Two key challenges facing Northeast Asia are how to tame the power of nationalism and create shared memories of history, Stanford professor Gi-Wook Shin wrote in The Diplomat. 

Shin, director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), urged action on the 70^th anniversary of the end of World War II. Northeast Asians should use the commemoration as an “opportune occasion to reflect on their unfortunate past to learn lessons,” only then can the region become more peaceful and prosperous.

Shin and Daniel Sneider, Shorenstein APARC’s associate director for research, lead the Divided Memories and Reconciliation research project which examines memories of the wartime experience in Northeast Asia and what steps can be taken to reconcile disputes over history.

One of their latest outcomes is the book Confronting Memories of World War II: European and Asian Legacies (April 2015), edited with University of Washington professor Daniel Chirot, that studies how wartime narratives are interpreted, memorialized and used in Europe and Asia.

The full article in The Diplomat can be accessed by clicking here.

Stanford sociologist Andrew Walder spoke with Ian Johnson of the New York Times about his new book, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed. Featured in a Q&A, Walder argues that Mao Zedong led Communist China based more on a simplistic understanding of Stalinist ideology than on a new vision. Walder also compares Mao and current president Xi Jinping.

Of Xi, "He’s adopting some of the symbolism of Mao in the Cultural Revolution," Walder said.

"What Xi is about is unity and stability and economic development, and that’s not what Mao was about. Mao was willing to throw things to the wind. He was willing to gamble. He never thought things could happen if it was orderly. He thought disorder was the midwife of progress. Xi is completely different."

The article can be accessed on the New York Times website.

Mike McFaul's public talk at SCPKU July 6, 2015

FSI Director and SCPKU Mingde Distinguished Faculty Fellow Mike McFaul shares with SCPKU intern Nathalie Chun key insights during his month-long academic residence at the Stanford Center at Peking University (SCPKU) this summer.

What is the purpose of your current visit? Could you tell us about your experiences and findings?

Michael McFaul: My main intellectual interest was to understand more about Chinese foreign policy and in particular the bilateral relationship between China and the US but also the bilateral relationship between China and Russia. I’m thinking of writing something, a new project, about this trilateral relationship. And so I spent the most of my time over the last several weeks speaking to two sets of people that are very different: those that focus on United States and those that focus on Russia. In addition, I have an interest in the politics of economic reform and the politics of political reform so I’ve also been speaking to academics, business people, and a few journalists to talk about the change that is going on here in China both on the political and economic dimensions

Is there in particular that you’ve learned about here in China that has surprised you? You’ve mentioned that you’ve talked to many different people so I was wondering if there was anything in particular that made you go ‘Oh that’s really interesting!’

MM: That’s good question. In terms of my subject matter, the thing that was most interesting to me as a concept of dual rising powers. So, the conventional wisdom is that China is rising and the rest are fading. But one academic, and it actually came up more than once, reformulated that idea. It’s not that China is rising and everybody else is fading, it’s actually that the United States is rising with China, just at a slower pace. And so maybe eventually they catch up, but it’d be incorrect to say that one is declining and that one is rising, and vis-á-vis the rest of the countries in the world. I also think that’s a better formulation because actually the United States continues to grow at a higher rate. It still has the largest military in the world; in terms of soft power [it still] has great reach and that has not been declining, that’s still rising. It’s just that when we look at this rate of change relative to the rate of change in China, the United States feels like it’s falling behind. Or China is catching up is a better way to put it. I thought that was interesting.

