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BBC News: Reinventing China's Abortion Police

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BBC News reports on REAP's program to train family planning officials, who used to enforce the one child policy, to become experts in early childhood education. To read the original article, click here.

Two-year-old Liu Siqi is curled up on her grandmother's lap, complaining of a tummy ache. A man tries to divert her with a squeaky plastic duck.

Gradually the toddler's mood brightens. She giggles and is persuaded to join him singing a nursery rhyme.

The man she calls Uncle Li belongs to China's army of family planning officers. Stationed in every city, town and village in China, for the past 35 years their job has been to hunt down families suspected of violating the country's draconian rules on how many children couples can have.

But with the end of the one-child policy at the beginning of this year, some, like Li Bo, are being retrained for a different role. Now he could even be mistaken for a Chinese Father Christmas visiting remote villages in the mountains of Shaanxi province with a bag full of toys and picture books.

Along with 68 of his colleagues, Li is part of a pilot programme involving academics from Shaanxi Normal University and Stanford University's Rural Education Action Programme. His new job is to teach parents and grandparents how to develop toddlers' minds by talking, singing and reading to them.

He works in Danfeng County, 700 miles (1,125km) south-west of Beijing, an impoverished area where more than half the adults of working age have left for jobs in the cities.

We meet at a new parenting centre in two-year-old Liu Siqi's village. It's part of the pilot project here in Shaanxi province designed to stimulate deprived rural children and give them the best start in life.

He watches toddlers throwing balls into boxes and playing with wooden shapes.

"This is a golden time for them to develop skills," he says. "I like this new job and I think my work is important, because what I am doing right now will probably influence what sort of people these children will become one day."

 

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Li, who used to enforce China's one child policy, works with REAP to become an early childhood development expert. Here, he reads a book to a child in an impoverished area of Danfeng County.
Li, who used to enforce China's one child policy, works with REAP to become an early childhood development expert. Here, he reads a book to a child in an impoverished area of Danfeng County. | BBC News / Lucy Ash
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Big Data: Lessons from the Field

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Gaurav Kataria is a Big Data leader at Google who is responsible for driving Production Adoption initiatives across various Google for Work product lines - Gmail, Drive, G+, Hangouts, Google Docs, Drive, Android and Chrome. His group employs sophisticated machine learning and data mining techniques to understand the usage patterns across different products, and based on that creates programs to improve user engagement.

Gaurav holds a guest lecturer appointment at Stanford Business School where he co-teaches a course on 'Data-Driven Decision Making.' He actively supports the startup community in the Bay Area and is an advisor to multiple startups in mobile space. Prior to Google, he was a senior manager at Booz Allen and a researcher at Cylab - Carnegie Mellon. He has a Masters and PhD in Information Security Risk Management from Carnegie Mellon University and Bachelors in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Palo Alto, California and enjoys hiking the Bay Area mountain ranges in his spare time.

Gaurav will share his perspective on how to create a data-driven organization and the specific capabilities businesses need to develop to harness the power of machine intelligence.

AGENDA:

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP REQUIRED
 
For more information about the Silicon Valley-New Japan Project please visit: http://www.stanford-svnj.org/
Gaurav Kataria, Head of Product Adoption Google for Work
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Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project

How Asia Works: Two Kinds of Economics and the Rise of a Divided Continent

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Can Northeast Asia’s developmental sequence help explain – and even prescribe – economic development worldwide? Joe Studwell, former journalist for The Economist, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Financial Times, argues that the East Asian story holds the key to development for other countries. The sequential implementation of household farming to maximize agricultural yields; an acute focus on export-manufacturing; and financial repression and controlled capital accounts is key to promoting accelerated economic development. Emphasizing the role of politics to shape markets, Mr. Studwell notes that there are at least two kinds of economics: the “economics of development” and the “economics of efficiency,” which countries, after achieving a certain level of development, must pursue.

