Will China’s new leadership push through new financial reforms? The private sector is growing rapidly but private firms complain about their inability to get loans.  Reforms undertaken over the past 20 years have brought change, but much remains to be done. There are now many non-governmental banks and financial institutions operating in China, including foreign firms. But how effectively can they operate?   How open is China’s financial system to the non-governmental banks and to foreign participation? Are the challenges different for foreign firms?  How might foreign firms best cooperate with local firms as Chinese firms increasingly globalize?  Two bankers, James Chen, head of Hollyhigh International Capital, the first investment banking firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in Mainland China, and Carl Walter, recently retired Managing Director, JPMorgan Chase, China, will assess the changes in China’s financial realm. 

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James (Mingjian) Chen is the chairman of Hollyhigh International Capital, the first investment banking firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in Mainland China. He is also an adviser of the Beijing Olympics organization. Chen is a member of the liaison committee in the China National Democratic Construction Association, the chairman of the M&A Elite Club, as well as a member of the Fuping Foundation for poverty alleviation. He also serves as the chief editor of the China M&A Review, and has published Winning the Deal and M&A Revolution.

Chen graduated from Tsinghua University’s Department of Economics and Management in 1993. After graduation, he worked as a trader at China Great Wall Financial Company for several years. He then established Tsinghua Unisplendour and Hollyhigh Investment Company, in 1997 and in 1998 respectively. In addition to his work at Hollyhigh, Chen is actively engaged in M&A projects for international corporations, such as Lafarge, Shell, SK, and Scottish & Newcastle.

Chen’s deal between Teda and the Meilun Group was used as the first M&A case study at Tsinghua University. He has lectured at many renowned institutions, including Harvard University and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Carl E. Walter worked in China and its financial sector for the past 20 years and actively participated in many of the country’s financial reform efforts. While at Credit Suisse First Boston he played a major role in China’s groundbreaking first overseas IPO in 1992, as well as the first primary listing of a state-owned enterprise on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. He was a member of senior management at China International Capital Corporation, China’s first and most successful joint venture investment bank where he supported a number of significant domestic and international stock and bond underwritings for major Chinese corporations. More recently at JPMorgan he was China chief operating officer and chief executive officer of its banking subsidiary. During this time Walter helped build a pioneering domestic security, risk and currency trading operation.

A long time resident of Beijing before his recent return to the United States, Walter is fluent in Mandarin and holds a PhD from Stanford University and a graduate certificate from Peking University. He is the co-author of Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundations of China’s Extraordinary Rise as well as Privatizing China: Inside China’s Stock Markets.

Since the resignation of Indonesia’s authoritarian president Suharto in 1998, the country has made great strides in consolidating a democratic government. But it is by no means a model of tolerance. The rights of religious minorities are routinely trampled. Regulations against blasphemy and proselytizing are routinely used to prosecute minorities including atheists, Ahmadiyah, Bahais, Christians, and Shias. As of 2012 Indonesia had over 280 religiously motivated regulations restricting minority rights. 

Hard-line groups such as the Islam Defenders Front use narrow interpretations of local and national legislation as a key tool to suppress minorities. In 2006 two ministers in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's cabinet jointly decreed stricter legal requirements for building a house of worship. The decree is enforced only on religious minorities, often when Islamists pressure local officials to refuse to authorize the construction of Christian churches or to harass those worshiping in “illegal” churches. More than 430 such churches have been closed since. Violent attacks on religious minorities have become more frequent—from 216 cases in 2010, to 244 in 2011, to 264 in 2012. What explains this record of intimidation? Can it be stopped, and if so, how?