Second interesting point is, you know I just spent two years as Ambassador to Russia from the United States, and there I would say there is a feeling of… envy towards the United States. Like we have wronged them or that we are guilty for some of the difficult periods that they have had, kind of like a chip on their shoulder. Here I don’t feel that. Here I see a kind of self-confidence that people have, wanting to work with United States. Most certainly when I met with officials there was a very strong sense of wanting to have cooperative relations with the United States and in particular it jumped out at me when I was at the Ministry of Foreign affairs yesterday, they kept using the phrase ‘win-win outcomes’ for China and the United States. Well that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with Russia when I was in the government; during the early period of the Obama administration we used that phrase too. And I find it interesting that here the bilateral relationship with China, the Chinese still talk about that, and most certainly do the Americans too. I met with Ambassador Baucus and his team, and they most certainly talk that way. I find it kind of tragic that in the bilateral relationship with Russia, we no longer talk that way.

You’ve just mentioned the whole idea of zero-sum perspective of looking at the world and I guess in IR theory that would be a more realist perspective, as opposed to a liberalist perspective. So do you think that this sort of liberalist perspective should the future of looking at and that this ‘win-win’ perspective is one that future diplomats should hold?

MM: I worked on the Obama campaign in 2008 and one time on a flight with him when I was briefing him, I started to talk about these two camps, realist and liberal camps, as a way to understand foreign policy and you know how he responded to me? He said “Come on, the real world, requires you to use both of those theories depending on the issue and the country and the bilateral relationship” and when I was in the government, I most certainly felt that way. These are useful paradigms to kind of clarify arguments but I wouldn’t want to be labeled in one camp or the other and I think it’s analytically distorting, not revealing, to say the world is either realist or liberal. That said, I lean towards liberalism personally. I do believe in the 21^st Century, maybe not early centuries it was possible, but in the 21^st Century it is possible to construct outcomes that are good for both countries especially through the use of treaties and institutions. And I come away from my month here in China feeling that there are real challenges in the bilateral relationship, complicated issues, but they’re not irreconcilable issues. Even South China sea right, even Taiwan, I see the possibility, with smart diplomacy, that we can find ways to manage these issues so that it doesn’t lead to conflict between the United States and China

While you were here at SCPKU you have given talks on both the upcoming US elections and current US-Russia relations. Putting those two themes together, what do you think are the implications of the current US-Russia relations on the upcoming elections in 2016 and the way the next president will tackle these issues?

MM: I would say, I predict continuity, more or less. That is to say, that the policy that you see now was a reaction to Russia annexation of Ukraine, of Crimea, and intervention in Eastern Ukraine, is one of deterrence and punishment. There are three dimensions to it: sanctions to punish Putin’s bad behavior, strengthening of NATO to deter him from going further and third, shoring up Ukraine to try and make the economy there recover from this very difficult period. And I basically think those three main policy trajectories will continue, I don’t see a change. But in each one of them, you might see more or less the same paths. I predict that if a Republican candidate is elected, the ones who’s policies I know, or even Secretary Clinton, you would see for instance maybe military assistance to Ukraine, which is something the Obama administration has so far been reluctant to do, but I don’t foresee major change. And that disappoints people here in China. When I say that they are disappointed, it is because they are hopeful after an election there might be a new president that may try to reset relations with Russia again. I’m not optimistic.

What roles, in your opinion, is SCPKU playing in China, and what do you hope the Center will achieve in the future?

MM: Well what I hope the Center will achieve for the future is to create greater connectivity between hundreds of Stanford scholars working in all fields. This is an incredible place, I’ve never seen it before until this trip, absolutely beautiful, 21^st century technology, and the second thing is, Peking University is an incredible university, beautiful campus, really all of my interactions with scholars here have been very positive, they’ve been very warm in greeting me as a fellow scholar and I’ve been impressed by the students as well. So that is my hope, over the coming years and decades, that this serves as a bridge between PKU, but also all of China, and Stanford University because there are many difference issues in all different fields of study where there’s room to cooperate. In my field, I also see a very concrete role to help develop what we call Track II dialogues, with China scholars, in terms of helping to manage US-China bilateral relationships. It’s very clear to me there’s a close relationship between senior scholars here at PKU and the government and the Party and the business community and the People’s Congress. I’ve met many people and they know all the people here and we have those connections in terms of Washington as well at Stanford. So my hope is that in a concrete way, and for me personally, that I might be involved in that, and we have an incredible platform here to be able to do so.

