Stanford Report: The First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, spoke at SCPKU today and said study abroad allows students to realize that countries all have a stake in each other's success.  Following her remarks, she held a conversation with students on the Stanford campu via SCPKU's Highly Immersive Classroom. Read more.

How do nations build and sustain economic power? While the rise of Asia-Pacific economies has drawn significant scholarly attention, these nations' divergent paths to success remain less understood. Stanford University's Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea in the Department of Sociology, argues we need a new lens to account for cross-national variation in how countries mobilize talent to develop their workforces and achieve growth.

In his recent book, The Four Talent Giants, Shin introduces Talent Portfolio Theory, a framework that explains how four strikingly different Asia-Pacific nations – Japan, Australia, China, and India – became economic powerhouses through distinct human resource development strategies. Each nation tailored its approach to education, migration, and global networks in ways shaped by unique historical, cultural, and geopolitical contexts.

Shin – a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of the Korea Program and the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL) at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) – joined host Sydney Seiler on the Center for Strategic and International Studies' video podcast, The Impossible State, to discuss that framework, how the four Asia-Pacific "talent giants" developed, attracted, and retained talent, and what other countries, including the United States, can learn as they face new risks and opportunities in a globalized, AI-driven economy.

The Four Talent Giants, published by Stanford University Press, is part of the SUP-APARC joint monograph series, Studies of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. The book draws on research conducted as part of SNAPL's Talent Flows and Development research track.

Countries are in a high-stakes competition to develop AI talent and respond to the technology's transformative impact on labor markets and economic growth. As the race intensifies, a critical question looms large: What talent development strategies deliver proven outcomes?

In a recent book published by Stanford University Press, The Four Talent Giants, Stanford sociologist Gi-Wook Shin, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, examines how countries attract, develop, and retain talent in a globalized world. Shin, who is also the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and director of the Korea Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), explores how four vastly different Asia-Pacific nations – Japan, Australia, China, and India – rose to economic prominence by pursuing distinct human resource development strategies, encompassing different approaches to education, migration, and transnational talent mobility.

The study provides a framework that extends beyond the four cases, offering policy lessons for other economies, particularly less developed nations. Below are four insights from the book on the evolution of talent strategies and why countries need to construct multiple forms of talent – domestic, foreign, and diasporic – to address new risks and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

1. Look for variation in mobilizing human resources for development

Several Asia-Pacific countries now rank among the world’s largest economies – a marked shift from the 1980s, when Japan was the only regional economy near the top. Shin cautions against interpreting this rise of Asia-Pacific nations as evidence of a single developmental regional “recipe.” Instead, his work shows that similar economic outcomes emerged from different national paths, shaped by distinct histories of colonial rule, nationalism, state-building, and higher education policy.

Rather than isolating one driver of growth, the analysis highlights how states structured education systems, migration pathways, and global connections to talent in ways that reflected domestic priorities and constraints.

2. Talent includes social capital, not just skills or credentials

Shin defines talent broadly as both human capital and social capital. In a transnational era, the value of talent lies not only in technical expertise but also in the networks, relationships, and institutional ties that connect individuals across borders.

This insight underpins a four-part framework for national talent strategies: brain train (developing domestic talent), brain gain (attracting foreign talent), brain linkage (maintaining ties with citizens and students abroad), and brain circulation (sending talent out and facilitating return). Successful countries rarely rely on a single approach; instead, they combine these strategies in different proportions over time.

3. Talent strategies must be diversified and rebalanced over time

A central contribution of Shin’s book is a framework he calls Talent Portfolio Theory, which likens national talent strategies to investment portfolios. Just as investors diversify assets and rebalance them as conditions change, states must continually adjust how they train, attract, and retain talent in response to economic shifts.

Japan’s experience illustrates both the strengths and limits of a concentrated strategy. Its post-WWII success rested on a robust domestic training system spanning universities, vocational schools, and workplace education. Nevertheless, as the global knowledge economy evolved in the 1990s, Japan struggled to adapt, facing demographic decline and hampered by institutional introspection. Only in the 2010s did Japanese policymakers begin to diversify talent development through study-abroad programs, attracting international students, and implementing limited immigration reforms.

Australia followed a contrasting path, relying heavily on foreign talent through skilled migration and international education. Its system emphasized work-migration pathways and relatively easy naturalization for international students, while more recent policies have focused on sustaining global alumni and diaspora networks. Each model carries risks, but together they demonstrate why diversification and timely rebalancing matter.