Andreas Harsono is widely published. He co-wrote In Religion's Name: Abuses against Religious Minorities in Indonesia (Human Rights Watch, 2013). His commentaries appeared in 2012 in outlets ranging from The New York Times to The Myanmar Times. Other writings include My “Religion” Is Journalism (2010), a collection of his Indonesian-language essays. In 2003 he helped establish the Pantau Foundation, which trains Indonesian journalists and defends media freedom. In 1999 he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship on Journalism at Harvard. He co-founded the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (Bangkok,1998), the Institute for the Study of the Free Flow of Information (Jakarta, 1995), and the Alliance of Independent Journalists (Jakarta, 1994). Earlier in his career he edited Pantau, a monthly Indonesian magazine on journalism and the media. Still earlier he worked as a reporter for The Nation (Bangkok) and The Star (Kuala Lumpur). He describes himself as a “journalist-cum-activist”—an identity richly illustrated by his career.

Related Resources

Indonesia: Religious Minorities Targets of Rising Violence (HRW, press release)

Indonesia: Rising Violence Against Religious Minorities (HRW, slideshow)

In Religion’s Name: Abuses Against Religious Minorities in Indonesia (HRW, report)

Early returns suggest that it may not be business as usual in state-society relations, with the Party-state being compelled to respond to an increasingly discontented and vocal society, and that a partial loosening of the tight censorship in media and culture may also be forthcoming. Indicators include changes in CCTV programming—e.g., a more interesting evening news report and the broadcast of the previously banned film V for Vendetta—media coverage of sensitive issues ranging from air pollution to the work of rights lawyers, and the relatively “enlightened” resolution of the Southern Weekend crisis, among other recent developments. What are we to make of these changes and, more importantly, how have these changes been received within China, for example on the ubiquitous and increasingly important Chinese microblogs?

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Stanley Rosen is a professor of political science at USC specializing in Chinese politics and society and was the director of the East Asian Studies Center at USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences from 2005–2011. He studied Chinese in Taiwan and Hong Kong and has traveled to mainland China over 40 times over the last 30 years. His courses range from Chinese politics and Chinese film to political change in Asia, East Asian societies, comparative politics theory, and politics and film in comparative perspective. The author or editor of eight books and many articles, he has written on such topics as the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese legal system, public opinion, youth, gender, human rights, and film and the media. He is the co-editor of Chinese Education and Society and a frequent guest editor of other translation journals. His most recent books include Chinese Politics: State, Society and the Market [Routledge, 2010 (co-edited with Peter Hays Gries)] and Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema [Hong Kong University Press, 2010 (co-edited with Ying Zhu)]. Other ongoing projects include a study of the changing attitudes and behavior of Chinese youth, and a study of Hollywood films in China and the prospects for Chinese films on the international market, particularly in the United States.

In addition to his academic activities at USC, Professor Rosen has escorted eleven delegations to China for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (including American university presidents, professional associations, and Fulbright groups), and consulted for the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, the Los Angeles Public Defenders Office and a number of private corporations, film companies, law firms and U.S. government agencies.

Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia, Stanford University

Human life expectancy improved more in the last 50 years than in the preceding 5000 years. Much of this recent progress arose from declines in childhood mortality, and most of this decline was due to scientific knowledge and technologies (defined widely as drugs, diagnostics, policies, strategies, and epidemiological knowledge). The dominant challenge of the 21st century is to apply scientific knowledge to reduce premature adult mortality, in particular from vascular and neoplastic disease but also from persistent infectious disease such as malaria. Reliable quantification of the causes of death is a key starting point for control of adult diseases, as shown by the early results from India's Million Death Study. Specific global attention is required to tobacco, as on current patterns there will be 1 billion deaths from smoking in the 21st century, as opposed to "only" 100 million deaths from smoking in the 20th century. Scientific research on adult mortality, paired with specific action, might well halve premature adult mortality worldwide in the next few decades.

Professor Prabhat Jha has been a key figure in epidemiology and economics of global health for the past decade. He is the University of Toronto Endowed Professor in Disease Control and Canada Research Chair at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and the founding Director of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. Professor Jha is a lead investigator of the Million Death Study in India, which quantifies the causes of premature mortality in over 1 million homes from 1997-2014 and which examines the contribution of key risk factors such as tobacco, alcohol, diet and environmental exposures. He is the author of several influential books on tobacco control, including two that helped enable a global treaty on tobacco control, now signed by over 160 countries.