 

Joe Studwell has worked as a freelance writer and journalist in East Asia for over twenty years. He has written for the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Observer Magazine and Asia Inc. From 1997 to 2007, Mr. Studwell was the founding editor of the China Economic Quarterly and also founder and director of the Asian research and advisory firm Dragonomics, now GaveKal Dragonomics. Joe Studwell’s previous books include Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and South-East Asia (2007) named one of the year’s ten best books on Asia by the Wall Street Journal. His latest book is How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region, which was placed by both the Financial Times and The Economist on their “books of the year” lists. Mr. Studwell is currently completing his mid-career Ph.D. at Cambridge University, U.K.

Joe Studwell former journalist for The Economist, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Financial Times
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Study: Promoting abstinence, fidelity for HIV prevention is ineffective

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The U.S. government has invested $1.4 billion in HIV prevention programs that promote sexual abstinence and marital fidelity, but there is no evidence that these programs have been effective at changing sexual behavior and reducing HIV risk, according to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study.

Since 2004, the U.S. President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR, has supported local initiatives that encourage men and women to limit their number of sexual partners and delay their first sexual experience and, in the process, help to reduce the number of teen pregnancies. However, in a study of nearly 500,000 individuals in 22 countries, the researchers could not find any evidence that these initiatives had an impact on changing individual behavior.

Although PEPFAR has been gradually reducing its support for abstinence and fidelity programs, the researchers suggest that the remaining $50 million or so in annual funding for such programs could have greater health benefits if spent on effective HIV prevention methods. Their findings were published online May 2 and in the May issue of Health Affairs.

“Overall we were not able to detect any population-level benefit from this program,” said Nathan Lo, a Stanford MD/PhD student and lead author of the study. “We did not detect any effect of PEPFAR funding on the number of sexual partners or upon the age of sexual intercourse. And we did not detect any effect on the proportion of teen pregnancy.

“We believe funding should be considered for programs that have a stronger evidence basis,” he added.

A Human Cost

Senior author Eran Bendavid, MD, said the ineffective use of these funds has a human cost because it diverts money away from other valuable, risk-reduction efforts, such as male circumcision and methods to prevent transmission from mothers to their children.

“Spending money and having no effect is a pretty costly thing because the money could be used elsewhere to save lives,” said Bendavid, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford and a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy.

PEPFAR was launched in 2004 by President George W. Bush with a five-year, $15 billion investment in global AIDS treatment and prevention in 15 countries. The program has had some demonstrated success: A 2012 study by Bendavid showed that it had reduced mortality rates and saved 740,000 lives in nine of the targeted countries between 2004 and 2008.

However, the program’s initial requirement that one-third of the prevention funds be dedicated to abstinence and “be faithful” programs has been highly controversial. Critics questioned whether this approach could work and argued that focusing only on these methods would deprive people of information on other potentially lifesaving options, such as condom use, male circumcision and ways to prevent mother-to-child transmission, and divert resources from these and other proven prevention measures.

Abstinence, Faithfulness Funding Continues

In 2008, when President Barack Obama came into office, the one-third requirement was eliminated, but U.S. funds continued to flow to abstinence and “be faithful” programs, albeit at lower levels. In 2008, $260 million was committed to these programs, but by 2013 by that figure had fallen to $45 million.

Spending money and having no effect is a pretty costly thing because the money could be used elsewhere to save lives.

Although PEPFAR continues to fund abstinence and faithfulness programs as part of its broader behavior-based prevention efforts, there is no routine evaluation of the success of these programs. “We hope our work will emphasize the difficulty in changing sexual behavior and the need to measure the impact of these programs if they are going to continue to be funded,” Lo said.

While many in the medical community were critical of the abstinence-fidelity component, no one had ever analyzed its real-world impact, Lo said. When he presented the results of the study in February at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infection, he received rousing applause from the scientists in the audience, some of whom came to the microphone to congratulate him on the work.

To measure the program’s effectiveness, Lo and his colleagues used data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, a detailed database with individual and household statistics related to population, health, HIV and nutrition. The scientists reviewed the records of nearly 500,000 men and women in 14 of the PEPFAR-targeted countries in sub-Saharan Africa that received funds for abstinence-fidelity programs and eight non-PEPFAR nations in the region. They compared changes in risk behaviors between individuals who were living in countries with U.S.-funded programs and those who were not.

