David M. Lampton gave a talk titled “Chinese Power and Rail Connectivity in Southeast Asia” before the Stanford China Program audience on February 6^th. He addressed three issues in particular: the scope of his research project, conducted in partnership with two co-authors based in Singapore and Malaysia; the long genesis of this railroad construction idea from Southeast Asia to China; and, third, the overarching question of whether China can effectively implement the gargantuan feat – technologically, financially, and politically. The high-and conventional-speed rail project will span seven Southeast Asian countries, plus China, Lampton highlighted.  This project is not only geographically forbidding, but the political terrain, and its socio-economic variety, is an even greater challenge.  Lampton’s talk comprised part of Stanford China Program’s 2019 Colloquia Series, “A New Cold War?: Sharp Power, Strategic Competition, and the Future of U.S.-China Relations.”

Lampton began by clarifying that the vision of rail connectivity through Southeast Asia into China is not the brainchild of either China’s leadership or Xi Jinping. This idea has a long history, he stated, beginning with the British and the French in the 19^th century when they were occupying Burma and Indochina, respectively; and even during World War II when Japan further entertained building railroads from the Korean Peninsula to Singapore to advance their military ambitions. In contemporary times, ASEAN had articulated a plan in 1995 to develop a rail line from Singapore to Kunming city, P.R.C. In 2010, ASEAN again put forth a master connectivity plan for 2025 where railroad development comprised a prominent part. Only in the aftermath of these many plans and proposals did Xi Jinping, in 2013, officially announce China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an infrastructure initiative with a scope far greater than simply Southeast Asia. The idea of infrastructural connectivity in the region, in other words, has a long history that predates China entering the picture as a major actor. Only recently has China amassed the technological capacity and financial wherewithal to realize this enormous project, with economic, diplomatic, and strategic military implications.

Next he described the key role that Beijing’s industrial policy has played in the rapid development of China’s high-speed rail. From a nonexistent industry in 2001, China has built a sector that is now an international powerhouse in high-speed rail technology. As of 2014, China boasted four trunk lines, North and South; and four trunk lines, East and West, crisscrossing the P.R.C. China’s industrial policy has clearly delivered striking results (as well as some setbacks) not only with respect to high-speed rail but also in other industries.  In light of this, Lampton opined that China is not likely to yield to U.S. demands for major structural reforms in onoing trade talks with China. 

Lampton described the progress in high-speed and conventional-speed rail construction with partners in Southeast Asia (ASEAN) that the Chinese have made, with Laos and Thailand furthest along in implementation. Nonetheless, Beijing also has met with significant resistance due to the complicated political situation in various regions. Lampton described, for example, the drawn-out financial negotiations between Singapore and Malaysia with respect to the rail line connecting Singapore to Kuala Lumpur; and the jockeying among various heads of Malaysia’s federation of local states. The election of Mr. Mahathir in 2018 also put an at least temporary halt to the construction and planning of two rail projects for many reasons, including the corruption of the preceding regime of Najib in Kuala Lumpur. Although Lampton expressed overall confidence that the rail lines will get built to Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, for example, in the not-too-distant future, the political complexities of the region and China’s ability to successfully navigate them are still open questions.

He also described the competing world views regarding infrastructure construction and economic development. There are powerful constituents in China – now backed by Xi Jinping himself – who believe that infrastructure development drives growth: i.e., “if you want to get rich, build a road.” By contrast, the U.S. and entities such as the World Bank are more cautious, seeing all the negative social and environment extenalities such massive projects create. They also want to see greater assurances of projected returns from these infrastructure projects before devoting resources. Having said this, both multilateral financial and development institutions, and the United States Government, are gradually adopting a more supportive posture on large infrastructure projects, in part not wishing to abandon the commercial and strategic battlegrounds of the future to the PRC.