China's Communist Party academies are drawing upon new ideas from formerly taboo places like business schools in the United States and Europe and sending delegations to absorb lessons from around the world, a Stanford scholar writes in a new book.

Once viewed as inflexible, China's party-managed training academies, or "party schools," are using many of the strategies found in China's hybrid, state-run private sector, said Charlotte Lee, associate director of the China Program at Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

"As communist parties fell from power in the 1980s and 1990s, there were many predictions of the Chinese Communist Party's demise," Lee said in an interview.

A perception exists, she said, that the party was too rigid to remain relevant and in power, given huge economic changes in China and throughout a more globalized world. But adapting is one way that it has managed to dominate for so long.

The Chinese Communist Party has now ruled China for more than six decades.

Signs of change 

"It is true that if you were to look at official party organization charts, many parts of the Chinese Communist Party are unchanged from the party's early years in power," Lee said. "Yet it is clear that the party has embraced new ideas and opened up to the world in recent decades."

The party schools are important, Lee explained, because they are a key set of organizations that exert political control over the knowledge, skills and careers of leaders throughout Chinese society.

In her new book, Training the Party: Party Adaptation and Elite Training in Reform-era China, Lee concludes that those seemingly static parts of the party have adjusted and that it is no longer "revolutionary," but has become, in its own words, a "learning party."

Lee's 264-page work draws on field research, datasets and trips to the party-run academies where party recruits and elites are trained.

Through conversations with people at the academy campuses she visited around the country Lee discovered the extent to which the schools, and the party, were changing.

For example, the schools are using as one of their core teaching methods the case method approach pioneered by Harvard Business School, which Lee described as a "force of inspiration" for the students.

As a sign of another change, Lee noted that the schools, once almost shrouded in secrecy from the rest of society, are now renting out their office parks to other organizations as a way to raise revenue.

"They are opening up in more than one way," Lee said, adding that the overall process began in the 1980s and accelerated in 2005 when China established state-of-the-art executive leadership academies that required a more legitimate educational approach. 

Organizational machinery

The success of the Chinese economy and market, as well as the rush for revenue and status by many people and organizations in the country, spurred the academies to change. Lee said the party schools are dynamic and entrepreneurial in the way they seek out new student populations and craft new programs, both educational and political.

"This shows how the party's organizational machinery has been more nimble than some would have predicted," she said.

Yet to be seen is whether the revised party-school approach is enough to turn around the larger Chinese Communist Party or deal with the problem of rampant political corruption in the country.

"There's some evidence of new organizational thinking in the party schools, but it is unclear whether this will help with resolving China's corruption problem or spark genuine democratic reform," Lee said.

While eight other political parties technically exist in China, there is no true opposition to the Chinese Communist Party.

Lee began her book while a political science doctoral student at Stanford.

Looking ahead, she is studying how China's education landscape is evolving and how China is constructing new international organizations, like the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, that reflect its long-term global ambitions.

She asks, "To what degree might these organizations challenge or supplement the existing global order and how might the U.S. respond intelligently?"

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

By Donna Norton

When my husband, Michael McFaul, proposed spending part of the summer with our kids (ages 17 and 12) at the Stanford Center at Peking Univeristy in Beijing, I was a little apprehensive.  What would the kids do?  Visions of a chaotic, hot and smoggy megalopolis flashed through my brain.  If you are considering spending some time at Peking University, you may be having these fears too.  For the sake of you, the unknown reader with restless kids, I’m writing this blog post to encourage you to make the trek.  Yes, there were definitely days when the smog kept us inside, but we still had a fantastic time.  So, in David Letterman style, here’s my top ten list of reasons why Stanford’s PKU Center is a great place for kids:

1)   Where else can you get up in the morning and take walk in the shadow of a pagoda around a beautiful lake filled with water lilies?  The biggest surprise for me was how beautiful and peaceful the Peking University campus is.

