Stanford University

NORTH KOREA’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM: STATUS AND PROSPECTS

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Pyongyang is moving ahead on all nuclear fronts: It announced in an April 2 statement that it will adjust and alter the use of existing nuclear facilities to simultaneously stimulate the economy and build up nuclear armed forces, implying that it will promote both commercial and military nuclear programs. It is expanding its missile launch facilities. It has at least one new nuclear test tunnel prepared for another test. It has restarted its plutonium production reactor and continues on the construction of the experimental light water reactor, likely to begin operation in late 2014 or early 2015. It appears to have doubled the size of the modern centrifuge facility in Yongbyon. These developments have set back progress toward restarting the six-party talks. Dr. Siegfried Hecker, drawing on his experiences in North Korea and technical analysis, will review the status of North Korea's nuclear program and suggest a path to resolving the nuclear crisis. 

Siegfried Hecker served as co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) from 2007 to 2012. He directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986-1997 and served as senior fellow until 2005. 

 

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Stanford Center at Peking University

Siegfried S. Hecker

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, C220
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-6468 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Emeritus
Research Professor, Management Science and Engineering, Emeritus
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Siegfried S. Hecker is a professor emeritus (research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering and a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). He was co-director of CISAC from 2007-2012. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Hecker served as the fifth Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Hecker is an internationally recognized expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction, and nuclear security.

Dr. Hecker’s current research interests include nuclear nonproliferation and arms control, nuclear weapons policy, nuclear security, the safe and secure expansion of nuclear energy, and plutonium science. At the end of the Cold War, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. In June 2016, the Los Alamos Historical Society published two volumes edited by Dr. Hecker. The works, titled Doomed to Cooperate, document the history of Russian-U.S. laboratory-to-laboratory cooperation since 1992.

Dr. Hecker’s research projects at CISAC focus on cooperation with young and senior nuclear professionals in Russia and China to reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism worldwide, to avoid a return to a nuclear arms race, and to promote the safe and secure global expansion of nuclear power. He also continues to assess the technical and political challenges of nuclear North Korea and the nuclear aspirations of Iran.

Dr. Hecker joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as graduate research assistant and postdoctoral fellow before returning as technical staff member following a tenure at General Motors Research. He led the laboratory's Materials Science and Technology Division and Center for Materials Science before serving as laboratory director from 1986 through 1997, and senior fellow until July 2005.

Among his professional distinctions, Dr. Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; fellow of the American Society for Metals; fellow of the American Physical Society, honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His achievements have been recognized with the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award, the 2020 Building Bridges Award from the Pacific Century Institute, the 2018 National Engineering Award from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the 2017 American Nuclear Society Eisenhower Medal, the American Physical Society’s Leo Szilard Prize, the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal, the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, among other awards including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.

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Siegfried S. Hecker Senior Fellow Speaker Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
Lectures

Christian E. Ollano

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Christian Ollano joined the Center on Democracy, Development, and The Rule of Law (CDDRL) in October 2013. As a communications and program associate, he will help manage digital and social media communications between CDDRL, Stanford, and the broader international community.

Christian will bring in his skills in communication and cultural competency to increase CDDRL visibility to a wide network of alumni, faculty, and professionals. As a student, Christian was heavily involved in the Asian American community, serving in a number of capacities to strengthen community ties. From April - August 2010, Christian studied abroad in Japan as part of the Bing Overseas Studies Program where he interned at Mitsubishi Motors as a public relations intern. From 2012-2013, he worked at the Stanford Office of Undergraduate Admission on the diversity team, engaging in a number of diversity outreach initiatives aimed at increasing representation of under-served communities in the applicant pool. Most recently, Christian served as an intern for the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program at the CDDRL assisting with logistical and programmatic efforts.

Christian holds a Bachelor of Arts in urban studies and a Masters of Arts in sociology.

The Changing Field of Power in Post-Martial Law Taiwan

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Abstract:

Professor Gold will make a presentation that is part of a larger book project that applies the theory of fields as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu, Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam to the remaking of Taiwan since the end of martial law in 1987. He argues that political democratization is only one part of the larger dispersal of all forms of power (what Bourdieu terms “capital”) away from the tight centralized control of the mainlander—dominated KMT to broader segments of Taiwan’s society. This talk will look at this process of the breakdown and reconstruction of the old order of various fields, in particular the political, economic and cultural fields, and the effect of this on the overarching field of power.

