The Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) are pleased to announce that four international scholars have been chosen to come to Stanford in 2010-11 as part of a jointly sponsored international program entering its second year. Nominated by Stanford departments and research centers, the international scholars will be on campus for four-week residencies. They will have offices at the Humanities Center and will be affiliated with their nominating unit, the Humanities Center, and FSI.

A major purpose of the residencies is to bring high-profile international scholars into the intellectual life of the university, targeting scholars whose research and writing engage with the missions of both the Humanities Center and FSI.

The following four scholars have been selected for the upcoming academic year.

• Anies Baswedan, currently President of Paramadina University in Jakarta, is a leading intellectual figure in Indonesia. In 2008, the editors of Foreign Policy named him one of the world's "top 100 public intellectuals." As an advisor to the Indonesian government, he is a leading proponent of democracy and transparency in Indonesia, a creative thinker about Islam and democracy, as well as a charismatic leader in the educational field. He was nominated by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
• Stephane Dudoignon is a political scientist/senior research fellow at the EHESS in Paris. He is one of the world's leading scholars of Muslim politics and societies from the Caucasus to Central Asia. He is the author of pioneering work on Muslim movements, including the historical study of Sufi networks from the Volga River to China, Muslim intellectuals' debates about gender, and modern Sunni revivalist movements in Eastern Iran. While on campus, he will give lectures on Islam in Eurasia and Iran, among other things. He was nominated by CREEES, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
• Monica Quijada is a high-profile public intellectual and historian of Spain and Latin America at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid. Her engagement with the UN in Argentina (working with refugees) and her directorship of the investigation carried out in the late 1990s regarding Nazi activities during the Second World War and in post-war Argentina shows her commitment to the public space. She has written extensively on dictatorship, populism, and war and their effect on the public sphere in Argentina and Spain as well as on the relationship between nineteenth-century Latin American states and their indigenous populations. She was nominated by the History Department and the Center for Latin American Studies.
• Patrick Wolfe is a historian at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a premier historian of settler colonialism, currently working on a comparative transnational history of settler-colonial discourses of race in Australia, Brazil, the United States, and Israel/Palestine. While at Stanford, he will give lectures based on his core work on Australia and also on his forthcoming book Settler Colonialism and the American West, 1865-1904 (Princeton University Press). He was nominated by the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

While at Stanford, the scholars will offer informal seminars and public lectures and will also be available for consultations with interested faculty and students. For additional information, please contact Marie-Pierre Ulloa, mpulloa@stanford.edu.

In early spring, historic health reform passes, extending insurance to millions of uninsured. Despite problems with workplace-based coverage, controversy over government subsidies for insurance premiums, and disparities across a large and diverse nation, dramatic shift to a single-payer system was seen as impractical.

Instead, reforms focus on expanding current social insurance programs as well as new initiatives to cover the uninsured, improve quality, and control spending. They provide a basic floor, subsidized for the poorest, but preserve consumer freedom to choose in health care. No government body dictates choice of doctor or hospital; investor-owned and private not-for-profits compete alongside government-run providers like community health centers and rural hospitals.

Left to be addressed in later phases are the difficult questions of how to slow the relentless pace of health care spending increases -- driven in part by technological change and population aging, but also perverse incentives embedded in fee-for-service payment and fragmented delivery. Pushed through despite multiple crises confronting the leadership, the final landmark health reform works in conjunction with measures enacted as part of the fiscal stimulus package to strengthen the healthcare system. Some provisions take effect immediately; others will take many years to unfold.

President Obama’s triumph on his top domestic priority? Actually, there were no votes along partisan lines, no controversy over abortion. I am describing health reform in China, which was announced almost exactly a year ago.

We do not hear much about the parallels in the US and Chinese social policy. But we cannot fully understand each other if we ignore these commonalities. We do not hear much about those who, in both societies, have been rendered destitute merely because they or a family member became sick or injured in a system with a social safety net full of gaping holes.

It will surprise many Americans to know that government financing as a share of total health spending was lower in socialist China over the last decade than in the United States. Now China has pledged about US$124 billion over 3 years to expand basic health insurance, strengthen public health and primary care, and reform public hospitals.

In China, the injustice of differential access to life-saving healthcare had sparked cases of social unrest. The April 2009 reform announcement was the culmination of years of post-SARS (2003) soul searching for a healthcare system befitting China’s dynamically transforming society. Special interests block change. (Sound familiar?) The CPC Central Committee and the State Council acknowledge that successful health reform will be “an arduous and long-term task”.  