2)   Chinese food!  My kids fell in love with Chinese food.  By the end of our trip, my son was asking for noodle soup for breakfast and complaining when I gave him a fork instead of chopsticks to eat it with.

3)   Riding a toboggan down the Great Wall of China!  Yes, it’s true, you can take a chair lift up to the Great Wall of China and toboggan down.  (We figured it was safe because there were photos of Michelle Obama riding the toboggan so it must have been cleared by the Secret Service.)

4)   Air conditioning!  Yes it hot in Beijing, but we had great air conditioning in our apartment and cars and restaurants are almost all air conditioned so we didn’t spend that much time sweating. 

5)   Chinese language!  The Stanford Center helped us find a Chinese language teacher for our kids and they loved their private lessons.

6)   Exotic and scary food at the Beijing Night Food Market – nothing builds your street cred with teenagers faster than posting photos on Instagram of live scorpions on a shish-kabob.

7)   Cool internship opportunities!  Our high school age son had a very cool and unique internship in Beijing. 

8)   A break from the drudgery of cooking!  We walked to restaurants for lunch and dinner every night from our apartment on campus because why bother cooking when the restaurants are so cheap and good? 

9)   Places to work off the daily Peking Duck calories!  If you want, there are gyms within walking distance from the apartments.  And if your kids would rather surf the internet than exercise, there’s wi-fi at the apartment we stayed at and at the Stanford Center.

10)    China!  The Stanford Center at Peking University happens to be located in China, which is an amazing country with a fascinating history, culture, and otherworldly natural beauty.  Definitely an enriching and unforgettable experience for the kids and adults!

My advice?  Don’t miss it!  If you have questions, feel free to contact me at donna@momsrising.org.

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The view of our partment building and the water lilies
Photo credit:  Donna Norton

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Arriving at the Stanford Center at Peking University
Photo credit:  Donna Norton

A three-week seminar focused on digital health innovation and entrepreneurship in China came to a close last week, culminating in the final pitch presentations from four cross-cultural, entrepreneurial student teams. The winning team, LiveBright, presented a way to improve access to personal counseling in China using digital, peer-to-peer methods, with the mission of reducing stress among students and young professionals.

Sponsored by the Stanford Center at Peking University (SCPKU), the course was developed by Dr. Robert Chang, digital health inventor and Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology at Stanford University, and Ravi Pamnani, medical technology executive and alumnus of Stanford’s Biodesign Innovation Fellowship, a pioneering training program in biomedical innovation.

The hands-on course paired Stanford students with Peking University students in collaborative teams and immersed them in the Chinese healthcare system. Students shadowed physicians and interviewed patients to identify unmet needs and market opportunities. Students then brainstormed solutions and developed rapid prototypes to test their ideas and obtain user feedback. Next, they selected business models to ensure the sustainability of their solutions. Along the way, students got feedback from physicians, digital health entrepreneurs, and investors who evaluated their ideas in real-world contexts.

SCPKU seminar instructors, Dr. Robert Chang and Ravi Pamnani.

SCPKU seminar instructors, Dr. Robert Chang and Ravi Pamnani
Courtesy of Stanford University
 

Other teams focused on a telemedicine approach to physical therapy, a more convenient way to obtain eyeglasses prescriptions at home, and a novel subscription box service to promote women’s health education.

“We have been really impressed with the outside-the-box thinking that the students have employed to identify new opportunities,” said Dr. Chang. “China has seen tectonic changes in the mobile and consumer internet sectors. With this in mind and given the unique characteristics of the Chinese healthcare system, a digital health revolution is inevitable, and in many ways has already begun. The rest of the world can learn a lot by observing how digital technologies will transform healthcare here in China over the next five years.”

For more information about the seminar, visit http://www.dhealthchina.com/.