Lastly, Lampton debunked the notion that the BRI is a unified, top-down “plan.” Rather, he described it as Beijing’s “umbrella policy” that “creates a predisposition [among Chinese entities] to build infrastructure.” It incentivizes “entrepreneurial SOEs, provinces, localities, overseas Chinese . . . to push their pet projects . . . onto . . . the national largesse.” This being the case, Lampton described the BRI as a dynamic, chaotic and, sometimes, even a rapacious process for the transit countries. Yunnan Province, for example, started a rail line even before the central government had approved it; and Guangdong Province began developing its own special economic zone and port construction in Malacca all without central approval. As Lampton stated, the “BRI isn’t just about Xi Jinping and Beijing . . . . [I]t’s about local initative, and how Beijing can or cannot control or . . . under what circumstances, it chooses to control [its local actors].”

The recording and transcript are available below.  

Armed conflict continues its brutal march in Syria, Yemen, Southeast Asia and South Sudan — to name a few of the international hotspots that contributed to an 11% increase in political violence around the world in 2018.

Nearly 10 million Yemenis are facing famine this year; Syria was the deadliest place on earth for civilians last year, with more than 7,100 fatalities.

Many of those killed — and even more who face starvation — are children. And that’s when Stanford professor of pediatrics Paul Wise finds it hard to stand on the sidelines. Wise, who has traveled to Guatemala annually for the last 40 years to treat children in rural communities, also travels to the frontlines of global calamities.

As part of a small team of physicians, Wise went to Mosul, the northern city in Iraq once controlled by ISIS, in 2017 to evaluate the World Health Organization-led system to treat civilians injured in the brutal battle for the city. 

Working with colleagues at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Wise has collaborated with the U.S. military, non-governmental organizations and the United Nations on the interaction of humanitarian and security challenges.

So, it should come as no surprise that the American Academy of Arts & Sciences — of which he is a member — recently appointed him and two other global health experts to lead a new initiative to develop new strategies to protect civilians, health care and cultural heritage in areas of extreme violence. 

The initiative, Rethinking the Humanitarian Health Response to Violence Conflict, will be a collaboration among political scientists, international human rights lawyers, physicians, academics and even the curators of major museums. They will develop strategies to prevent civilian harm and deliver critical health services in areas plagued by violent conflict, most notably in the Middle East, central and north Africa and parts of Asia. 

“We also want to address the humanitarian and protective frameworks that operate in areas that are extremely violent but wouldn’t necessarily be defined as being in armed conflict, like in the northern triangle of Central America. The human toll in these areas is at least as great as some of these other more traditionally defined areas,” Wise said.

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Another of those areas is Myanmar, where nearly 700,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighboring Bangladesh amid sectarian violence in the northern Rakhine province, in what the United Nations calls a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Rethinking is also headed up by global health expert Jaime Sepulvedaof the University of California, San Francisco, and Jennifer M. Welsh, a global governance and security expert at   McGill University in Canada. Their work will result in a series of publications, blog posts, videos, podcasts and op-eds as a means to reach not only a general audience but also local and field-based humanitarian health providers. The initiative will also seek the engagement of those directly victimized by violence in the areas of greatest concern. 

“We will come up with new strategies to protect civilians and deal with their needs when protection fails in the real world,” Wise said. “The goal is to make a difference in the real world. That’s a much more ambitious goal of course, but it’s the only goal that’s worthy of this kind of initiative.” 

A professor of pediatrics in the Medical School and core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, Wise is also appointed in several international security programs at Stanford, including the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law,and the Center for International Security and Cooperation,and is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Wise said he is particularly excited about the prospect of working with those who curate and protect cultural heritage sites and objects.

“The other thing about the American Academy of Arts & Sciences is that we are not just academics, but artists, musicians, novelists — and we expect to take full advantage of breaking out into these disciplines that aren’t normally part of these conversations,” Wise said.

When fire nearly toppled Notre Dame in Paris three months ago, Parisians gathered near the French Gothic cathedral to pray and to sing. When al-Qaida seized control of the North African country of Mali in 2012, a band of librarians undertook a dangerous mission to protect 350,000 centuries-old Arabic texts and smuggled them out of the library in Timbuktu.