 

Speaker Bio:

Thomas B. Gold is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies, whose executive office is at Berkeley and teaching program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He received his B.A. in Chinese Studies from Oberlin College, and M.A. in Regional Studies – East Asia and PhD in Sociology from Harvard University. He taught English at Tunghai University in Taiwan. He was in the first group of U.S. government-sponsored students to study in China, spending a year at Shanghai’s Fudan University from 1979-1980. Prof Gold’s research has examined numerous topics on the societies on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. These include: youth; guanxi; urban private entrepreneurs (getihu); non-governmental organizations; popular culture; and social and political change. He is very active in civil society in the United States, currently serving on the boards of several organizations such as the Asia Society of Northern California, International Technological University, Teach for China, and the East Bay College Fund.  His books include State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, and the co-edited volumes Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature ofGuanxi, The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe and China, and Laid-Off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment With Chinese Characteristics.  

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Thomas B. Gold Professor of Sociology Speaker UC Berkeley
Seminars

Why Do Parents Abort Girls? Patrilocality and Its Historical Origin

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Co-sponsored by the Stanford Center for International Development

Recent scholarship has documented an alarming increase in the sex ratio at birth in parts of East Asia, South Asia and the Caucuses. In this paper, I argue that parents in these regions engage in sex selection because of patrilocal norms that dictate elderly coresidence between parents and sons. Sex ratios and coresidence rates are positively correlated when looking across countries, within countries across districts, and within districts across ethnic groups. The paper then examines the roots of patrilocality and biased sex ratios using the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1965). I find that ethnic groups in areas with land conducive to intensive agriculture have stronger patrilocal norms, higher modern coresidence rates, and higher sex ratios at birth. The paper concludes with an examination of the expansion to old age support in South Korea. Consistent with the paper’s argument, I find that the program was associated with a normalization in the sex ratio at birth.

Avi Ebenstein received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 is a Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Economics. His fields of interest include environmental economics, economic demography, and international trade. Avi's past research has focused primarily on issues related to  China, including the health impacts of air and water pollution, causes and consequences for the country’s high sex ratio at birth, internal migration, and the impact of China’s entry into the global economy on wage patterns domestically and in the United States. He is currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.

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Philippines Conference Room

Avraham Ebenstein Lecturer Speaker The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the Department of Economics
Seminars

Empire as a Moral Problem: Religious Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Modernity in Northeast Asia

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In the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of colonial violence, the Japanese annexation of Korea, and World War I, religious and secular groups in East Asia voiced support for a new ethos of humanitarian internationalism.  This presentation examines the confluences between millenarian "new religions" such as Chŏndogyo (Korea), Ōmotokyō (Japan), and Daoyuan (China), Bahá'ís, Esperantists and other groups espousing world peace, gender and social equality, and religious unity.  Under the scrutiny of the Japanese imperial state, these communities presented teachings that were inimical to colonial hierarchies, but they had to do so without resort to the standard means and methods of social, economic, and political reform, such as protests, provocative civil disobedience, lobbying, electioneering, coercion, and either the threat or actual use of political violence.

Philippines Conference Room

Taylor Atkins Professor, Department of History, Northern Illinois University Speaker
Lectures

Artist as Producer and Kitsch: The Ethnographic Turn and the Colonial Collection

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In the 1930s, with Japan’s expansions into the Asian continent, colonial Korean culture in general, and literature in particular, came to take important roles as both subject and object of such imperial expansions. This paper reexamines the colonizer and colonized binary by re-contextualizing the rise of translated texts packaged as ethnographic “colonial collections.”  In particular, this paper historicizes the ethnographic turn relegated to colonial culture by examining the rise of colonial collections as a manifestation of mass-produced objects of colonial kitsch at this time. The complex position of the colonial artist/writer cum (self-)ethnographer situated in between the colony and the metropole embodies an uncanny contact zone as the artist and work of art become reified as objects of imperial consumer fetishism.  In the colonial encounter, the artist as producer and the art object of his or her labor meld into indistinguishable and interchangeable forms, as producer and product of kitsch. In such relations of colonial alienation, cultural producers struggled to map out spaces as agents of artistic expression, while agency for the colonized artist often meant further alienation through self-ethnography or through mimicry of the colonizer’s racialized forms and discourses.

