At present, the tobacco industry produces some six trillion cigarettes worldwide every year. Six trillion cigarettes per annum, each ready to release smoke filled with highly addictive nicotine and powerful carcinogens. A third of all these sticks were produced in China last year. In 2011, the world’s largest cigarette maker by volume, the China National Tobacco Corporation, contributed an all-time high of U.S. $214 billion in profits and taxes to the Chinese government, up 22 percent year-on-year. Currently the greatest cause of preventable death in the world, the cigarette is likely to kill ten times as many people in the 21st century as it did in the 20th century, epidemiologists tell us, with China bearing the largest burden. Until now, much global health research and intervention has focused with limited success on the cigarette consumer—addressing how one or another variable prompts people to take up or quit smoking, whether the cue for the consumer is biological, psychological, spatial, financial or symbolic. What though of the industrial sources of tobacco-related diseases? Where are the six trillion cigarettes that are released into circulation each year manufactured? Where are they rolled, wrapped, and boxed for shipment? This presentation will introduce the Cigarette Citadels Project, an innovative application of participatory GIS. With special attention given to China’s network of cigarette factories, Matthew Kohrman will explain how the Cigarette Citadels Project not only reveals conceptual roadblocks in public health policy but also lacuna in social theory pertaining to the state and the politics of life.

Matthew Kohrman joined Stanford’s faculty in 1999. His research and writing bring multiple methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, examines links between the emergence of a state-sponsored disability-advocacy organization and the lives of Chinese men who have trouble walking. In recent years, Kohrman has been conducting research projects aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking and production. These projects expand upon analytical themes of Kohrman’s disability research and engage in novel ways techniques of public health.

This event is part of the China's Looming Challenges series. 

Abstract:

     While the reelection of Taiwan’s president, Ma Ying-jeou, relieved concerns about an immediate deterioration in cross-Strait relations, the future of ties between Beijing and Taipei remain uncertain. Much will depend on the PRC’s policy. Moreover, calls in the United States either to abandon Taiwan or, conversely, to embrace it ever more closely as a hedge against the Mainland’s growing strength, have yet to play themselves out. Alan D. Romberg will address the implications of the election for these issues, as well as for Sino-American relations and for the region.

Speaker Bio:

     Alan Romberg is the director of the East Asia program at Stimson. 

     Before joining Stimson in September 2000, he enjoyed a distinguished career working on Asian issues, both in and out of government, including twenty years as a US Foreign Service Officer. Romberg was the principal deputy director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff and deputy spokesman of the department. He served in various capacities dealing with East Asia, including director of the Office of Japanese Affairs, member of the Policy Planning staff for East Asia, and staff member at the National Security Council for China. He served overseas in Hong Kong and Taiwan. 

     Additionally, Romberg spent almost ten years as the CV Starr Senior Fellow for Asian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and was special assistant to the Secretary of the Navy. 

     Romberg holds an MA from Harvard University, and a BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) came to power loudly proclaiming an end to the old deference to bureaucrats and favored interest groups. Two and a half years later, it has backtracked on many of its bold promises. In the face of daunting financial challenges and obstreperous opposition parties, Prime Minister Noda seeks, still somewhat unsteadily, to establish a new balance between strong leadership and artful compromise with allies and enemies alike.  

Gregory W. Noble is Professor in the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, where his research focuses on comparative political economy in East Asia.  After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government, he taught at the University of California and the Australian National University before moving to Tokyo. Among his publications are Collective Action in East Asia: How Ruling Parties Shape Industrial Policy; The Asian Financial Crisis and the Structure of Global Finance(co-edited with John Ravenhill); “Fiscal crisis and party strategies”; “The decline of particularism in Japanese politics”; “Japanese and American perspectives on regionalism in East Asia”; “What can Taiwan (and the U.S.) Expect from Japan”; “The Chinese Auto Industry as Challenge, Opportunity and Partner”; “Executioner or Disciplinarian: WTO Accession and the Chinese Auto Industry” (with Richard F. Doner and John Ravenhill]; “Power Politics: Elections and Electricity Regulation in Taiwan,” (with Stephan Haggard).

Special Japan Studies Program and CEAS Series: Winter-Spring 2011-12

While Chernobyl, and now Fukushima, are household words, far fewer people have heard of Maiak in the southern Urals and Hanford in eastern Washington State where Soviet and American engineers built plutonium plants to fuel the Cold War nuclear arsenal. Within nuclear "buffer zones," plant managers, who were pushed to produce as much plutonium as quickly as possible, polluted freely, liberally and disastrously. During the plutonium disasters that ensued, each plant issued over 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment, at least twice the amount released at Chernobyl. Under cover of nuclear security and powered by generous corporate welfare, plant managers employed influential public relations campaigns, restricted medical research, deployed temporary, migrant workers as ‘"jumpers" for the dirtiest work, and generally denied the existence and hazards of radioactive contamination. This was the house plutonium built. Kate Brown argues these histories are important because they supplied models, staff, blueprints and subsequent ready-made disasters for Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Kate Brown is an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the author of a Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Harvard 2004), which won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for the Best Book in International European History. Brown is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow and is working on a book called Plutopolia, a tandem history of the world’s first plutonium cities, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

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Special Japan Studies Program and CEAS Series: Winter-Spring 2011-12

Looking Back, Looking Forward: Japan's March 11 Disasters One Year Later

The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster that hit Japan in March 2011 had both immediate catastrophic consequences and long term repercussions. Fundamental areas of Japan’s environment, economy, society, and collective national psyche were deeply affected, giving rise to a broad range of urgent issues. These include economic debates about how to meet the country’s energy demands with nuclear power plants offline, and what path to take for the country’s energy future; political crises, including criticism of the government’s disaster response; the psychological challenges of coping with trauma and grief; a daunting environmental clean-up; and social developments, including a new wave of civil society activism. This series brings together scholars and activists from a wide range of specialties to take stock of how the Japanese have been affected by the disasters, and to assess the efforts of residents, volunteers, and policy makers to recover and move forward.