4. Political leadership and state policy shape talent outcomes

Across cases, Shin argues that talent strategies are not purely organic market outcomes. Political leadership and state capacity play decisive roles in shaping higher education systems and migration policy. China’s post-reform experience demonstrates how state-led overseas training and return programs helped address the loss of scientific expertise after the Cultural Revolution. Over time, China shifted from emphasizing the return of Chinese nationals to the country toward building broader transnational linkage and circulation mechanisms.

India offers a different model, where long-standing patterns of outward migration produced a global diaspora that functions as a form of “brain deposit.” Alumni of Indian Institutes of Technology and other elite institutions now serve as transnational bridges connecting India to Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs.

For developing countries, Shin offers a counterintuitive lesson: initial brain drain is often unavoidable and can be productive if governments invest in long-term linkage and circulation rather than restricting mobility. To the United States and other nations grappling with anti-immigration politics, Shin’s message is that erecting barriers to attracting and retaining global talent could undermine their long-term economic competitiveness.

Introduction and Motivation:

Social scientists and philosophers have shown increased interest in the concept of descriptive representation. Indeed, the identities and life experiences of those doing the representing may be critical for enacting the preferences of those being represented. This is especially the case for historically marginalized groups — upper-class, educated men may simply fail to adequately represent lower-class, uneducated, or women voters. In addition to considerations of fairness, there is growing recognition that descriptive representation can improve policy outcomes, such as service delivery or trust in government.

However, the study of descriptive representation has been hampered by data availability. Identifying simple correlations across the world’s democracies — for example, between proportions of working-class legislators and levels of social welfare provision — has hitherto been impossible.

In “The Global Legislators Database,” Nicholas Carnes, Joshua Ferrer, Miriam Golden, Esme Lillywhite, Noam Lupu, and Eugenia Nazrullaeva introduce the largest dataset of biographic and demographic information on national legislators ever assembled. GLD will enable scholars to assess just how much voters elect those with life experiences resembling their own. The authors compile information on five descriptive variables across 97 democracies: legislators’ party affiliation, gender, age, highest level of education, and previous occupation (to assess their social class). By contrast, prior datasets have focused only on heads of state or cabinet members, or on only a selection of more developed democracies.

Some questions around descriptive representation would seem to have intuitive answers: Wouldn’t developed countries have more women representatives, or wouldn’t women legislators feature less prominently in right-wing parties? Scholars can now hope to do more than merely gesture at answers.

Characteristics, Validity Checks, and Applications:

GLD comprises countries that (a) have a population of over 300,000 and (b) meet the standard for what Freedom House calls “Electoral Democracy” — having some minimum of political rights and civil liberties. Excluding six cases of data availability constraints, this yields 97 countries, including India, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Scholars of Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Turkey — who would likely characterize these countries as authoritarian during the 2015-17 time period — will be pleased that the authors chose a more forgiving measure of democracy.

Biographic data is drawn from the national legislature in unicameral countries and the lower chamber in bicameral countries. (By contrast, upper chambers are sometimes indirectly appointed or hereditary, which sheds less light on whether voters choose descriptively similar representatives.) This yields over 19,000 individuals who held office during at least one legislative session in 2015, 2016, and 2017. GLD has remarkably complete data for the five variables mentioned above: age and education data are presented for over 90% of legislators in the dataset, for over 93% as regards occupation, and nearly 100% for gender.

In order to assess GLD’s validity, the authors compare select variables to those in comparable datasets. For example, the gender variable is compared with gender data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which shows that the two measures are nearly identical. So too is the age data nearly identical to an index from 15 affluent democracies.
 

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Figure 1. Shares of women legislators in the GLD and V-Dem. Note: Bahamas, Belize, Fiji, and Kosovo are omitted because of missing data in the V-Dem.
 

For categories like education and prior occupation — where comparable data are unavailable — the authors conduct “face validity” tests: these draw on our intuitions that legislators are, for example, mostly educated and not working class. And indeed, these intuitions are borne out in the distributions of GLD data. In terms of total coverage, GLD includes information on more legislators than the comparable Global Leadership Project database for all but two countries, and in many cases, the differences are large.
 

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Figure 3. Distributions of legislator traits in the GLD. Note: Age is calculated at the time of election. Higher education includes levels beyond primary and secondary education (Bachelors, Masters, PhD, LLB, LLM, JD, MD, and short-cycle tertiary). Data on educational attainments for legislators is unavailable for Côte d’Ivoire.
 