RSVP required at http://ceas.stanford.edu/events/rsvp.php

521 Memorial Way, Knight Building, Room 102
Stanford University

Aimee Kwon Assistant Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University Speaker
Lectures
The Korea Colloquium on History and Culture

International Conference on Regional Carbon Policies

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We write to invite you to an international conference on “Regional Carbon Policies” that PESD is hosting at Stanford University on Thursday, December 5th. With efforts to expand international carbon markets beyond Europe’s trading scheme seemingly stalled, various countries and subnational jurisdictions have taken unilateral action on climate policy. Switzerland, the Canadian provinces of Québec and British Columbia, California, the member states of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) in the northeastern United States, and New Zealand have all moved forward on carbon markets or taxes. Asian countries including Japan, India, South Korea, and China are also in the process of implementing carbon policies.
 
Linking regional efforts to create a single larger carbon market has the potential to increase the impact and reduce the cost of climate mitigation. With this in mind, our conference brings together academics, government policymakers, and market participants to share the best available academic and practical knowledge about how to make regional carbon policies work. We specifically seek to: 1) identify common implementation challenges facing regional climate policies around the world, 2) formulate a “best practice” market design that can serve as a starting point for a country or region contemplating a GHG emissions allowance market, and 3) identify the policy pathways most likely to foster rapid and successful integration of regional carbon efforts. An additional goal of the meeting is to identify key market rules and integration protocols that can be tested as part of a new research project at Stanford that uses structured “games” to simulate cap and trade markets.

We hope you will join us for this unique event.

Click here for the conference agenda and to register
                                                                                       
Frank A. Wolak                                       Mark C. Thurber
Director, PESD                                          Associate Director, PESD
wolak@stanford.edu                              mthurber@stanford.edu

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Chinese Education Reimagined: REAP co-director Scott Rozelle's Interview with Center for Education Innovations

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October 16, 2013

Xuejiao Cheng
   

 

An Interview with Scott Rozelle


“So, imagine, if you had unlimited resources to change two or three things about China’s education, what would they be?”

I asked this to Scott Rozelle, professor at Stanford University and co-director at the Rural Education Action Program (REAP) - an impact evaluation organization that makes evidence-based policy recommendations, seeking to close the education gap for China’s poor and marginalized students. Given that I had a limited time to interview Scott, who was to board a plane to Beijing in 30 minutes, I hoped this question could foster some interesting answers and reflect some of the deepest concerns this mandarin-speaking American professor has for China’s underdeveloped education system.

Without hesitation, Scott began to draft his blueprint for China’s education in bold and creative strokes. “These are several things I’d like to change,” he started passionately, proposing ambitious changes in a wide array of areas in China’s education sector…

Free High School Education


“If possible, I’d love to roll out a very aggressive plan to promote high school education in China.” Scott began by proposing the cancellation of high school fees for China’s disadvantaged students.

As Scott explained, due to unreasonably high tuition fees, a lot of rural and low-income families can’t afford to send their children to high schools. According to a research by REAP, only 40% of junior high graduates in China’s poor rural areas go to academic high schools, as compared with more than 80% high school enrollment rate among China’s urban students.

To Scott, this inequality in education attainment has directly translated into tremendous inequality in the Chinese society in general, which in turn spells detrimental consequences for China’s economic development in the future. “If you think about it, throughout modern history, no country has been able to progress from a middle-income country to a high-income country with such high inequality in society.”

“Never,” said Scott emphatically.

