EMERGING ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA

A Special Seminar Series

RSVP required by February 22, 2019 at: https://goo.gl/forms/ZCwcHC0qTec2rzj63

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ABSTRACT: The United States has been the world’s dominant power for more than a century.  Now many analysts believe China is taking its place. Is China an emerging superpower? Should the United States gear up for a new cold war in Asia? In this seminar, I show that China actually lags far behind the United States by the most important measures of national wealth and power—and will probably fall further behind in the coming decades. The most likely threat to American security, therefore, is not a confident Chinese peer competitor, but a deeply insecure China that lashes out after failing to live up to the global hype about its rise. I will discuss how the United States can contain this threat without starting a cold or hot war with Beijing.   

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This panel discussion, moderated by Andray Abrahamian (Stanford APARC), will discuss health and medical care in North Korea. Physicians Kee Park (Harvard Medical School) and David S. Hong (Stanford Lucile Packard Children's Hospital) will discuss their experiences with neurosurgery in Pyongyang; and all three panelists will share perspectives on how average DPRK residents interact with their country’s health system—including distinctive aspects of North Korean public health policy and how geopolitical factors influence human security and humanitarian aid on the Korean peninsula.

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Dr. Kee B. Park is a member of the faculty at the Program in Global Surgery and Social Change (PGSSC) at the Harvard Medical School. 

He is also the Director of the North Korea Program at the Korean American Medical Association where he leads the collaboration between US and DPRK physicians. Since 2007, he has made 18 visits to DPRK, most recently in May 2018.

His academic interests include studying the unique features of the North Korean public health system, how geopolitical factors influence human security and humanitarian aid on the Korean peninsula, and the complex relationships between international security, health, and human rights.

Dr. Park is a consultant for the World Health Organization and serves on the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on Surgical Care and Anesthesia. In this capacity, he advocates for and assists in the development of national surgical plans by the Member States.

He is a diplomate of the American Board of Neurological Surgery, a member of the Advisory Committee for the Foundation of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies, member of the National Committee on North Korea, and member of Council of Korean Americans.

Kee B. Park, MD obtained his medical degree from the Rutgers University in New Jersey and trained in neurosurgery at the Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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Dr. David S. Hong specializes in the treatment of pediatric patients with neurosurgical conditions, with additional specialty training in the treatment of pediatric spinal disorders, including scoliosis. His additional clinical interests include brain tumors, epilepsy surgery, idiopathic scoliosis, Chiari malformation, vascular conditions, and concussion.  He works to develop clinical pediatric neurosurgical programs in the Bay Area.

He is an active part of the Korean American Medical Association’s Global Health Program, and as the first pediatric neurosurgeon in North Korea has been developing the recently established pediatric neurosurgical program in the DPRK since 2015.

He is a member of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, Congress of Neurological Surgeons, the National Council on North Korea, and the Council of Korean Americans.  He completed his residency in his home state of Michigan at the Detroit Medical Center, and completed fellowship training at Rady Children's Hospital in San Diego, before becoming a part of Stanford Children's Health.

Andray Abrahamian is the 2018-2019 Koret Fellow at Stanford University. He is also an Honorary Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney and an Adjunct Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute. He is an advisor to Choson Exchange, a non-profit that trains North Koreans in economic policy and entrepreneurship. He was previously Executive Director and Research Direction for Choson Exchange. That work, along with supporting sporting exchanges and a TB project, has taken him to the DPRK nearly 30 times. He has also lived in Myanmar, where he taught at Yangon University and consulted for a risk management company. He has conducted research comparing the two countries, resulting in the publication of "North Korea and Myanmar: Divergent Paths" (McFarland, 2018). Andray has published extensively and offers expert commentary on Korea and Myanmar, including for US News, Reuters, the New York Times, Washington Post, Lowy Interpreter and 38 North. 

He has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Ulsan, South Korea and an M.A. from the University of Sussex where he studied media discourse on North Korea and the U.S.-ROK alliance, respectively. Andray speaks Korean, sometimes with a Pyongyang accent.

Plese note: we're no longer accepting RSVPs for this event.

Eight years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. Steady progress has been made towards the reconstruction of Fukushima, repopulation of surrounding areas, and the decommissioning of the plant, of which Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) must shoulder 16 trillion yen of the 22 trillion yen, the total estimated cost of the accident. Meanwhile, with Japan having fully liberalized its electricity and gas retail market, the business environment surrounding TEPCO is undergoing a major change. In the long term, TEPCO foresees a decrease in demand for their power service and increased competition among utility companies. In this program, Naomi Hirose, who endeavored to manage the Fukushima incident spearhead reforming the company as President of TEPCO from 2012 to 2017, shares his insights on the current situation in Fukushima, lessons learned and implications from the accident.

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The event is jointly sponsored by the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

In this talk, David Leheny (Waseda University) discusses his new book Empire of Hope (Cornell University Press, 2018), which challenges current trends in debates about emotion and politics, arguing that we should instead look at the role of narrative in shaping emotional representation. In the book, Leheny draws from debates about status in international relations theory and from debates about affect and narrative in literary and historical studies to analyze cases from Japan’s Bubble and post-Bubble eras. This talk will focus especially on a 2001 crisis in US-Japan relations over a collision between a US Navy nuclear submarine and a fisheries training boat that resulted in the deaths of nine Japanese, including four high-school students. By presenting grief as both a national emotion and as one that could be narrated through the lens of timeless cultural difference, the US and Japanese governments crafted a crisis resolution that ostensibly rested on “mutual understanding” but that also hid the messier realities of power and of loss in the collision’s aftermath.

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Abstract: Materials used in key components of nuclear power reactors, such as the fuel cladding and the pressure vessel, provide shields for the release of highly radioactive isotopes generated in the nuclear fuel to the environment, thus their reliability is an important issue in the safety evaluation.  The accident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi in 2011 demonstrated that materials that are considered reliable during normal operating conditions will fail in an extreme accident condition. Subsequently, there has been an international effort on developing materials for Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF). In addition, the development of new generation of nuclear reactors also calls for new materials that may withstand higher temperatures, higher radiation doses and with better performance under severe corrosive conditions.  This talk will outline the challenges and status for such developments using recent data from the authors’ own research group as examples.  Also, since China is building the most nuclear reactors now and “a nuclear accident anywhere of the world will be an accident of everywhere of the world”, the importance and challenges of collaborating with the Chinese in this area will be discussed. 

Bio: Dr. Lumin Wang is a professor of nuclear engineering, and materials science & engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (UM). He came to the US from China in 1982, and received his MS and PhD degrees in Material Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and a research scientist at the University of New Mexico before joining the faculty of UM in 1997.  His research has focused on the study of radiation effects of materials using ion beams and transmission electron microscopy. He served as the director of Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory, a campus-wide material characterization center at UM between 2005 and 2010. Dr. Wang has published more than 400 papers in research journals and delivered more than 100 invited talks internationally. He has been a member of the International Committee of the American Nuclear Society and an adjunct chair professor of Xiamen University of China since 2011. He has taken more than 100 UM students to China to observe the construction of nuclear reactors during the last 8 summers.