Stanford-Sasakawa Peace Foundation New Channels Dialogue 2014

Energy Challenge and Opportunities for the United States and Japan

 

February 13, 2014

Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall, Stanford University

Sponsored and Organized by Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) and Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (S-APARC) in Association with U.S.-Japan Council

 

Japan Studies Program at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University has launched a three-year project from 2013 to create new channels of dialogue between experts and leaders of younger generations from the United States, mostly from the West Coast, and Japan under a name of "New Channels: Reinvigorating U.S.-Japan Relations," with the goal of reinvigorating the bilateral relationship through the dialogue on 21st century challenges faced by both nations, with a grant received from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

Larry Diamond, director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), received the 2013 Richard W. Lyman Award at a ceremony on January 22.

The Stanford Alumni Association (SAA) presents the annual Lyman Award to a faculty member who has gone "above and beyond" to engage alumni through volunteer activities that further the SAA's goal of lifelong learning.  

Stanford Provost John Etchemendy presented the Lyman award to Diamond, recognizing him as "a university citizen of the highest degree," noting his willingness to engage Stanford alumni "whenever and wherever around the globe."

Along with his academic and administrative roles at Stanford, Diamond has dedicated time and enthusiasm to engaging Stanford's alumni community through events and travel study trips.

Diamond, a senior fellow at FSI, also is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and serves as the faculty co-director of the Haas Center for Public Service. He earned three degrees at Stanford: a bachelor's degree in political organization and behavior in 1974; a master's degree at the Food Research Institute in 1978; and a doctorate in sociology in 1980.

In accepting the award, Diamond described his first visit to Stanford as a high school debate student where his eyes were as big as saucers when he first saw the campus. From that moment forward he set his sights on doing everything he could to study at Stanford.

"My smartest decision was to turn down Harvard to come to Stanford," said Diamond. "It has been a gift to be at Stanford for the most of the past 45 years and to witness the remarkable growth of the university."

Diamond also recognized the leadership of Stanford's seventh president, Richard Lyman, who Diamond got to know when he was a student leader on campus during the turbulence of the early 1970's.

Since 1991, Diamond has presented talks at regional alumni meetings in cities across the country, including Honolulu, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York. He also spoke at Leading Matters, a series of events that shared Stanford's vision for the future with nearly 13,000 alumni, family members and friends around the world during the five-year Stanford Challenge fundraising campaign.  

Diamond recently returned from a two-week Stanford Travel-Study trip to Burma. He also has served as the faculty leader on alumni trips to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, Korea, South Africa, and the Middle East.

On campus, Diamond has presented "Classes Without Quizzes" at Reunion Homecoming. During last year's Commencement weekend, he gave the Class Day Lecture. In 2007 Diamond received Stanford's Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education.

The award was established in 1983 in honor of the late Richard W. Lyman, Stanford’s seventh president, who died in 2012. In addition to the award, the prize includes funding toward books and materials designated by the recipient for the Stanford University Libraries.

Recent Lyman Award winners include Hank Greely, a law professor; Lyman P. Van Slyke, professor emeritus of history; and Al Camarillo, professor of history and special assistant to the provost for faculty diversity.

“I felt lonely when I started working in the internet business in China around 1995. Everyone thought you were a con man.” When Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba shared this memory with a packed audience at Stanford in the spring of 2013, lots of people chuckled. Who is this self-described “loner” who “didn’t know anything about technologies” yet built an unlikely internet start-up into the world’s largest e-commerce website?

The case study of Taobao vs. eBay China taught by Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor William Barnett details how Jack Ma and Alibaba-owned Taobao defeated the global leader of e-commerce and payments in mainland China. Alibaba’s momentum continues to build: in November 2013, the company’s Taobao and Tmall platforms broke a world record by posting sales in 24 hours that topped $5.7 billion, approximately four times the total of the previous Cyber Monday in the US. Now Alibaba is heading toward an IPO that may be valued at $100 billion or more--higher than Facebook.

The self-made Ma is not your typical tech entrepreneur. Without any business education background, or “rich father, and strong uncle,” as Ma said in his keynote at the 2nd China 2.0 annual conference in September 2011, he was “a blind man riding a blind tiger” when he first started. With strong government influences and a nascent online user base, China’s environment for starting an internet firm at that time was far less than ideal.

