APARC is pleased to announce the appointment of political scientist Dr. Diana Stanescu and doctoral candidate in sociology Mary-Collier Wilks as our 2021-22 Shorenstein postdoctoral fellows on contemporary Asia. They will begin their appointments at Stanford in autumn 2021.

The Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Asia supports recent doctoral graduates dedicated to research and writing on contemporary Asia, primarily in the areas of political, economic, or social change in the Asia-Pacific, or international relations in the region.

Fellows develop their dissertations and other projects for publication, present their research, and participate in the intellectual life of APARC and Stanford at large. Our postdoctoral fellows often continue their careers at top universities and research organizations around the world and remain involved with research and publication activities at APARC.

Meet our new postdoctoral scholars:

Diana Stanescu

Research Project: Do Bureaucratic Networks Matter for Market Access? The Effect of Informal Connections on Trade and FDI of Japanese Firms.

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Dr. Stanescu’s research interests include international trade, regulation, and lobbying with a focus on Japan. Using formal and quantitative methods, her research addresses the overarching question of how bureaucracies shape global economic governance, from a structural and agent-driven perspective. Her dissertation, “The Bureaucratic Politics of Foreign Economic Policymaking,” explains the mechanisms by which stakeholders shape international economic policy through bureaucratic channels of influence. Additional work looks at the micro-foundations of bureaucratic structure and its consequences for policy, examines the role of individual bureaucrats within domestic and international institutions, and develops micro-level data on bureaucratic careers and appointments.

At APARC, Stanescu will further assess how politicians and interest group representatives maneuver within bureaucratic channels to have influence over foreign economic policy. In particular, she will examine how bureaucratic-interest group networks help firms obtain market access abroad, with evidence from trade and foreign direct investment in Japan.

Mary-Collier Wilks

Research project: How do conceptions of gender, sexuality, and women’s advancement shape the construction of development knowledge and foreign aid?

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It was Wilk’s work as a grant writer at a local NGO, Social Services of Cambodia, that first sparked her interests in globalization, gender, and the politics of international development. Having seen how resources and ideas from all over the world flow through NGOs to affect the lives of people in Cambodia, she began thinking about the complicated process of foreign aid and international development. She also gained experience as a consultant in the development sector, performing a gender analysis for a USAID health project and serving as a trainer for a USAID Women’s Leadership Conference.

For her dissertation, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Fulbright IIE, Wilks conducted a multi-sited ethnography comparing U.S. and Japanese international NGOs that advance women's health in Cambodia. Her work contributes to scholarly theories of global civil society and international development, contending that to adequately analyze and improve development outcomes, we must attend to national variation in international NGO programs and practices.

At APARC, Wilks will transform her dissertation manuscript into a book and extend her comparative research agenda to investigate how NGO practices are shaped by the business cultures in which their donors are embedded.

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Introducing the new book, Lawrence H. Summers, president emeritus of Harvard University and the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at the Kennedy School, called the co-authors’ analysis of collaborative governance “micro microeconomics” that shows how particular tasks and particular commitments of resources, once decided on, are going to be best accomplished. This work, Summers noted, sheds light on situations involving both cooperation and competition — aspects that affect almost any complex problem yet are rarely considered by economists.

A key element of collaborative governance, noted Zeckhauser, is the sharing of discretion. Rather than contracting at one pole and complete laissez-faire at the opposite pole, in a collaborative governance process, the two parties involved play a role in determining what is produced and how it is produced. It is a process that calls on the best capabilities of both the private and public sectors and that grants each of them an element of control. Sometimes that process results in triumphs, sometimes in tragedies, and other times in outcomes that are “in-between.” The book analyses cases of this entire gamut. “We hope that this volume provides guidance on how the triumphs can become more common, the tragedies more scarce, and the in-between outcomes improved,” said Zeckhauser.

Collaborative Governance in the Time of COVID-19

The unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic provides dramatic current illustrations of collaborative governance. The urgent need for an effective vaccine created the conditions for a successful partnership between the U.S. government and the pharmaceutical sector, with the former offering both regulatory processes and significant financing, the latter its innovation. Consider the Moderna vaccine, which, based on evidence from clinical trials, is over 90% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 illness. The vaccine was created within less than a year using a new approach, based on Messenger RNA technology, by a company that had never before produced a commercial product. “This is a triumph of collaborative governance,” said Zeckhauser.