China's tight control over its economy is one reason why it is facing an economic slowdown of global implications, Stanford scholars say.

China's stock market fall is now in its third week, and share prices have lost a third of their value since mid-June, though the market is still higher than a year ago. China has the world's second-largest economy, with deep financial links to the United States.

Nicholas Hope, director of the China Program at the Stanford Center for International Development, which is part of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said the simple answer behind the slowdown is that "nothing grows at 10 percent forever."

However, the dropoff is sharper than the government of China expected or desires, he noted.

Hope said the deceleration is due to the effects of slow growth globally on international trade, slower progress than hoped in rebalancing the Chinese economy toward spending more on consumption and less on investment, and the inefficiency of much of Chinese investment. Another big problem is the debt load of local and regional governments.

Hope does not think the steep fall of China's stock market is comparable to the American crash of 1929 – "so long as the Shanghai market index remains comfortably above where it was a year ago."

Yet the "frighteningly sharp correction" over the past few weeks highlights the fragility of the Chinese financial system, he said. It also serves as a cautionary tale for the many small investors who speculated on high returns with borrowed money.

"Borrowed funds have financed many risky economic investments in infrastructure by subnational [regional and local] governments as well as stock purchases by unwise investors," he said. "The result threatens to be an unwanted increase in non-performing loans in the banking system as borrowers are unable to repay."

Hope believes China can overcome its problems if it adopts economic reforms aimed at fostering more private enterprise and less state control over the market. Back in 1993, China's Communist Party announced those reforms and updated them in 2013, so they are technically on the books.

"Paradoxically, current weaknesses could be a longer-term source of strength, as the shares of income and consumption in Chinese GDP rise, investment is increasingly more efficiently allocated by a transformed financial system and all factors of production – land, capital and labor – are put to more productive uses," he said.

To counteract the market drop, the government ordered state-owned companies to buy shares, hiked the amount of equities insurance companies can hold and offered more credit to finance trading. Hope said this may cause a problem.

"It is introducing considerable moral hazard by attempting to bail out small investors because of the concern over the potential for social unrest if too many of those investors lose all of their savings," he said.

Charlotte Lee, associate director of the China Program at Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, says it is too early to tell if the market fall will diminish the credibility of the government and Communist Party in the eyes of the people. China's President, Xi Jinping, does want to maintain his popularity.

"The government's management of the economy is, however, one of the pillars of its credibility," Lee said.

She described this as a "small dent" in that credibility, as the government has many other ways it aids the Chinese people.

Opening up the economy

Stanford Professor Darrell Duffie says that it will be hard for China to maintain its past high growth rates.

"China's growth rate is still very high, but it is less high than it was because most of the giant pool of cheap and underutilized labor that China had 20 years ago has by now been put to work relatively productively," said Duffie, the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business.

"Additional sources of productivity gains are harder to find," he added.

Duffie is concerned about excessive leverage in China's equity markets.

"Chinese investors have borrowed a lot of money to invest in equities. This margin financing was used too aggressively. China's corporations and local governments are heavily indebted, and that will be a drag on future growth," he said.

He suggests that China would do well to continue on its current course of opening up its economy to cross-border capital flows and reducing its economy's reliance on state-owned enterprises.

If China's economy slows down, the country will decrease its demand for American goods and services, he added. American businesses that plan to operate in China should learn as much as possible about how China's economy and government works.

And Duffie advised, "Whenever possible work with trusted partners in China."

Asian power games?

With China ramping up its military in recent years, what are the risks to U.S. national security if China's economy plunges?

Amy Zegart, co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said it is possible that a slowing economy might make China behave differently in terms of its hard and soft power.

"For all the worry about a rising China, a fragile China is bad for the United States. The Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy rests on a promise of economic prosperity. The more China's growth falters, the more party leaders will be driven to stoke the fires of nationalism to secure domestic support," said Zegart, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

She added, "We've seen this movie before. It stars Vladimir Putin behaving recklessly abroad to win political support at home as his economy stalls."

