.

Featured Speaker

Jia Qingguo is a Professor and former Dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University in 1988. He is a member of the Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. He is vice president of the China American Studies Association, vice president of the China Association for International Studies, and vice president of the China Japanese Studies Association. He has published extensively on US-China relations, relations between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan and Chinese foreign policy.

Discussants

Thomas Fingar is a Shorenstein APARC Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He was the inaugural Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow from 2010 through 2015 and the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford in 2009. From 2005 through 2008, he served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and, concurrently, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Fingar served previously as assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (2000-01 and 2004-05), principal deputy assistant secretary (2001-03), deputy assistant secretary for analysis (1994-2000), director of the Office of Analysis for East Asia and the Pacific (1989-94), and chief of the China Division (1986-89). Between 1975 and 1986 he held a number of positions at Stanford University, including senior research associate in the Center for International Security and Arms Control.

Michael McFaul is Director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. Dr. McFaul also is as an International Affairs Analyst for NBC News and a columnist for The Washington Post. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). 

This event is part of the Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Lecture Series. 

The Payne Lectureship is named for Frank E. Payne and Arthur W. Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. Their descendants endowed the annual lecture series at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to raise public understanding of the complex policy issues facing the global community today and to increase support for informed international cooperation.

The Payne Distinguished Lecturer is chosen for his or her international reputation as a leader, with an emphasis on visionary thinking, a broad, practical grasp of a given field, and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global community and its challenges.

China Chats with Stanford Faculty 

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Friday, December 16, 2022          5 - 6 PM Pacific Time 
Saturday, December 17, 2022    9 - 10 AM Beijing Time

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From Picking Stones in Sand to Inventing Skin-like Electronics that will Change the Future of Electronics
A Conversation with Professor Zhenan Bao

What’s the secret to innovation? How do scientific findings transfer to the real world? Professor Zhenan Bao, K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University and former department chair of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, sits down with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, to answer these questions and more. Born in China, Professor Bao moved to the U.S. during college and rose to become a leading scientist and professor of chemical engineering whose work pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in fundamental science. During the conversation, she will share how she became who she is today, her thoughts on Stanford’s culture of innovation, and her passion for mentoring the next generation of innovators. 

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About the Speakers

 

Zhenan Bao is K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering, and by courtesy, a Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Material Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Bao founded the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiate (eWEAR) in 2016 and serves as the faculty director.

Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies from 1995-2004. She received her Ph.D in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1995.  She has over 700 refereed publications and over 100 US patents with a Google Scholar H-Index 190.
 

Bao has received notable recognition for her work in chemical engineering. Most recently, she was the inaugural recipient of the VinFuture Prize Female Innovator 2021, the ACS Chemistry of Materials Award 2022, MRS Mid-Career Award in 2021, AICHE Alpha Chi Sigma Award 2021, ACS Central Science Disruptor and Innovator Prize in 2020, and the Gibbs Medal by the Chicago session of ACS in 2020. 

Bao is a co-founder and on the Board of Directors for C3 Nano and PyrAmes, both are silicon-valley venture funded start-ups. She serves as an advising Partner for Fusion Venture Capital.
 

 

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

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Watch the Recording

Questions? Contact Tina Shi at shiying@stanford.edu

In The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, Ukrainian journalist and writer Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner from 2015 to 2017 in a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation (FSB) in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This memoir recounts an endless ordeal of psychological and physical abuse, including torture and rape, inflicted upon the author and his fellow inmates over the course of nearly three years of illegal incarceration spent largely in the prison called Izoliatsiia (Isolation).

Since February 2022, numerous cases of illegal detainment and extreme mistreatment have been reported in the Ukrainian towns and villages occupied by Russian forces during the full-scale invasion. These and other war crimes committed by Russian troops speak to the genocidal nature of Russia’s war on Ukraine and reveal the horrors wreaked upon Ukrainians forced to live in Russian-occupied zones. Aseyev’s account offers critical insight into the operations of Russian forces in the occupied territories of Ukraine. Aseyev also reflects on how a human can survive such atrocities and reenter the world to share his story. The emphasis of the talk will be on the inhuman conditions that Russian and Russian-controlled forces subject people to on the territories controlled by them and on Aseyev’s own experience, particularly as described in the book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stanislav Aseyev is a Donetsk-born Ukrainian writer and journalist. He is the author of a collection of poetry, a play, and a novel. Under the penname Stanislav Vasin, he published short reports in the Ukrainian press about the situation on the ground following the outbreak of Russian-sponsored military hostilities in Donbas. Arrested and unlawfully imprisoned by separatist militia forces for “extremism” and “spying,” Aseyev was held captive and subjected to mistreatment and intermittent torture for over two and a half years.

