Drawing on his latest book, Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom is Wrong (Oxford University Press, 2017), Yukon Huang will highlight the reform challenges that China's leadership, recently anointed at the 19^th Party Congress, will face. These include dealing with negative global opinions of the country, surging debt levels, a prolonged growth slowdown, entrenched corruption, trade and investment tensions and pressures for political liberalization. Dr. Huang argues that many of the mainstream assumptions for addressing these issues are misguided and that the related policy prescriptions are, therefore, flawed.

A book signing will follow. Copies of Dr. Huang's book will be available for purchase

[[{"fid":"228512","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","alt":"","title":""},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"5":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","alt":"","title":""}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"style":"margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 15px; padding: 0px; float: left; height: 262px; width: 200px;","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto","data-delta":"5"}}]]Yukon Huang is currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Asia Program. He was formerly the World Bank’s Country Director for China. His research focuses on China’s economy and its regional and global impact. He is a featured commentator for the Financial Times on China, and his articles are seen frequently in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Foreign Affairs, National Interest and Caixin. He has authored or co-authored East Asian Visions: Perspectives on Economic Development (2006); Reshaping Economic Geography in East Asia (2009); and International Migration and Development in East Asia and the Pacific (2014). His latest book is Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom is Wrong (2017). He has a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a B.A. from Yale University.

ABSTRACT

Despite security surveillance, forced dismissals of labor activists, and referrals of labor activists and protesters to military trials, labor activism remains at the forefront of societal resistance to authoritarian policies and practices in today’s Egypt. Unionized workers in public and private industrial facilities, as well as civil servants inside the state bureaucracy, continue to demonstrate and organize strikes to articulate their economic and social demands and to defend workers’ rights to freedoms of expression and association. Protests by labor activists have even impacted key sectors, such as public transportation and healthcare. While the Ministry of Manpower and Immigration has settled some formal complaints and requests filed by workers and civil servants, most cases have been referred to labor courts. The ministry has also resorted to providing temporary financial assistance and other short-term benefits to appease some workers and civil servants and to address the upsurge in labor protests. This talk will examine the various administrative, security, legislative, and judicial tools that the regime of Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi has employed to undermine labor activism. Joel Beinin will serve as a discussant.

SPEAKER BIO

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His research and teaching interests as well as his academic publications focus on democratization processes in Egypt, tensions between freedom and repression in the Egyptian public space, political movements and civil society in Egypt, contemporary debates in Arab political thought, and human rights and governance in the Arab world. He is currently writing a new book on contemporary Egyptian politics, titled Egypt’s New Authoritarianism.

Hamzawy is a former member of the Egyptian parliament, and was elected to office in the country’s first legislative elections following the January 25, 2011 revolution. He is also a former member of the Egyptian National Council for Human Rights. Hamzawy contributes a weekly op-ed to the Egyptian independent newspaper al-Shorouk and a weekly op-ed to the London based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi.

DISCUSSANT BIO

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Beinin’s research and writing focus on the social and cultural history and political economy of modern Egypt, Palestine, and Israel and on US policy in the Middle East.  He has written or edited eleven books, most recently Workers and Thieves: Labor Movements and Popular Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2015); Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa, 2nd edition (Stanford University Press, 2013) co-edited with Frédéric Vairel; and The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center, 2010).

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.