The scientists included data from 1998 through 2013 so they could measure changes before and after the program began. They also controlled for country differences, including gross domestic product, HIV prevalence and contraceptive prevalence, and for individuals’ ages, education, whether they lived in an urban or rural environment, and wealth. All of the individuals in the study were younger than 30.

Number of Sexual Partners

In one measure, the scientists looked at the number of sexual partners reported by individuals in the previous year. Among the 345,000 women studied, they found essentially no difference in the number of sexual partners among those living in PEPFAR-supported countries compared with those living in areas not reached by PEPFAR programs. The same was true for the more than 132,000 men in the study.

Changing sexual behavior is not an easy thing. These are very personal decisions.

The researchers also looked at the age of first sexual intercourse among 178,000 women and more than 71,000 men. Among women, they found a slightly later age of intercourse among women living in PEPFAR countries versus those in non-PEPFAR countries, but the difference was slight — fewer than four months — and not statistically significant. Again, no difference was found among the men.

Finally, they examined teenage pregnancy rates among a total of 27,000 women in both PEPFAR-funded and nonfunded countries and found no difference in rates between the two.

Bendavid noted that, in any setting, it is difficult to change sexual behavior. For instance, a 2012 federal Centers for Disease Control analysis of U.S.-based abstinence programs found they had little impact in altering high-risk sexual practices in this country.

“Changing sexual behavior is not an easy thing,” Bendavid said. “These are very personal decisions. When individuals make decisions about sex, they are not typically thinking about the billboard they may have seen or the guy who came by the village and said they should wait until marriage. Behavioral change is much more complicated than that.”

Level of Education

The one factor that the researchers found to be clearly related to sexual behavior, particularly in women, was education level. Women with at least a primary school education had much lower rates of high-risk sexual behavior than those with no formal education, they found.

“One would expect that women who are educated have more agency and the means to know what behaviors are high-risk,” Bendavid said. “We found a pretty strong association.”

The researchers concluded that the “study contributes to the growing body of evidence that abstinence and faithfulness campaigns may not reduce high-risk sexual behaviors and supports the importance of investing in alternative evidence-based programs for HIV prevention in the developing world.”

The authors noted that PEPFAR representatives have been open to discussing these findings and the implications for funding decisions regarding HIV prevention programs.

Stanford medical student Anita Lowe was also a co-author of the study.

The study was funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Stanford’s Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging.

Previously: PEPFAR has saved lives – and not just from HIV/AIDS, Stanford study finds
 

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China's strategy in the South China Sea

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In an editorial for The Asan Forum, Stanford scholar Donald Emmerson portrays China’s building of infrastructure on land features in the South China Sea as a strategy to gain control over the area incrementally, without triggering actual war. He says the strategy has, so far, succeeded in large part due to Beijing’s effective use of ambiguity and because fears of unwanted escalation have tended to outweigh fears of Chinese expansion. He argues in this context that a recent incident in Indonesian waters involving China’s coast guard is unlikely to cause a significant hardening of Jakarta’s posture toward Beijing.

The full editorial may be viewed by clicking here.

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A small craft assigned to a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer carries sailors to the guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin for training. | Flickr/U.S. Pacific Fleet
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"How America Retrenches: Foreign Policy Pullbacks in Historical Perspective" - A Lecture by Stephen Sestanovich

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Sorry, we've reached registration capacity. Please contact us if you would like to be added to the waitlist.

 

Barack Obama is not the first U.S. president to deal with the problem of overcommitment abroad.  How does his record compare with earlier cases?  Can the past help us understand the foreign policy debate of 2016?  Can it tell us how, when—and whether—today’s retrenchment will end?

 

Stephen Sestanovich is a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Maximalist: America in the World from Truman to Obama (Knopf 2014). 

From 1997 to 2001, Sestanovich was the U.S. State Department's ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union.  In previous government assignments, he was senior director for policy development at the National Security Council, a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and legislative assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He has also worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Ambassador Sestanovich received his BA summa cum laude from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University. He has written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy.     