If the US can pass sweeping health reform despite an unprecedented financial crisis, and China can envision universal health coverage for 1.3 billion while “getting old before getting rich,” then together we should be able to look past our many differences to focus on our common interests. Our two proud nations must work together to confront numerous challenges, such as upholding regional stability (e.g. on the Korean peninsula); redressing global economic imbalances (increasing health insurance can help spur China towards more domestic consumption); and investing in “green tech” for a warming planet and “grey tech” for an aging society.

 

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When searching for insights about how other countries deal with similar challenges, Americans often look to Europe and Canada. Rarer is the comparison to counterparts across the Pacific. Yet President Obama has clearly articulated the vision of the US as a Pacific Nation, and there are developments around the Pacific Rim that merit consideration in our debates.  

Australia pioneered cost-effectiveness in health care purchasing, while the US continues to debate whether cost should be part of comparative effectiveness research and policy decisions.

Both Japan and South Korea, like Germany, have enacted long term care insurance to smooth the transition to an aging society. Their experiences might be fruitful as we implement the first national government-run long-term care insurance program, a little-heralded component of the newly passed legislation (and a fitting legacy of Senator Edward Kennedy).

Japan and Singapore provide universal coverage to older populations than ours with health systems that, although surprisingly different from each other in terms of public financing and role of market forces, both ranked among the best in the world -- and far higher than the US -- in the World Health Organization’s ranking of health systems in the year 2000. Although one may quibble with the ranking, it is indisputable that Japan spends a much smaller share of GDP on healthcare than the US does, despite being one of the oldest and longest-lived societies in the history of the world and having (like the US) a fee-for-service payment system.

Japan and South Korea are also democracies, where health policies occasionally engender heated debates. In South Korea, physicians went on nationwide strike three times to oppose the separation of prescribing from dispensing. Although Japan’s incremental reforms rarely spur such drama, the passions aroused by end-of-life care – embodied in the bizarre “death panels” controversy in the US health reform debate of 2009 – has its counterpart in the bitter nickname for Japan’s separate insurance plan for the oldest old: “hurry-up-and-die” insurance.

Yet Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong all offer health systems that provide reasonable risk protection and quality of care for populations older than ours, with a diverse range of government and market roles in financing and delivery, while spending far less per capita than the US.

No system has all the answers. But the US and our neighbors across the vast Pacific have a common interest in sharing what we’ve found that works for health reform. Despite divergence in our political and economic systems, we all value long, healthy lives for ourselves and our children -- and we’re united in health reforms that try to further that goal.

Since the Democratic Party of Japan came to power in August 2009, upsetting fifty years of conservative rule, U.S.-Japan relations have been on rocky ground. It would seem that the DPJ is upending decades old policies, hewing its own path with the United States, China, and the Asia-Pacific region. As Shorenstein APARC Director for Research Daniel Sneider notes, Japan’s new tack not only has caught the United States flat-footed, but also has other countries in the Asia-Pacific worried. Most importantly, Tokyo seems to be making uncharacteristically friendly overtures to Beijing. But it would be wrong to assume that Sino-Japan relations are really much improved. From oil and gas rights in the East China Sea to China’s military modernization there are still plenty of points of contention. Moreover, the much-contested issue of U.S. marines stationed on Okinawa remains the biggest deterrent to North Korean aggression and Chinese expansion – two fears not far from Tokyo’s mind. This is not to say U.S.-Japan relations will return to the status quo, but that the interlocutors are likely to recall the reason for such a persistent alliance.

The dramatic end to Japan's half-century of conservative rule in a late August election led almost immediately to a public spat with the United States. An inward-looking Japan that had reflexively followed the American lead suddenly was no longer an obedient ally.

At a time when the US was trying to woo a recalcitrant China to become a "strategic partner", Japan's insistence on reopening an agreement over US military bases seemed to upset the regional balance. But there are recent signs of a concerted effort on both sides to put underlying strategic interests back in the forefront, propelled in part by the recent eruption of frictions between China and the US.

The row began with the newly elected Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's call for more "equal" relations with the US, his advocacy of an East Asian Community à la the EU, and his focus on repairing ties with China. Put together, some saw a nascent urge to abandon the post-war security alliance. A senior State Department official went so far as to tell the Washington Post in late October that the "the United States had ‘grown comfortable' thinking about Japan as a constant in US relations in Asia. It no longer is, he said, adding that ‘the hardest thing right now is not China, it's Japan.'"

The trigger was growing frustration over the Hatoyama government's handling of the relocation of the US Marine air base at Futenma on Okinawa. The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) consistently opposed the deal to relocate the base elsewhere within Okinawa, expressing sympathy for the disproportionate burden of the US military presence in Japan born by Okinawans. American officials were loathe to reopen an agreement that had taken years to negotiate and believed the Japanese government exaggerated its domestic political constraints.