The vaccine distribution process in the United States, however, has proved to be challenging and chaotic. Zeckhauser contrasted this experience with China’s activation of technology giant Tencent, which is using its ubiquitous WeChat application to allow individuals to easily find where the vaccine is distributed and sign up for vaccination appointments. “There is probably a lesson here in the way these two outcomes came about. We hope that individuals in both China and the United States will examine the lessons in this volume to see how they can achieve outcomes for their citizens that produce public benefits more effectively.”

A Spectrum of Policy Domains

The book details how China and the United States grapple with the complexity of producing the goods and services they need to meet a broad array of public goals. Eggleston surveyed the five broad policy domains she and her co-authors examine in the book through detailed historical legacies and case studies of the application of collaborative governance in both countries.

These domains include the railroads that build the nation historically in both countries and China’s high-speed rail network; real estate's intricate tangle of public and private partnerships; hosting the Olympic Games and the experience of the public and private sectors in that endeavor in both countries; education provision; and state and market in population health and health care in both countries. The book spotlights the different ways in which both countries produce public goods and services in these broad policy domains.

East and West

Professor Yijia Jing of Fudan University, an expert on privatization, governance, and collaborative service delivery, participated in the discussion with the book co-authors and shared insights on public-private relationships in China. Collaborative governance in the country, he said, has undergone a gradual process of institutionalization. He observed that Chinese local governments apply different strategies in collaborating with private companies. For example, local governments like Guangdong and Shanghai partner in different ways with digital giants Tencent and Alibaba to build up their digital capacities — collaborations through which they have been learning how to balance their multiple roles as partners, policymakers, and market regulators.

Jing noted that China uses collaborative governance not only in domestic arenas but also in areas of international development, through entities such as the BRICS Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China is also promoting collaborative governance as part of its Belt and Road initiative.

A Call for Transparency

The Dragon, the Eagle, and the Private Sector helps decision-makers apply the principles of collaborative governance to effectively serve the public. The book's overarching conclusion is that transparency is the key to the legitimate growth of collaborative governance. In the United States, said Donahue, the principle of governmental transparency is widely accepted as a broad-spectrum accountability device. He recognized that he and his co-authors do not expect China to adopt the U.S. approach to transparency, but expressed their hope to see more transparency “with Chinese characteristics.” “It is crucial for China to embrace the transparency imperative because the evil twin of collaborative governance is cronyism or corruption,” Donahue argued.

In many countries and policy arenas, collaborative governance could effectively increase innovation but is not available because the populace is convinced that any interaction between the public and private sectors amounts to corruption on the part of elites against the public interest. The potential in China to create public value through interaction between its public and private sectors is enormous, concluded Donahue. ”It would be a shame to squander that.”

SPICE’s Manager of Curriculum and Instructional Design Rylan Sekiguchi was announced this week as the recipient of the 2021 Franklin R. Buchanan Prize for his authorship of What Does It Mean to Be an American? The prize is awarded annually by the Association for Asian Studies, which will formally honor Sekiguchi in a ceremony at 2pm PDT on March 24, 2021. This is the third time that Sekiguchi has won the award.

SPICE co-developed the website for What Does It Mean to Be an American? with the Mineta Legacy Project. What Does It Mean to Be an American? was inspired by the life of Secretary Norman Mineta, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Bill Clinton and U.S. Secretary of Transportation under President George W. Bush. President Clinton, President Bush, and Secretary Mineta contributed video interviews for the website.

Established in 1995 by the AAS Committee on Educational Issues and Policy and the Committee on Teaching about Asia, the Franklin R. Buchanan Prize is awarded annually to recognize an outstanding pedagogical, instructional, or curriculum publication on Asia designed for K–12 and college undergraduate instructors and learners.

We often think of language as a democratic field, but it is not quite the common property of its speakers, argues Jeffrey Weng, APARC’s 2020-21 postdoctoral fellow on contemporary Asia. Rather, language is a skill that must be learned, says Weng, and it creates social divisions as much as it bridges divides. 