At a recent meeting at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Wise met with museum directors, archeologists and political scientists about the preservation of cultural heritage.

“It was very clear that there were enormous areas of overlap between the efforts to protect cultural heritage and the efforts to protect people,” he said. “They’re just pragmatically connected because when you start destroying things of cultural importance, it tends to be associated ultimately with atrocities against people.”

Singapore in Southeast Asia and Stanford University in the United States are focal points for discussions of AI and how it can be made to help—not hurt—human beings. In a piece written for RSIS Commentaries, Don Emmerson, Director of the Southeast Asia Program at APARC, uses a recent panel at Stanford to illustrate the difficulty and necessity of bringing both generalist and specialist perspectives to bear on the problem.

Singapore has been described as “a thriving hub for artificial intelligence.” In May 2019, Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) released the first edition of “A Proposed Model AI Governance Framework.”

That “accountability-based” document would “frame the discussions around harnessing AI in a responsible way” by “translat[ing] ethical principles into practical measures that can be implemented by organisations deploying AI solutions”. The guiding principles it proposes to operationalise are that AI systems should be “human-centric” and that decisions made by using them should be “explainable, transparent, and fair”….

Read the full article on RSiS Commentaries.

Trust but verify. That mantra from nuclear-weapons negotiation discourse during the Cold War is newly relevant today. Versions of the advice are circulating among governments in Southeast Asia and elsewhere as they weigh the security risks of partnering with this or that company to install the fifth-generation telecommunications technology known as 5G.

It is tempting to believe that a technical solution to the problem of unwanted risk exists — a clever digital tweak that will fully and permanently protect a 5G network’s users. It does not. The best one can hope for is a “good enough” balancing of faith and proof that is — arguably, not assuredly — reassuring and realistic. Characteristics of the network-offering company in its home country and of the network-purchasing government in its own country will shape the 5G seller-buyer bargain and its location. This will occur on an eventual spectrum of arrangements between the unwise and the unworkable: unverified trust at one extreme end, trust-eliminating verification at the other....

Read the full article on RSiS Commentaries.

On Thursday, the third Asia-Pacific Geo-Economic Strategy Forum (APGEO) saw discussion on issues of international strategic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific with a particular focus on the U.S.-Japan relationship. Speakers included experts on defense and foreign affairs, including former U.S. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and former Japanese Ministers of Defense.

Organized by the Hoover Institution, Nikkei Inc. and the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies (FSI), the talks occurred within the context of the United State’s Free and Open Indo-Pacific Strategy (FOIP) and Japan’s Medium Term Defense Program, both recently updated to outline the U.S. and Japan’s respective regional commitments.

The forum’s speakers focused on the rise of China as a common theme underscoring the importance of the U.S.-Japan alliance. Particularly, the speakers shared a general consensus that China’s attempts to increase its economic and political influence and its initiatives to drive progress on technological frontiers such as 5G networks and artificial intelligence pose a threat to the current international order...

Read the full article in The Stanford Daily

This post was originally published on Axios.

Where it stands: Trump and Kim each face immense pressure, both international and domestic, to make progress.

• Trump needs to earn political trust back in Washington to continue negotiating with North Korea. His strategy so far has been to convince Kim that North Korea’s denuclearization would bring the country a “bright future.”
• At the same time, Trump must address Kim’s concerns about whether any agreement reached with his administration will withstand the Democrat-controlled House and survive the post-Trump era.

Between the lines: Successful diplomacy sometimes entails purposeful ambiguities, and the ambiguities of the first Trump-Kim summit might indeed have been strategic. At this critical juncture, however, a failure on Trump’s and Kim’s part to commit to defined objectives could hurt the bilateral relationship.

The bottom line: Trump and Kim need support more than ever to advance their diplomatic endeavors. While spectators have good reason to be skeptical, and one can only be cautiously hopeful with North Korea, a return to confrontation or "strategic patience" is in no one’s interest.

Gi-Wook Shin is the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.

