As the United States struggles to emerge from recession, India and China's continued robust growth is the subject of much interest and concern. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Senior Fellow Adam Segal will talk about his new book Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge, analyzing Asia's technological rise, questioning assumptions about the United States inevitable decline, and explaining how America can preserve and improve its position in the global economy by optimizing its strength of moving ideas from the lab to the marketplace.

In his book, Segal argues that the emergence of India and China does not mean the end of American economic and technological power. Instead, the United States should now leverage its many advantages.

Through his research, Segal concludes the United States has an advantage over Asia in the realm of the software of innovation. “In America, your ideas can make you rich. Intellectual property is protected, and individual scientists are able to exploit their breakthroughs for commercial gains,” he writes. “It is time to realize that software in its most expansive sense offers the most opportunities for the United States to ensure its competitive place in the world.” The challenge is “to recover a culture of innovation that was driven underground, overshadowed by sexy credit default swaps and easy spending.”

Speaker

Adam Segal is the Ira A. Lipman senior fellow for counterterrorism and national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). An expert on security issues, technology development, and Chinese domestic and foreign policy, Dr. Segal currently leads study groups on cybersecurity and cyber conflict as well as Asian innovation and technological entrepreneurship. His new book Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge (W.W. Norton, 2011) looks at the technological rise of Asia. Dr. Segal is a research associate of the National Asia Research Program and was the project director for a CFR-sponsored independent task force on Chinese military modernization.

Before coming to CFR, Dr. Segal was an arms control analyst for the China Project at the Union of Concerned Scientists. There, he wrote about missile defense, nuclear weapons, and Asian security issues. Dr. Segal has been a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has taught at Vassar College and Columbia University. Dr. Segal is the author of Digital Dragon: High-Technology Enterprises in China (Cornell University Press, 2003), as well as several articles and book chapters on Chinese technology policy. His work has recently appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Financial Times, Washington Quarterly, Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs. Dr. Segal currently writes for the CFR blog, “Asia Unbound".

Dr. Segal has a BA and PhD in government from Cornell University, and an MA in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He reads and speaks Chinese.

Koji Murata received his M.Phil in Political Science from the George Washington University, where he studied as a Fulbright student, and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Kobe University, Kobe, Japan.

Dr. Murata's specialties include US foreign policy in East Asia, Japans foreign and
defense policy, and the history of U.S.-Japan alliance. Dr. Murata was a visiting fellow of the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Mike Mansfield Foundation in DC.

Dr. Murata is an author of many books, chapters and articles both in Japanese and English. He has testified in Japanese National Diet many times, and is a frequent commentator on Japanese TVs and newspapers. Professor Murata will assume the deanship of School of Law, Doshisha University beginning in April, 2011.

Paul Wise is a clinical professor of pediatrics and a CHP/PCOR core faculty member. His work focuses on children's health policy; health disparities by race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status; and the interaction of genetics and the environment as these factors influence child and maternal health.

Before coming to Stanford in July 2004, he was a professor of pediatrics at Boston University and vice-chief of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He previously served as director of emergency and primary care services at the Children's Hospital of Boston, and as director of the Harvard Institute for Reproductive and Child Health at Harvard Medical School. He has also served as a special expert at the National Institutes of Health and as special assistant to the U.S. Surgeon General.

Wise has worked to improve healthcare practices and policies in developing countries. He is involved in child health projects in India, South Africa and Latin America, targeting diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS. He currently chairs the steering committee of the NIH's Global Network for Maternal and Child Health Research, and he has served on many other boards and committees including the Physicians' Task Force on Hunger and the American Academy of Pediatrics' Consortium on Health Disparities. He has received honors from organizations including the American Public Health Association, the March of Dimes, and the New York Academy of Medicine.

He received a BA in Latin American studies from Cornell University, an MD from Cornell University and an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. He completed a residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Boston.

Much has been written lately about the Chinese government's efforts to control and censor the Internet. Internet censorship is an important issue, but it is not the top priority of the country's 420 million Internet users. Their top priority? Connecting with other Chinese online. The Internet has opened access to information for ordinary Chinese citizens in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Coming from a world where information was pre-filtered by editors at state-run media, China's Internet is freewheeling by comparison. Rather than kill social media, controls imposed by the government have created a vibrant and unique social media domestic ecosystem.

Speaker

Thomas Crampton, who oversees social media strategy in the Asia-Pacific region for the marketing and communications company Ogilvy and Mather, will speak about what social media means to China and Asia. A former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, he previously looked at the region in terms of political, economic, and social issues. In his current role, he has been a participant of change as social media is affecting Asia's economics, politics, and society.

Commentator

Daniel Sneider is the associate director for research at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. Sneider was the former foreign affairs columnist of the San Jose Mercury News and had a long career as a foreign correspondent.

Media X is the partner of this seminar.

Image