Equipping Students with the Right Skills

In addition to increasing access to high school education, the quality of education is another concern for Scott. “Nowadays, when you walk into any classroom in China’s rural high schools, what you see is a sea of students’ blank stares at the blackboards – students aren’t learning what they should be learning, nor what interest them.” Scott continued to point out that the problem exists in vocational schools too. “China’s zhigao (mandarin for vocational high schools) are all pianrende (mandarin for liars). In fact, half of the students drop out by grade 2 in vocational schools.” According to Scott, vocational schools in rural and low-income areas don’t even teach the basic skills students need to succeed in the job market. Knowing that the opportunity cost for attending vocational schools is too high, students naturally drop out of school to get low-paying jobs instead.

As Scott elaborated, while China shifts away from a labor-intensive economy to a more service-oriented, knowledge-intensive economy, it requires that workers be equipped with the proper 21st century skills and technical skills. His comment exactly echoed a recent McKinsey report on China’s skills mismatch, which predicted that if China didn’t close its current skilled labor gap, the country could be facing an opportunity cost of $250 billion, or 2.3% of the GDP in 2020.

A Teacher Incentivization Plan

“We also need to incentivize teachers. “ Scott added. “Right now, teachers in China buquegongzi (mandarin, meaning “don’t lack salaries”).” Instead, Scott commented, what they lack is the incentive to improve students’ academic performance. In the US, initiatives such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RTTP) have been promoting new assessment systems to hold teachers accountable for students’ performance. “Maybe the same needs to happen in China, too.” Interestingly, unlike in the United States where teachers unions have become an intractable force strongly opposing reforms that can hinder teachers’ interests, teachers unions are rather non-existent in China. It would be indeed intriguing to see what would happen if China proposed a similar teacher incentivization strategy to tie teacher pay with student performance. 

A Free AND Nutritious Meal Plan from Early On

“I’d also love to propose a health and nutrition plan for disadvantaged students from very early on,” said Scott. As a matter of fact, since October 2011, the Chinese government has already piloted a lunch subsidy plan in 680 rural counties, through which each student gets a subsidy of 3 yuan every day during the school year. “3 yuan buys you nothing these days. It’s a free meal, but not a nutritious one.” Scott laments.

“Schools need to cover at least 40% of the nutritional requirements for students,” Scott further elaborated on his plan. This needs to happen early, because if poor rural students suffer from malnutrition starting in kindergarten they will also suffer from significant cognitive underdevelopment, which then lingers until secondary school and even college -- further broadening the achievement gap between rich and poor students in the country.

Indeed, the reality revealed by REAP’s research is rather disheartening. By testing nearly 60,000 children across China for iron-deficiency anemia between 2008 and 2012, researchers at REAP estimated that 30 to 35 million school aged children nationwide were suffering from malnutrition. A series of similar studies further predicted that if the micronutrient deficiencies of Chinese infants/toddlers were not corrected before they reached 30 months old, it would mean 20 to 30 percent of China’s future population would be in danger of becoming permanently physically or mentally handicapped.

Overcoming Shortsightedness of the Government

In addition to the four proposals above, Scott also poignantly revealed the difficulty of overcoming political shortsightedness in committing long-term investment in education. According to Scott, “The local government could be looking at its progress in the upcoming years, but not what is to happen in 20 to 30 years.” Faced with this short-sightedness, Scott proposes that the central government should more aggressively allocate financial resources specifically for investment in education. “Unless the central government intervenes, it’s hard for local governments with limited fiscal revenue to initiate educational changes at the grassroots level,” Scott predicted.

In the absence of central government intervention, REAP’s approach already exemplifies some of the most effective ways to encourage local governments in spearheading education reforms. Starting from 2008, the organization has been working closely with various levels of the government to help rigorously design and evaluate potentially effective and scalable education interventions in rural China. Provided with research-backed data to demonstrate program effectiveness, the local government is then able to showcase their return on education investment to higher-level governments, which in turn are encouraged to roll out the program in a larger-scale.

“The Chinese government actually seems very receptive to changes, as long as it knows what kind of change actually works” commented Alexis Medina, a project manager at REAP that I interviewed about Contract for Dreams, a REAP program that supplies and assesses the impact of vouchers on increasing high school enrollment among rural students. As an example, she told me that informed by REAP’s longitudinal study from 2010 to 2013 - which showed poor junior high school students were 13% more likely to attend high school when given guaranteed financial aid - the Chinese State Council has since adopted a new national policy requiring that high schools inform junior high students of their financial aid status before their graduation, while also issuing bank cards to guarantee timely disbursement of the fund.