This event is co-sponsored by CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Cold War Radio is a fascinating look at how the United States waged the Cold War through the international broadcasting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). Mark G. Pomar served in senior positions at VOA and RFE/RL from 1982 to 1993, during which time the Reagan and Bush administrations made VOA and RFE/RL an important part of their foreign policy. Pomar takes readers inside the two radio stations to show how the broadcasts were conceived and developed and the impact they had on international broadcasting, U.S.-Soviet relations, Russian political and cultural history, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Pomar provides nuanced analysis of the broadcasts and sheds light on the multifaceted role the radios played during the Cold War, ranging from instruments of U.S. Cold War policy to repositories of independent Russian culture, literature, philosophy, religion, and the arts. Cold War Radio breaks new ground as Pomar integrates his analysis of Cold War radio programming with the long-term aims of U.S. foreign policy, illuminating the role of radio in the peaceful end of the Cold War.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark G. Pomar is a senior fellow at the Clements Center for National Security and an adjunct lecturer in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. He is a former assistant director of the Russian Service at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, director of the USSR Division at the Voice of America, and executive director of the Board for International Broadcasting, a federal agency. He served as president and CEO of IREX, an organization that administers programs in education, public policy, and media, and was the founding CEO and president of the U.S.-Russia Foundation in Moscow.

This event is co-sponsored by CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

Every year, in mid-January, the world pauses for a day to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and to remember him as the leader of the Civil Right Movement and a symbol of justice and peace. However, only a few realize that the chief architect behind the MLK National Holiday was his wife, Coretta Scott King. During this class, Dr. Clayborne Carson takes us back in time to tell the intimate story of how these two remarkable individuals met, fell in love, and shared a lifelong commitment to activism and the betterment of the world.

This event is only open to Stanford Reunion Homecoming pass holders.

Dr. Clayborne Carson is the director of The World House Project and Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of History, emeritus. Selected in 1985 by Coretta Scott King to edit and publish the papers of her late husband, Clayborne Carson has devoted most of his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King Jr. In 2005, he founded The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute to endow and expand the educational outreach of the King Papers Project. Since 2021, Carson has been the director of the World House Project at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford.

Join us for a book talk with John Lawrence, author of "Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi's Speakership, 2005-2010."  Lunch will be served.

Drawing from his thousands of pages of notes written while serving as Chief of Staff to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, John Lawrence has written a narrative documenting his insider perspective from 2005 to 2010. These momentous years included furious political and legislative battles over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the economic recession, the 2008 presidential election, the productive first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, as well as many key legislative products, such as the Troubled Assets Relief Program, the Affordable Care Act, and Wall Street reform.

Lawrence offers valuable insights into the differing and often conflicting role played by the House and Senate given their design and composition, and shows how even a House led by powerful individuals is frequently undercut by the Senate, and how that weakness especially impacts the political power of minority populations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 

We have reached capacity for the in-person portion of this event. Please register above to join us virtually.

Why did Putin launch the war against Ukraine and what are his objectives and plan? How did the war impact Russia? What is the effect of Western sanctions on the Russian economy and society? How much longer can Russia sustain the war? What is the Russian public opinion regarding the war?

In this talk, Vladimir Milov will offer a highly detailed and nuanced analysis of all issues related to Russia and the war from his perspective based on long-term political experience and economic and state governance expertise.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Vladimir Milov Former Deputy Energy Minister of Russia (2002), adviser on economic and international affairs to Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny since 2017. Co-author of critical reports on Vladimir Putin's legacy ("Putin. The Results" & others) published together with late Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2008-2011.

 

 

Over the past three weeks, activists across Iran have been organizing to seek justice for the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old who passed away in the custody of the country's Guardian Patrol. This is one of a series of protest movements that have challenged the Iranian regime over the past five years.

Stanford in Government, in partnership with CDDRL, hosts a conversation with Jason Rezaian on October 13 from 5:00-6:30 pm in the Moghadam Conference Room 123 of Encina Commons.

In this conversation, he'll offer his perspective on the near-term prospects for U.S.-Iran relations and draw parallels between his own experience in Iran and the experience of American political prisoners abroad.