At the same time, Japan seems eager to hew its own course with China, to improve relations and begin to build the foundation for a new Asian community. If one is to believe US officials, alarm bells have been ringing among their allies and others in Asia over the rift with Japan. The talk of building a regional organization that might exclude the US made Singapore, Australia, South Korea, the Philippines and even Vietnam worried that this would only aid Chinese ambitions.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration itself was ardently wooing China. President Obama, on the eve of a trip in November, spoke of creating a "strategic partnership." In Beijing, the President avoided public finger wagging. Discussion of difficult issues such as human rights, Tibet and sanctions against Iran were conducted largely, if at all, behind closed doors.

Given their own pursuit of Chinese partnership, American officials could hardly object to Tokyo's efforts along the same lines. In public, they said this is not a zero sum game, that an easing of Sino-Japanese tensions could aid security and stability in the region for everyone. But some US officials soon saw evidence of Sino-Japanese collusion to push the US out of Asia. Privately they pointed to what was considered a telling moment following a trilateral summit of Chinese, Japanese and South Korean leaders in Tianjin in October. Talking to reporters after the meeting, Hatoyama had spoken about Japan's desire to lessen its "dependence" on the US. American officials considered Hatoyama's actions a gross display of obeisance to the Chinese.

Accusations that Japan was drifting into Chinese arms grew louder after DPJ Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa led a group of about 140 lawmakers on an adulatory visit to China in early December. Then Hatoyama and Ozawa raised hackles when they pushed for the Emperor to receive a visiting Chinese senior official, the heir apparent for leadership, Xi Jinping. However, these depictions of Tokyo lurching toward Beijing ignore the gradual evolution of Japanese policy and the deep-seated rivalry that persists.

Sino-Japanese relations reached a low point five years ago after anti-Japan demonstrations were apparently sanctioned by Chinese authorities. Unresolved wartime historical issues drove those outbursts, prompted by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to the Yasukuni shrine, which honors Japan's war dead. Disputes over oil and gas rights in the East China Sea threatened to explode. And China launched a campaign to block Japan's bid for permanent membership in the UN Security Council.

Japanese policymakers began to worry about the impact of these tensions on Japan's growing economic interdependence with China. They were critical of Koizumi's one-sided focus on the US-Japan security alliance.

"To weather the wild seas of the 21st century, Japan's diplomacy must have two elements: the Japan-US alliance and a Japan-China entente," wrote Makoto Iokibe, a defense specialist who now heads the Japanese Defense Academy, in the summer of 2006. "A combination of a gas field accord and a depoliticized Yasukuni issue would provide Japan and China with a clear view for the joint management of East Asia."

Beginning in late 2006, a succession of Japanese administrations has made concerted efforts to repair ties with Beijing and Seoul. Though the atmosphere with China has improved, substantive differences remain. In January, Japan's foreign minister warned that Tokyo would take action if China continued to violate a 2008 deal to develop oil and gas fields jointly. When Ozawa met the Chinese defense minister in December, he said the Japanese see China's military modernization as a threat. Ozawa suggested that if such fears were not eased, Japan might be prompted to undertake its own arms build up.

The Hatoyama government has also moved to upgrade ties, including security links, with Asian powers that share a fear of China, including India, Indonesia and South Korea. Ozawa stopped in Seoul after his visit to China where he apologized for Japan's colonial rule in Korea and pledged to push through legislation granting voting rights to Korean residents in Japan, an issue of great importance to Koreans and opposed by conservatives in Japan.

Recent events seem to have caused the US to reassess its handling of relations in Northeast Asia. There is growing evidence of an emboldened China that seems to interpret America's bid for a strategic embrace with the country as a sign of weakness. The authorities in Beijing took a tougher line toward internal dissent, openly clashed with the US at the climate change talks in Copenhagen, balked at cooperation on sanctions against Iran, and brushed off American protests over evidence of cyber attacks on Western firms.

After all this, America has begun to soften its tone toward Tokyo. Officials pledge patience as the new government looks for a solution to the base problem, while also mounting a public effort to convince Japan that the Marine presence in Okinawa is key to "deterrence" of North Korea and China. There is a renewed emphasis on broadening the security agenda to include other issues, from cyber security to climate change. Hatoyama, too, has emphasized that the Japan-US alliance remains "a cornerstone for Japan to enhance its cooperative relations with other Asian countries, including China."

Whether any real lessons have been learned in Tokyo or Washington remains to be seen. But perhaps the turn in Sino-US relations has reminded people in Tokyo and Washington that there remains a strategic purpose to the alliance.