The authors then use GLD in application to a number of questions for which scholars have lacked global data. First, some have hypothesized that in legislatures with more (a) uneducated, (b) female, and (c) working-class representatives, incumbency rates will be lower. This is because individuals from these three groups might have a harder time overcoming challenges relating to expertise, sexism, and fundraising, respectively. Correlating GLD data with a global reelection database, the authors find only evidence for (b), suggesting that women may face higher barriers to remaining in office. These are only correlations, but they point to fruitful areas for exploration: why might women face unique barriers, and what distinguishes countries with lower versus higher barriers?
 

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Figure 5. Re-election rates by years of education, gender, and occupational background. Note: The share of working-class legislators is zero for six countries that are dropped from the figure: Albania, Botswana, Cyprus, Estonia, Guatemala, and Mongolia.
 

A second application involves public financing of elections, which is thought to favor more working-class legislators who would have a harder time fundraising. Correlating V-Dem data on public financing with the GLD variable on prior occupation, however, the authors find limited evidence for this conjecture. Finally, some have proposed that countries with a stronger rule of law would favor a higher proportion of lawyers in the national legislature. Looking again at GLD prior occupation data alongside V-Dem rule of law data, the authors find limited evidence for this hypothesis.

These varied applications point to how the Global Legislators Database can serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in the causes and consequences of descriptive representation. Although the GLD covers only a single point in time, it can serve as a bedrock for additional data-collection efforts. In addition to expanding its temporal coverage, scholars may also wish to gather data on upper chambers. Especially in ethnically diverse countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina, upper chambers are intended to mirror the descriptive composition of specific regions. However, it may be the case that ethnic representatives are still vastly more wealthy or educated than their constituents, thus impeding their ability to represent.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

The January 3, 2026, U.S. “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela to capture and remove President Nicolás Maduro has raised urgent questions about its repercussions for the U.S.-China competition, Taiwan Strait security, American strategic priorities in the Indo-Pacific region, and U.S. allies and partners.

In two new episodes of the APARC Briefing series, Stanford scholars Larry Diamond, the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and William L. Clayton Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and APARC faculty affiliate Oriana Skylar Mastro, a center fellow at FSI, join host Kiyoteru Tsutsui, the director of APARC, to unravel what happened in Venezuela and the implications of the U.S. actions in Latin America for Taiwan, security and alliances in the Indo-Pacific, and U.S. relations with stakeholders in the region.

Both scholars agree that the U.S. mission in Venezuela is a precedent that likely emboldens rather than deters China in its Taiwan calculus, warning that the shift it represents in U.S. national security policy might detract from American capabilities in the Indo-Pacific region at a crucial moment. They also provide sobering advice for U.S. allies struggling to adjust to rapidly shifting geopolitical realities under the second Trump administration.

A Shocking Action in World Affairs

There is no dispute that the Maduro government has been deeply authoritarian, deeply corrupt, and deeply illegitimate, says Diamond, author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency. Yet the United States “has probably violated international law to intervene forcibly in the internal affairs of Venezuela and remove its political leader," creating enormous implications for the international community. If it does not pursue a strategy of systemic democratic change in Venezuela, “all of this will have been for naught, and it will have paid a tragic price in terms of international precedent and international legitimacy,” Diamond argues.

Beijing is already using the operation as a "discourse power win," depicting the United States as crushing sovereignty and international law, Mastro notes. Moreover, in addition to Venezuela, President Trump continues to make statements about Greenland, reiterating its importance for U.S. national security and his interest in acquiring the territory, which has alarmed European partners and exacerbated strains with NATO.

“For the first time since WWII, some European countries have declared the United States to be a security threat,” Mastro says. “So I am curious to see if the Chinese try to bring along the Venezuela case as well, to convince U.S. allies and partners to distance themselves from the United States, which would have significant repercussions for the global order and for the United States' role in it.”

A Risky Strategic Reorientation

By unilaterally bypassing international norms to wield power in its own "backyard," the United States may have set a precedent that China can now exploit to justify its own ambitions in Taiwan as a legitimate exercise of regional dominance.

Diamond remarks on this line of thought: “If the United States, as a hegemon, can just do what it wants to arrest and remove a leader, in its kind of declared sphere of influence, what's to stop Xi Jinping from doing the same in his sphere of influence, and with a democratic system in Taiwan, whose sovereignty he does not recognize?” 