“Ok, I need to board the plane now,” Scott said hastily, as I heard him breaking up a bit while entering the plane. Off he went to the country he deeply cared about, and I knew he was to realize his blueprint bit by bit, by trudging through the remote villages in China, asking questions, testing answers.

 

R4D's Xuejiao Cheng is originally from Anhui province and has spent time in Hunan and Sichuan as a volunteer teacher for ethnic minority students. Xuejiao has a B.A. in English Literature from Peking University and an M.Ed. in International Education Policy from Vanderbilt University.

Link: http://www.educationinnovations.org/blog/chinese-education-reimagined

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U.S. Ambassador to China, Gary Locke: China Needs Financial Reforms

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Gary Locke, the U.S. Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, speaks about why China must enact financial reforms and hopes that changes will be announced by China's new leadership during the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party Central Committee in November 2013.

Locke was a keynote speaker at the fourth annual China 2.0 conference hosted by Stanford Graduate School of Business on October 3, 2013. 

Watch Ambassador Locke's full video here.

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Are China’s Manufacturers and Suppliers Innovative?

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Sidney Lu, Chairman and CEO of Foxconn Interconnect Technologies—a subsidiary of Foxconn Technology Group, and Michael Marks, former Chairman and CEO of Flextronics and Founding Partner of Riverwood Capital, came together at the 4th annual China 2.0 conference for a conversation about the role of innovation in manufacturing and supply chain management.

Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Hau Lee, who moderated the panel, kicked off the debate by asking how innovation happens in China, and how it fits in the global network.

Lu shared that “innovation in supply chains is extremely critical.” For a business like Foxconn, which operates with margins as low as 5%, a dollar saved through cost management can be equivalent to 20 dollars earned via sales. In order to achieve these savings, Foxconn, like other manufacturers, is always looking to develop new materials, processes, and business models. The “lone-innovator” model of one company designing something in isolation and sending it to China for manufacture has given way to a model in which designers and manufacturers work very closely with each other.

“Truly innovative companies…take advantage of the logistics management, the suppliers, the material guys and all that, and incorporate that into the products that they are developing,” Marks argued. In fact, Marks noted that many innovative products such as the Motorola RAZR were built on the back of breakthroughs made at places like Foxconn and Flextronics.

Lee, also Founder and Co-Faculty Director of the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum at Stanford Graduate School of Business, quipped: “...[B]ehind every successful man, there is a woman; and behind every successful product there is a supply chain.”

What is innovation?

Discussing the role of innovation in manufacturing, the question of how exactly to define innovation was naturally raised. On this point, Lu and Marks had divergent views, exemplified by the example of shanzhai cellphones that have proliferated in China (shanzhai phones are very close copies of common phone models, often with small changes—some functional, some not—made to the hardware and software). Lu argued that something innovative must be “new and unique” and also “serve a purpose.” Many products or developments billed as innovative only satisfy one of these requirements—a shanzhai phone with six speakers might be new, but it isn’t innovative. On the other hand, Marks championed the Chinese model of incremental innovation, arguing that almost all new products are a refinement of existing ones, and that the Chinese practice of adapting popular products and ideas to fit local needs and culture is, in fact, “a perfectly valuable approach to innovation.”

While the position of Asian manufacturers appears unassailable, rising energy costs and shifting demographics mean that China is getting more expensive. Foxconn, once the hegemon of the consumer-electronics manufacturing world, is vulnerable: the business model has been replicated, and clients are diversifying supply chains. Manufacturers are starting to form new ventures that will allow them to find and invest in promising hardware startups early on. Flextronics recently launched an accelerator program, and designers looking for a manufacturing partner can often find price-competitive services without going to Asia.

Innovation in the supply chain has been driven by increased competition and the need to be as efficient as possible. Two challenges China faces in the global innovation network, accordingly to Marks, are flexibility and communication. Although internet has led to improvements in both areas, such as making orders fasters and being able to share information in real time, there are still some gaps for China to bridge to be able to maintain its position in the global innovation network.

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