Stanford University

The Modernization of Rural East Asia

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Abstract:
Kristen Looney will be discussing her forthcoming work, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia (Cornell U. Press 2020). This book tackles the question of how countries achieve rural development and offers a new way of thinking about East Asia’s political economy that challenges the developmental state paradigm. Through a comparison of Taiwan (1950s–1970s), South Korea (1950s–1970s), and China (1980s–2000s), the research shows that different types of development outcomes—improvements in agricultural production, rural living standards, and the village environment—were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. Looney argues that rural modernization campaigns played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interplay between campaigns and institutions. Relevant to political science, economic history, rural sociology, and Asian studies, the book enriches our understanding of state-led development and agrarian change.



Speaker Bio:

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Kristen Looney is an assistant professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on Chinese and Comparative Politics. Her research is on rural development and governance and has previously appeared in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Current History. Her first book is forthcoming with Cornell University Press in spring 2020.

Kristen Looney Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University
Seminars

Nominations Open for 2020 Shorenstein Journalism Award

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Noa Ronkin
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The annual award, which carries a US $10,000 cash prize, is sponsored by Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. It recognizes outstanding journalists and journalism organizations for excellence in coverage of the Asia-Pacific region. News editors, publishers, scholars, journalism associations, and organizations focused on Asia research and analysis are invited to submit nominations for the 2020 award through Friday, February 14.

STANFORD, CA, December 3, 2019 — The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), Stanford University’s hub for interdisciplinary research, education, and engagement on contemporary Asia, invites nominations for the 2020 Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award recognizes outstanding journalists who have spent their careers helping audiences around the world understand the complexities of   the Asia-Pacific region. The 2020 award will honor a journalist whose work has mostly been conveyed through American news media. The deadline for nomination submissions is Friday, February 14, 2020.

An annual tradition since 2002, the Shorenstein Journalism Award is sponsored by APARC and carries a cash prize of US $10,000. It honors the legacy of APARC benefactor, Mr. Walter H. Shorenstein, and his twin passions for promoting excellence in journalism and understanding of Asia. “In the face of a shifting geopolitical landscape and amid global declines of democracy, political rights, and civil liberties, it is more crucial than ever before to support independent journalism that seeks accuracy, deep reporting, and nuanced U.S.-Asia dialogue,” said APARC Director Gi-Wook Shin.

Over the course of its history, the award has recognized world-class journalists who push the boundaries of coverage of the Asia-Pacific region and help advance mutual understanding between audiences in the United States and their Asian counterparts. Recent honorees include Maria Ressa, Anna Fifield, Siddharth Varadarajan, Ian Johnson, and Caixin Media. The award alternates between recipients whose work has mostly been published through Asian news media and those whose work has mostly been conveyed through American news media. The 2020 award will recognize a recipient from the latter category.

For the award, the Asia-Pacific region is defined broadly to include Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia and Australasia. Both individual journalists with considerable body of work and journalism organizations 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, whose members are experts in journalism and Asia research and policy, presides over the judging of nominees and is responsible for the selection of honorees.

APARC is seeking 2020 award nomination submissions from news editors, publishers, scholars, journalism associations, and entities focused on researching and interpreting the Asia-Pacific region. The Center will announce the winner by April 2020 and present the award at a public ceremony at Stanford in autumn quarter of 2020.

Nominations are accepted electronically through Friday, February 14, 2020 at 11:59 PM PST. For information about the nomination procedures and to submit nominations please visit the award nomination entry page.

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

About the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) addresses critical issues affecting the countries of Asia, their regional and global affairs, and U.S.-Asia relations. As Stanford University’s hub for the interdisciplinary study of contemporary Asia, APARC produces policy-relevant research, provides education and training to students, scholars, and practitioners, and strengthens dialogue and cooperation between counterparts in the Asia-Pacific and the United States. Founded in 1983, APARC today is home to a scholar community of distinguished academics and practitioners in government, business, and civil society, who specialize in trends that cut across the entire Asia-Pacific region. Learn more about APARC and about the Shorenstein Journalism Award.