Mr. Rezaian is a writer for Global Opinions at The Washington Post. He served as The Post's correspondent in Tehran from 2012 to 2016. He spent 544 days unjustly imprisoned by Iranian authorities until his release in January 2016. Mr. Rezaian chronicled his experience in Iran in his 2019 book Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the establishment of CDDRL, Hicham Alaoui joins ARD to discuss his recently released book, Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Click here to order a copy of the book.

Pacted Democracy in the Middle East provides a new theory for how democracy can materialize in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world. It shows that one pathway to democratization lays not in resolving important, but often irreconcilable, debates about the role of religion in politics. Rather, it requires that Islamists and their secular opponents focus on the concerns of pragmatic survival—that is, compromise through pacting, rather than battling through difficult philosophical issues about faith. This is the only book-length treatment of this topic, and one that aims to redefine the boundaries of an urgent problem that continues to haunt struggles for democracy in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Hicham Alaoui is the founder and director of the Hicham Alaoui Foundation, which undertakes innovative social scientific research in the Middle East and North Africa. He is a scholar on the comparative politics of democratization and religion, with a focus on the MENA region.

In the past, he served as a visiting scholar and Consulting Professor at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University.  He more recently served as postdoctoral fellow and research associate at Harvard University. He was also Regents Lecturer at several campuses of the University of California system. Outside of academia, he has worked with the United Nations in various capacities, such as the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. He has also worked with the Carter Center in its overseas missions on conflict resolution and democracy advancement. He has served on the MENA Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch and the Advisory Board of the Carnegie Middle East Center. He served on the board of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University and has recently joined the Advisory Board of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard.

He holds an A.B. from Princeton University, M.A. from Stanford University, and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. His latest book is Pacted Democracy in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in Comparative Perspective (Palgrave, 2022). His memoirs, Journal d'un Prince Banni, were published in 2014 by Éditions Grasset, and have since been translated into several languages. He is also co-author with Robert Springborg of The Political Economy of Arab Education (Lynne Rienner, 2021), and co-author with the same colleague on the forthcoming volume Security Assistance in the Middle East: Challenges and the Need for Change (Lynne Rienner, 2023). His academic research has been widely published in various French and English journals, magazines, and newspapers of record.

This event is co-sponsored by ARD, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Center for African Studies at Stanford University.​

2022 Sam Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture
Date & Time: Wednesday, September 28, 2022     |    4:30 - 6:00 PM PT 
Location: Green Library, Bing Wing, 5th floor, Bender Room

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Overreach and Overreaction: The Downward Spiral in the U.S.-China Relations 

Stanford Libraries and the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions are pleased to present the 2022 Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture featuring Professor Susan Shirk who will be speaking on Overreach and Overreaction: The Downward Spiral in the U.S.-China Relations.  This is an in-person event.

Why did China abandon its successful foreign policy of restraint and shift toward confrontation and unchecked control over its own society? Surprisingly the shift began under Hu Jintao’s collective leadership (2002-12). Under the personalistic leadership of Xi Jinping the trend has intensified. Those who implement Xi's directives compete to outdo one another, provoking an even greater global backlash. To counter China’s overreach, the worst mistake the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, can make is to overreact. Understanding the domestic political drivers of foreign policy in both countries can help us stem the downward spiral in relations.

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About the Speaker

Susan Shirk is Chair of the 21st Century China Center and research professor at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. Shirk’s book, China:  Fragile Superpower helped frame the policy debate on China in the U.S. and other countries. Her articles have appeared in leading academic publications in political science, international relations, and China studies. She previously served as deputy assistant secretary of state (1997-2000) responsible for U.S. policy toward China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia. She is director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and founded the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, an unofficial forum for discussion of security issues. Shirk is a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College and received her PhD from M.I.T.

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The family of Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh donated his personal archive to the Stanford Libraries' Special Collections and endowed the Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture series to honor his legacy and to inspire future generations. Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh (1919-2004) was former Governor of the Central Bank in Taiwan. During his tenure, he was responsible for the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, and was widely recognized for achieving stability and economic growth. In his long and distinguished career as economist and development specialist, he held key positions in multilateral institutions including the Asian Development Bank, where as founding Director, he was instrumental in advancing the green revolution and in the transformation of rural Asia. Read more about Dr. Hsieh.

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Questions? Contact Sonia Lee from Stanford Libraries