On the other hand, many commentators have argued that Operation Absolute Resolve serves as a deterrent to Chinese aggression. Granted, there is no doubt that the operation was a remarkably successful military attack showcasing the capabilities of U.S. special forces, notes Mastro, who, alongside her academic career, also serves in the United States Air Force Reserve, for which she currently works at the Pentagon as deputy director of research for Global China Strategy. Nevertheless, she emphasizes that the United States cannot carry out a similar attack in Asia.

“There is no situation in which we ‘neutralize’ Chinese air defenses and then somehow do some sort of infiltration,” says Mastro, author of Upstart: How China Became a Great Power. The U.S. intervention in Venezuela, therefore, “does not tell us a lot, operationally, about what the United States is capable of in a contingency via China.”

More troubling, Mastro identifies the Venezuela operation as demonstrating a fundamental shift in U.S. strategic priorities, with the raid conducted just weeks after the Trump administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy, which prioritizes restoring “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Mastro characterizes it as “the one region where U.S. dominance faces no serious challenge.” Thus, Venezuela suggests “the Trump administration means business about the renewed focus on the Western Hemisphere, and, unfortunately, that makes me concerned that there might be strategic neglect of the Indo-Pacific moving forward,” she points out.

Diamond stresses that, virtually throughout the entire presidency of Xi Jinping, dating back to 2012, China has been rapidly building up its military capabilities, prioritizing those specifically suited for coercing, isolating, or potentially seizing Taiwan. Against this backdrop, “I am much more fearful about the future of Taiwan in the week following U.S. military action on January 3 in Venezuela than I was before that action.” 

Mastro agrees with this assessment about the ripple effects of the operation in Venezuela. “I would say that it probably emboldens China.”

Frank Advice for U.S. Allies

For U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as allies and partners in Europe, both scholars offer pragmatic counsel for coping with the Trump administration.

Diamond urges U.S. allies to manage Trump diplomatically while staying focused on core interests, namely, prioritizing the preservation of the alliances and strengthening autonomous defense capabilities to demonstrate commitment and hedge against potential U.S. retrenchment.

“It takes constant, energetic, proactive, imaginative, relentless, and in some ways deferential working of the relationship, including the personal relationship between these leaders and Donald Trump [...] The future will be better if the leaders of these countries internalize that fundamental lesson about Trump.”

Mastro is equally direct about the limited alternatives ahead of U.S. allies: "You don't really have an option. That Chinese military – if it gives the United States problems, it definitely gives you problems. There's no hope for a country like Taiwan without the United States. There's no hope for Australia without the United States."

Counterintuitively, U.S. assertiveness may indicate its insecurity about the balance of power with China. “It seems to me that the United States also needs to be reassured that our allies and partners support us [...] And if we had that confidence, maybe the United States would be less aggressive in its use of military force.”

Watch the two APARC Briefing episodes:

🔸 What the U.S. Raid in Venezuela Means for Taiwan and Asia - with Larry Diamond >

🔸 Does Venezuela Provide China a Roadmap for Taiwan? – with Oriana Skylar Mastro >

Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) is pleased to invite nominations for the 2026 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award, which carries a cash prize of US$10,000, recognizes outstanding journalists and news media outlets for excellence in covering the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region. The 2026 award will honor a Western news media outlet or a journalist whose substantial body of work has primarily appeared in Western news media. APARC welcomes award nomination submissions from news editors, publishers, scholars, news outlets, journalism organizations, and entities focused on researching and analyzing the Asia-Pacific region. Entries are due by February 15, 2026.

The award defines the Asia-Pacific region broadly as including Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and Australasia. Both individual journalists with a considerable body of work and news media outlets are eligible for the award. Nominees’ work may be in traditional forms of print or broadcast journalism and/or in new forms of multimedia journalism. The Award Selection Committee oversees the judging of nominees and is responsible for selecting honorees.

An annual tradition since 2002, the award honors the legacy of Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, APARC's benefactor, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. Throughout its history, the award has recognized world-class journalists and news media who push the boundaries of coverage of the Asia-Pacific region and champion press freedom and human rights.

Recent honorees include Netra News, Bangladesh's premier public interest journalism outlet; Chris Buckley, the New York Times' chief China correspondent; The Caravan, India’s esteemed magazine of long-form journalism; Emily Feng, then NPR's Beijing correspondent; and Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, CEO and president of the Philippines-based news organization Rappler. Visit the award page to learn more.

Award nominations are accepted electronically through Sunday, February 15, 2026, at 11:59 PM PST.  Visit the award nomination entry page for information about the nomination procedures and to submit an entry.

APARC will announce the winner by May 2026.

Please direct all inquiries to aparc-communications@stanford.edu.