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What has shaped your interest and research into the study of language and linguistic dissemination?

As a first-grade student in the early 1990s attending Chinese school in central New Jersey on Saturday mornings, I learned how to write my first complete sentence in the language: “I am an overseas Chinese.” Now, this was a curious sentence to teach to a class full of American-born children of Taiwanese parents, and it’s a reminder that language is never a neutral conveyor of meaning. Language cannot but be freighted with social, cultural, and political import, a lesson reinforced in my high-school Spanish classes, in which I made my first forays into literature in a foreign language: stories by the great writers of Spain and Latin America not only spoke a wholly different language, but they told wholly different stories from those of their British and American counterparts.

Linguistic difference also is a signal of individual and social difference: my childhood visits with family in Taiwan opened my ears to a cacophonous Babel in the media and on the streets—though we spoke Mandarin at home, whenever we went out, people speaking Taiwanese were everywhere to be seen and heard. This was further amplified when I visited mainland China for the first time in my early 20s. Beijing, the supposed wellspring of the nation’s language, was bewildering—I could not understand much of the unselfconscious speech of the locals. And traveling several hundred miles in any direction would only deepen my incomprehension. And yet, on the radio and on TV, during formal events and on university campuses, there was always Mandarin to clear the way. I wanted to learn more about how this language situation came to be. For me, studying the social, cultural, and political nature of language is a way to a deeper understanding of how people are united and divided in vastly different contexts across the globe.

As you’ve looked deeper into how language shapes society and society shapes language, what is something surprising you’ve come to realize about that relationship?

People often see language as the ultimate democratic field when it comes to cultural practice. No matter how much you might tell people not to split their infinitives or end their sentences with prepositions, popular practice will always win the day. Or so we English speakers think. Ever since Merriam-Webster came out with its infamously descriptivist Third New International Dictionary in 1961, Anglophone language nerds have fought over whether dictionaries should be “prescriptive”—that is, rule-setting—or “descriptive”—reflective of popular usage. But really, these are two sides of the same coin. We take it for granted that privately-owned publishers of dictionaries spell out the supposed norms of our language. Not only that, we even think this ought to be the case. French is the usual counterexample: when government language authorities in Quebec or Paris try to stem the Anglophone tide, we think it absurd that so-called authorities would ever try to rule over something so fundamentally unruly as language.

In my research, however, I learned how fundamentally invented Mandarin as a language is—from its highly artificial pronunciation to the way its orthography has been stabilized. There used to be a lot of variability in how characters were written and how they could be used, much like English spelling before the 18th century. Mandarin, both spoken and written, was standardized only in the 1920s to facilitate mass literacy and national cohesion. So linguistic change might often follow and reflect social change, but the process can also operate in reverse—a government can change language in hopes of facilitating social change.

In your latest journal publication, you argue that language nationalization in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam between 1870-1950 was a state-led, top-down process directed at remaking society rather than the more traditional view of diffusion through trade, economics, and cultural exchange. Why is this an important distinction to make?

Again, we often see language as a democratic field, the common property of its speakers, but it isn’t really. Sociolinguists are often quick to remind us that linguistic differences reflect class differences—“proper” language is that of “educated” speakers. But language is a skill, and skills must be learned. Some people can learn skills more easily than others, whether through natural ability or, more importantly, the life circumstances they were born into. Rich people can more easily get a good education. Educational disparities are now part and parcel of today’s broader debates about inequality. But the very fact that we think this is a problem is a product of developments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Before then, broad swaths of humanity were totally illiterate and had no chance at being educated, and most people did not think this was a problem. In Europe, the language of the Church and academia, even to some extent in Protestant areas, was Latin until the 18th century. Local vernaculars had gradually developed as independent media of communication in government chancelleries and popular literature since the Middle Ages, but they did not really gain ascendancy until the age of print-capitalism and nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Marxian-influenced scholars have therefore concluded that the rise of national languages coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie, whose own languages became those of the nations they constructed.