As tension grows between China and the United States, its effects are felt across Asia. APARC's Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson sat down with Michael McFaul, FSI's Director and host of FSI's podcast World Class, to talk about why Southeast Asia in particular is caught in that rising tension between China and the United States and what can be done to prevent it from becoming a battle ground for a new Cold War between the two superpowers.

Listen to the conversation:

Widespread cultivation of oil palm trees has been both an economic boon and an environmental disaster for tropical developing-world countries. New research points to a more sustainable path forward through engagement with small-scale producers.

Nearly ubiquitous in products ranging from cookies to cosmetics, palm oil represents a bedeviling double-edged sword. Widespread cultivation of oil palm trees has been both an economic boon and an environmental disaster for tropical developing-world countries, contributing to large-scale habitat loss, among other impacts. New Stanford-led research points the way to a middle ground of sustainable development through engagement with an often overlooked segment of the supply chain (read related overview and research brief).

"The oil palm sector is working to achieve zero-deforestation supply chains in response to consumer-driven and regulatory pressures, but they won’t be successful until we find effective ways to include small-scale producers in sustainability strategies,” said Elsa Ordway, lead author of a Jan. 10 Nature Communications paper that examines the role of proliferating informal oil palm mills in African deforestation. Ordway, a postdoctoral fellow at The Harvard University Center for the Environment, did the research while a graduate student in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

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An oil palm plantation in Cameroon (Image credit: Elsa Ordway)

Using remote sensing tools, Ordway and her colleagues mapped deforestation due to oil palm expansion in Southwest Cameroon, a top producing region in Africa’s third largest palm oil producing country (read about related Stanford research). Contrary to a widely publicized narrative of deforestation driven by industrial-scale expansion, the researchers found most oil palm expansion and associated deforestation occurred outside large, company-owned concessions, and that expansion and forest clearing by small-scale, non-industrial producers was more likely near low-yielding informal mills, scattered throughout the region. This is strong evidence that oil palm production gains in Cameroon are coming from extensification instead of intensification.

Possible solutions for reversing the extensification trend include improving crop and processing yields by using more high-yielding seed types, replanting old plantations, and upgrading and mechanizing milling technologies, among other approaches. To prevent intensification efforts from inciting further deforestation, they will need to be accompanied by complementary natural resource policies that include sustainability incentives for smallholders.

In Indonesia, where a large percentage of the world’s oil palm-related forest clearing has occurred, a similar focus on independent, smallholder producers could yield major benefits for both poverty alleviation and environmental conservation, according to a Jan. 4 Ambio study led by Rosamond Naylor, the William Wrigley Professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies(Naylor coauthored the Cameroon study led by Ordway).

Using field surveys and government data, Naylor and her colleagues analyzed the role of small producers in economic development and environmental damage through land clearing. Their research focused on how changes in legal instruments and government policies during the past two decades, including the abandonment of revenue-sharing agreements between district and central governments and conflicting land title authority among local, regional and central authorities, have fueled rapid oil palm growth and forest clearing in Indonesia.

They found that Indonesia’s shift toward decentralized governance since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 has simultaneously encouraged economic development through the expansion of smallholder oil palm producers (by far the fastest growing subsector of the industry since decentralization began), reduced rural poverty, and driven ecologically destructive practices such as oil palm encroachment into more than 80 percent of the country’s Tesso Nilo National Park.

A worker in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, loads palm fruit for transport to a factory that will process it into palm oil (Image credit: Joann de Zegher)

Shorenstein APARC's annual overview of the Center's 2017-18 activities  is now available to download. 

Feature sections look at the Center's seminars, conferences, and other activities in response to the North Korean crisis, research and events related to China's past, present, and future, and several Center research initiatives focused on technology and the changing workforce.

The overview highlights recent and ongoing Center research on Japan's economic policies, innovation in Asia, population aging and chronic disease in Asia, and talent flows in the knowledge economy, plus news about Shorenstein APARC's education and policy activities, publications, and more.