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Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian, David Kennedy Reflects on the 2016 Presidential Election and the American Political System

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David M. Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus at Stanford University, award winning teaching and author of more than a dozen, including Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history, spoke to a packed audience on October 22nd, 2019.  Kennedy used the outcome of the 2016 American presidential election, which surprised many observers, to reflect on both its historical and current determinants. Professor Kennedy explored some of the deep structural features that have long characterized the American political system, as well as the social, economic, technological, and cultural issues that are shaping American politics today.

Professor Kennedy spoke about the process of “disintermediation,” where different branches of government lose part of their role in the policymaking process.  He used this concept to analyze the long-standing struggle between congress and the president that continues today.   Particularly insightful for current day understanding is how presidents increasingly succeeded in using the public to go around congress in pursuing their policy interests. Franklin D. Roosevelt redefined the president’s relationship with the public with his famous “fireside chats,” making use of the radio, reaching beyond Woodrow Wilson who had to rely on printed newspapers.   John F. Kennedy took this even further via televised news conferences.  The internet and social media have taken disintermediation to the extreme.

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CPC Lunch Seminar Series | From Polarization to Consensus: Towards a Modern Theory of Social Choice

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Ashish Goel
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While the Internet has revolutionized many aspects of our lives, there are still no online alternatives for making democratic decisions at large scale as a society. In this talk, we will describe algorithmic and market-inspired approaches towards large scale decision making that our research group is exploring. We will start with a model of opinion dynamics that can potentially lead to polarization, and relate that to commonly used recommendation algorithms. We will then describe the algorithms behind Stanford's participatory budgeting platform, and the lessons that we learnt from deploying this platform in over 70 civic elections. We will use this to motivate the need for a modern theory of social choice that goes beyond voting on candidates. We will then describe ongoing practical work on an automated moderator bot for civic deliberation (in collaboration with Jim Fishkin's group), and ongoing theoretical work on deliberative approaches to decision making. We will conclude with a summary of open directions, focusing in particular on fair advertising. 

Ashish Goel Bio

Lunch Seminar Series Flyer
  • E207, Encina Hall
  • 616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
 

Ashish Goel

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Ashish Goel is a Professor of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science at Stanford University, and a member of Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California from 1999 to 2002. His research interests lie in the design, analysis, and applications of algorithms; current application areas of interest include social networks, participatory democracy, Internet commerce, and large scale data processing. Professor Goel is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan faculty fellowship (2004-06), a Terman faculty fellowship from Stanford, an NSF Career Award (2002-07), and a Rajeev Motwani mentorship award (2010). He was a co-author on the paper that won the best paper award at WWW 2009, and an Edelman Laureate in 2014. Professor Goel was a research fellow and technical advisor at Twitter, Inc. from July 2009 to Aug 2014.
Ashish Goel Professor of Management Science and Engineering
Seminars

Unresponsiveness to Microfinance: Evidence from Chinese Poverty Reduction Practices

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The extraordinary achievement of Chinese poverty reduction practice has been well acknowledged. Meanwhile, in similar practices throughout the world, microfinance, as the most widely adopted policy tool, has recently been documented to generate almost nil impacts, a frustrating puzzle for both the academia and policy practitioners. By employing the micro-level data of Chinese households from 2005 to 2010, we investigate the effects of poverty fund injection on incomes and expenditures. The empirical results show that the increased income observed afterwards mainly comes from the fund itself, rather than any increases in households’ business and/or labor income. Next, in order to rule out the possibility that the weak impacts on income comes from the decreased prices as a result of increased supply of agricultural markets, we study the treatment effects on the quantities of 122 agricultural products that households produce and their selling prices, and find that those quantities and prices barely change after the poverty fund injects.

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Jing Zhang, Associate Professor, graduated from Peking University (BA, MA) in 2005 and received her PhD in economics from University of Maryland in 2011. After that, she has been working in School of Finance at Renmin University of China. The focus of her research lies in health economics and public finance. Her research has been published in the leading international and Chinese academic journals, including Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Health Economics, China Economic Review, The Journal of World Economy (in Chinese) etc. She was invited to present at many prestigious universities and research institutes, such as Stanford University, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, Peking University. She also worked as a consultant at the World Bank (Washington, D.C.) from 2010 to 2011 and in 2015.

Jing Zhang Associate Professor, School of Finance, Renmin University of China
Seminars

No Pain, No Gain

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Lectures
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