In France, for example, while revolutionaries in the 1790s advocated the use of Parisian French to unify a country divided by hundreds of local forms of speech, into the mid-19th century, even journeying 50 miles outside Paris found travelers having trouble making themselves understood to the locals. It took more than a century for French to gain a foothold in most of the country. Asia, too, was a polyglot patchwork for millennia, unified at the top by an arcane language much like Latin—Classical Chinese. This situation became politically untenable in the 19th century as European imperialism encroached on traditional sovereignties in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. In order to counter the foreign threat, governments sought to strengthen their societies by educating their populations, which required making it easier to learn how to read and write. While standard languages have been described by historians and sociolinguists as “artificial” for less-privileged learners, Asia’s standard languages were artificial even to their bourgeois inventors.

Our understanding of the present is invariably colored by our interpretation of the past: if we understand a national language to be a bourgeois imposition that diffused via economic development, then we more easily see its continued imposition as a perpetuation of class prejudices. If on the other hand, we see an invented national language as a tool for bridging regional divisions and expanding economic opportunity for our children, then we feel much more positively about the spread of such languages. Both interpretations can be true at the same time, but we must remember that one is inseparable from the other.

Do you see any parallels between how language nationalization has occurred in the past to how language and society are shaping one another in the present?

The number of “standard” Mandarin speakers in the early 1930s could be counted on one hand. Today, it’s the world’s largest language by a number of “native” speakers. Though it began as an elite nationalizing project that was largely ignored by the masses of people in China, Mandarin is now more often seen as a hegemonic threat to local languages and cultures. Language can thus bridge divides, but also create new divisions. People in China are often ambivalent about the pace of change these days. When I visited cousins in rural Fujian during the Lunar New Year a few years ago, I noticed that all my nieces and nephews spoke Mandarin in almost all situations, to their parents, and especially to one another. Only my grandparents’ generation used the local Fuqing dialect as a matter of course. My parents’ generation spoke dialect to their parents, but a mix of Mandarin and dialect to their children—the cousins of my generation, who were able to speak the dialect, but were more comfortable speaking Mandarin among themselves and to their children. One of my young nieces who’d grown up in Beijing, where her parents had moved for work, even had a perfect Beijing accent. In a span of three generations, migration due to expanded opportunity had wrought enormous change in language habits. Much had been gained, but also much had been lost.

How has your time at APARC as one of our Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellows aided your research project?

It’s certainly been a strange year to be a postdoc, given how we’ve all been operating remotely. Nevertheless, life and work have continued, and we’ve all been able to find new ways of building community and getting things done. I’ve personally benefited from the access to the vast academic resources of Stanford—library access, even online alone, is a lifeline to any researcher. Moreover, I’ve had the opportunity to chat on Zoom with Stanford faculty about research and connect with my fellow postdocs to support one another as we figure out how to move forward in our careers in these challenging times.

With your recent appointment as an assistant professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei, how do you anticipate your research interests growing and developing given the tension between Taiwan and China?

I am gratified to begin my academic career in a place of such diversity and openness as Taiwan. Language and identity are constant sites of contention in Taiwan's politics, and I look forward to expanding my on-the-ground understanding of these issues as I begin teaching in the sociology department at National Taiwan University. It is nothing short of miraculous that democracy has flourished at such an intersection of empires, colonialism, repressions, and struggles. And it is unsettling to see that flourishing takes place in such a precarious geopolitical location. NTU's sociology department is at the forefront of understanding all of these vital issues as we barrel forward into an ever more uncertain future.

The 2020 US election occurred in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, yet the voter turnout was the highest in 120 years.  After all the mail-in ballots were counted, former Vice President Joseph Biden was declared the winner of the popular vote and the Electoral College vote by a wide margin.  Yet, Donald Trump refused to concede defeat for two months after the results became clear and mounted a series of court challenges to fight the results, including taking his baseless claims of fraud to the Supreme Court.  Even more unprecedented, mobs of Trump supporters assaulted the Capitol building on Jan. 6, forcing an evacuation of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.  In the aftermath of that insurrection in Washington, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection and not stopping the mob action, making him the first president in US history to be impeached twice.  To help understand this historic US election and its aftermath, SCPKU on Jan. 13, 2021 convened a distinguished roundtable titled “The 2020 U.S. Election: Stress Test for American Democracy.”