It took a lot of courage for Ma to embark on a journey into the unknown 20 years ago. As Barnett wrote in his blog “Where are the authentic entrepreneurs?” “…[I]t turns out that at times or in places where entrepreneurship is least likely, those few entrepreneurs who do appear are most likely to win big.” Jack Ma certainly is one of them.

To read Professor Barnett’s blog post, please click here.

Stephen W. Bosworth, a former diplomat and expert on Korea, will spend the winter quarter at Stanford as a visiting lecturer.

Bosworth was a United States ambassador to three countries: South Korea (from 1997 to 2001); the Philippines (from 1984 to 1987); and Tunisia (from 1979 to 1981).

He was the President Barack Obama’s Special Representative for North Korea Policy between 2009 and 2011 and held several other senior positions at the State Department. He was a dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and is currently a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

At Stanford, he will be a Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, in residence at FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Prior to his arrival at Stanford University, Bosworth also served as the Director of Policy Planning, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, among other senior level positions at the State Department. Bosworth co-authored Chasing the Sun, Rethinking East Asian Policy in 2006, and focuses on U.S.-Asia foreign policy, energy security and inter-governmental relations.

The Payne lectureship, named after Frank and Arthur Payne, presents prominent speakers chosen for their international reputation as leaders who emphasize visionary thinking, a broad grasp of a given field, and the capacity to engage the larger community in important issues. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is also spending this academic year as a Payne lecturer.

Bosworth will deliver three public lectures at Stanford. His first talk will focus on his extensive experience in the diplomatic service. The public lecture and reception will take place in the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall on Feb. 3. The two other lectures will address negotiations and relations between North Korea and the U.S. management of its alliance with Japan and South Korea.

After the critical Third Plenum meeting in Beijing last November, China indicated impending changes to its economic and security policy in a 60-point resolution. Now the challenge is determining just how the Chinese government will attempt to implement its directives, leaving analysts to ask how significant and in what direction reform will go. As economic growth remains a priority, China will consider initiating realistic, long-standing policy changes to maintain its status as a global leader.

Barry J. Naughton, So Kuanlok professor of Chinese economy in the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, considered this question and related topics during his visit to the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center on January 9, 2014. His lecture was the first in a series on the meaning of the reforms coming out of the recent Third Plenum of the 18^th Party Congress.

After introducing the context of the Third Plenum, Naughton evaluated what the resolution signals and offered his view on what it all adds up to.  He posed the questions: did the Third Plenum succeed? and should we understand the place of the Third Plenum in China’s future development?

Naughton put forth a guarded, but optimistic view of the November resolution by pointing out that while individual reforms might not seem major, putting all the reforms together, there is a lot of substance.  He stressed the breadth of the document, its inclusion of measurable policy targets, and its willingness to tackle the most complex and controversial subjects. However, Naughton also warned that the large agenda is one of the risks. 

Focusing on the need for further SOE reform, Naughton ended his talk with a proposal. He argued that, indeed, the reform agenda is plausibly achievable if new institutions are created to implement economic restructuring. This could include the abolition of existing supervisory organizations and the creation of competing wealth management agencies assigned with the task of turning the remaining unreformed SOEs into modern joint-stock corporations. Naughton proposed that a national wealth-restructuring task force be created to address these major problems facing China.

Having recently spent time at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Naughton draws from extensive hands-on experience with China’s political economy. Many of his publications, including his book The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth, remain standards in the canon of scholarship on China. Most recently, Naughton is the editor of Wu Jinglian: Voice of Reform in China released in 2013 by the MIT Press.

Co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies, the Stanford China Program series, entitled “China under Xi Jinping,” will engage distinguished academics, policymakers, and thought leaders in discussion throughout the next few months. Noted experts will provide thoughtful conversation on the new era initiated under Xi’s leadership.

Jean C. Oi, director of the China Program, says of the series “The 3^rd Plenum of the 18^th Party Congress unveiled details of the reforms to come under Xi Jinping’s rule of China.  But how significant are they?  Are the proposed reforms sufficient to tackle the challenges that China faces?  Can they be achieved?  Are they contradictory?  These questions are all the more pressing given Xi Jinping’s seemingly divergent policy directions in the economic and political realms.  This series brings leading scholars to help untangle the 3^rd Plenum reforms and shed light on where Xi Jinping is taking China.” 

The event series “China under Xi Jinping” will be reoccurring throughout spring, please refer to the Stanford China Program calendar of events to learn more and RSVP.