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

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Hua Tang, Stanford Associate Professor of Genetics, visited SCPKU as a faculty fellow in March 2015.  Below are the highlights of a conversation Professor Tang had with SCPKU in which she shares more details about her research and the contributions SCPKU made to her work in China.

Q: Describe your research and its connection to China

My research aims to develop statistical and computational methods for elucidating the genetic basis of human complex diseases. My current focus is on two related themes: identifying disease risk factors by integrating functional genomic information, and understanding factors that contribute to differential disease prevalence across human populations. My SCPKU faculty fellowship has given me the opportunity to explore new dimensions related to both themes.  Through connections I have made with scholars at Peking University (PKU), I will be able to combine biological knowledge and population-based association evidence in my efforts to identify genetic risk factors for complex diseases.  I also plan to compare epidemiologic data based on the East Asian population in the U.S. and epidemiological studies in China to understand the role of life-style risk factors, such as diet and physical activities, in ethnic health disparity.

Q: What got you interested in the study of human complex diseases?

I have always enjoyed mathematics, but it is very important to me that my work has direct benefit to people. Luckily, in college and during graduate school, I discovered that statistical and population genetics are areas in which I could use mathematical tools to gain insights relevant to human health. We are living in an era of big data; combining novel statistical models, efficient computational tools and large-scale biomedical data offers fantastic opportunities to make real contributions to medicine and public health.

Q: Why did you decide to apply for an SCPKU Faculty Fellowship?

I wanted to connect better with the scientific community in China.  I had already started communicating remotely with a PKU professor at PKU, whose research shares common goals with mine but who takes complementary approaches. The SCPKU faculty fellowship would allow me to travel to China and strengthen ties with faculty at PKU.  I also look forward to the opportunities of interacting with students at PKU.

Q: How valuable was SCPKU's team in supporting your fellowship at SCPKU?

Extremely valuable!   I got a nice office on the courtyard level, great IT and staff support. Also, I had the opportunity to interact with faculty from other departments for collaborations.

Q: What were your fellowship objectives and were they met?  Also, if applicable, aside from the fellowship, how did SCPKU help you to achieve your objectives?

My first visit to SCPKU in March was very productive and I was able further my research on the two themes I mentioned earlier.  I also taught a lecture in a concurrent SCPKU graduate seminar, through which I got to know the work of Professor Randall Stafford from the Stanford Prevention Research Center.  Professor Stafford was also an SCPKU faculty fellow and taught a graduate seminar at SCPKU this past spring focused on chronic disease in China.  I was able to participate in the seminar and establish new ties with instructors and participants of this  multidisciplinary seminar including Chinese scholars, health practitioners and government representatives from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and other health-related organizations. 

Being physically at SCPKU this past spring really helped to stimulate my research program. The fellowship has opened up many possibilities for interacting with scholars at Peking University and the broader scientific community in Beijing. I hope to expand these relationships by making several more trips to SCPKU. I am also very interested in organizing an SCPKU graduate seminar for the near future.
 

Q: Describe some highlights of your stay in China/SCPKU. 

Aside from meeting with my PKU contacts to further my research, I enjoyed participating in (both as an observer and teaching a lecture) Dr. Stafford’s graduate seminar on chronic diseases in China. I made many new connections in the Beijing science community and will host a visiting student in early 2016.  I also attended an SCPKU-hosted happy hour which included a Chinese rice wine tasting and musical performance on a Chinese zither or “guzheng.”

Q: List at least THREE words or thoughts that come to mind which best describe your experience at SCPKU. 

Adventure, exploration, collaboration.
 

Q: Any future plans in China? 

I plan to use the remaining funds from my SCPKU fellowship in the fall, and continue interaction with faculty at PKU and SCPKU.

Photo courtesy of Stanford University