The Stanford participants were Professors David Brady and Bruce Cain; Professors Pan Wei and Wang Yong joined from Peking University.  Professors Jean Oi from Stanford and Wang Dong from PKU moderated.  The event was part of an ongoing collaboration between SCPKU and Peking University.

Professor Brady analyzed the election results at the presidential level and down-ballot.  Using survey data, he highlighted the extreme divisions within the electorate.  However, the results of the election as a whole show that it was a referendum on Trump at the top of the ticket, where he failed, but down-ballot the Republicans made gains, especially in the House.  The crucial issue that drove the loss for Trump was his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.  That cost former President Trump five battleground states and the election.  Prof. Brady cautioned that the progressives and the Democratic Party would be wrong if they thought the election outcome signaled a huge surge to the left.

Professor Bruce Cain analyzed the aftermath of the election, including the decision to impeach Trump, which had happened only on the morning of our program, asking why the Democrats had chosen that route and where the Democratic and Republican parties are headed after the election.  The impact of seeing the far-right extremists breach the Capitol cannot be overstated.  Regardless of whether one calls it a coup, a riot, or an insurrection, it was traumatic for members of Congress.  This trauma made it unacceptable to do nothing, even if some Republicans were willing to go down that route.  There had to be accountability.  Impeachment was the better choice to ensure that nothing like this would ever happen again.  As for where the parties might be headed, Prof. Cain thinks we are likely to see consensus regarding the need to fix some of the problems in the electoral system and the way it is administered.  He questioned how much foreign policy would figure into the agenda of the Biden administration in the first year.  He stated that the progressives are going to force the Democratic Party into something a little bit closer to what Trump was trying to do in terms of paying attention to the implications of economic policy.  Prof. Cain further offered that there will probably be more of a renewal than was seen under the Trump administration towards human rights.

Professor Pan Wei offered his observation that three big changes are dividing Americans and undermining the basis of the American democracy.  The first is a widespread anti-intellectualism; the social respect for scientific knowledge is degrading among the ordinary people.  The second change is the rapid growth of individualism, which he sees manifest in the strong and healthy not wanting to wear a mask to protect the health of the old.  The third change Prof. Pan noted was the manipulation of the new capital of social media, where groups strengthen their political identities.  He blamed government for not regulating media platforms, allowing companies to ban individuals, including the president.  He reasoned that the cause for the three major changes is a new digital technology, which is bringing the US deep into the age of tertiary industry.  The US leads in the decentralization of digital technology, where individuals are creating innovative ideas that create rich overnight.  Prof. Pan worries about the increasing competition and inequality that will come from such developments, especially surrounding the ability to attend elite universities.  He concluded that it is America against America.  This contradictory combination of the three changes has brought about the current social and political results in the US.  He stated that President Trump catered to the anti-intellectualism, which led to the mishandling of COVID-19.  Were it not for that, Prof. Pan thinks Trump would have been reelected.

Professor Wang Yong argued that we need to go beyond President Trump to explore the reasons for the problems in the US democracy.  He focused on the effects of economic globalization and argued that the US, as its biggest beneficiary, has seen a widening wealth gap and more inequality.  In addition, he remarked that the US has overreached in international relations and expended too many resources intervening in other countries, fighting two wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.  The consequences have manifested in the handling of COVID and the outcome of the election.  COVID changed the way people vote, which made the election more chaotic.  He submitted that the US political system had failed the stress test, and that perhaps it was a good time for people in the United States to talk about the reform of the 100-year-old tradition that is its political system.  American political division is seen by many as the world’s biggest challenge in 2021.  Prof. Wang concluded with questions and hope that the Biden administration will lead to a positive impact on US China relations.

Following the presentations, the participants engaged in a lively discussion and Q&A on a number of different topics.  One clear conclusion was that the Stanford participants all agreed that the US did pass the stress test, even if it was difficult, and that possibly the US may be stronger for it.  

SCPKU will continue to host similar programs in the coming months and deepen the understanding between the US and China.