 

Event co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation

Stephen Sestanovich Columbia University
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European Security Initiative
European Security Initiative Lecture Series

China’s Growth Prospects and Implications for Southeast Asia

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With the G-7 economies in the doldrums since 2008, the roller-coastal behavior of global commodity markets from 2010 to 2015 is convincing evidence of the huge impact that China’s economy now has on the prosperity of many regions, Southeast Asia notably included. The future course of the China’s economy will determine, among other things, the legitimacy of its government, the incentive to project force beyond its borders, and the ability to build an effective international coalition to advance its agenda in world affairs.  Prof. Woo will examine (a) the recent marked slowdown in China’s growth, distinguishing temporary factors from the medium-term trend and comparing the policy options, and (b) the domestic and external implications of two scenarios of Chinese growth for two settings­­­­­­­­ in Southeast Asia.

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Wing Thye Woo, in addition to the positions noted above, is a special-term professor in the Fudan University School of Economics (Shanghai). He is co-editing a forthcoming book on the global economy and its Asian component. His many previous publications include Ranking the Liveability of the World’s Major Cities (co-author, 2012); The Asian Financial Crisis: Lessons for a Resilient Asia (co-editor, 2000); and Fiscal Management and Economic Reform in the People's Republic of China (co-authored, 1997). He is the convener of the Asian Economic Panel (AEP), a network of leading scholars on Asian economies who meet tri-annually, and the chief editor of Asian Economic Papers, a journal co-sponsored by research institutes in Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and the US. He has also served as a special advisor to Malaysian prime minister Abdullah Badawi (2005-08), US treasury secretary Robert Rubin (1997-98), and officials of other governments.

 

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Wing Thye Woo President, Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia, Sunway University, Kuala Lumpur, and Professor of Economics, University of California, Davis
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Shorenstein APARC scholars discuss President Obama's visit to Hiroshima

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In the wake of this month’s G7 Summit in Japan, U.S. President Barack Obama has an opportunity to make a presidential visit to Hiroshima. Such a visit would reinforce his vision of a nuclear-free world and solidify an important legacy of his foreign policy, Shorenstein APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin and Associate Director for Research Daniel Sneider write in an editorial for The Diplomat. The co-authors argue that the visit be framed in a way that would contribute to historical reconciliation in Northeast Asia and not undermine progress made between Japan and South Korea. 

Sneider wrote in an earlier Toyo Keizei editorial that while the White House has not yet announced a decision, the momentum for such a visit exists. And while issues of divided historical memory cannot be ignored, the occasion would not include an apology. The editorial can be viewed online in English and Japanese.

Sneider also contributed to Public Radio International's podcast series "Whose Century Is It?" and two articles on the Huffington Post Japan website. The first article, written in Japanese, examines how the history of atomic bombings are taught in the United States, and the second article, written in English, explores the question of acceptability of President Obama's visit to Hiroshima by the Japanese people.

During the visit, Obama delivered a speech that outlined the threat of nuclear weapons and the need for a world free from them. Writing for Nippon.com, Sneider said the speech and overall visit was well-received by many, but also had its critics. "The best judgment of the impact of Obama's Hiroshima visit may be what follows in Northeast Asia, where the task of postwar reconciliation remains unfinished," he wrote. The editorial can be viewed online in English and Japanese.

Shin and Sneider lead a decade-long research project that examines historical reconciliation in Asia, and are co-authors of the forthcoming book, Divergent Memories, about elite opinion and wartime memory in Asia.

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During a break in the G7 Ministerial Meetings in Japan, a delegation visits the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on April 11, 2016 with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. | Flickr/U.S. Department of State
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Payne Distinguished Lecture with R. Nicholas Burns: National Security Challenges for the Next President

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Click below to view the recording:

 

Please join us for the upcoming Payne Distinguished Lecture, “NATIONAL SECURITY CHALLENGES FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENT," with R. Nicholas Burns, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and the Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations, Harvard Kennedy School of Government. 

The lecture will take place on Friday, April 29 at 12 noon in the Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall.  Please RSVP to Scott Nelson at snelson@stanford.edu.

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Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Lecture Series
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