The Forbidden City housed the imperial families of China from the 1400s until the early 20th century. It was considered the embodiment of Chinese culture and power, and attracted scholars, officials, and dignitaries. Today it is the largest museum in China, attracting visitors from China and abroad.
This workshop—facilitated by the China Institute and co-sponsored by SPICE—is a unique opportunity for K–12 educators wishing to deepen their understanding of China and bring that knowledge into the classroom. Participants will learn about, and discuss, aspects related to the Forbidden City including but not limited to: architecture, philosophy, politics, Chinese history, and the transition from palace to museum. We will also discuss how to integrate China and Forbidden City-related topics into the classroom, apply critical thinking to the content discussed, and provide take-home resources to all participants.
This workshop is part of We All Live in the Forbidden City (www.walfc.org), China Institute’s unique educational program about the history, culture, architecture, and life of imperial and contemporary China as seen through the lens of this iconic structure. This program also includes books, children’s workshops, and a website with additional resources for parents and teachers.
Okimoto Conference Room
Encina Hall East, Third Floor
http://aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/directions
On May 29, SCPKU announced a new faculty team-based program, the Team Innovation Faculty Fellowship Program (TIFF), to spark creative, multi-disciplinary approaches to research in China targeting topics of key interest to Stanford, the U.S. and China. TIFF awards provide support for up to $30K per team for "proof of concept" project expenses. There are two application cycles per year; the first application deadline is July 15, 2015. See the program website for more information.
The Stanford Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness (CSDGC) held its 2015 Annual Partner Meeting on May 16 at SCPKU. The meeting included a discussion on innovation-driven sustainable industrial development and upgrades with a focus on smart learning, the application of green technology in building a smarter society, and smart manufacturing and operation in the industrial transformation. Participants also exchanged ideas about CSDGC's future development in China. Attendees included CSDGC Affiliate companies, representatives from collaborating universities, and visiting scholars.
As the appetite for entrepreneurship grows worldwide, large corporations find themselves facing threats and new opportunities that once were reserved for a small set of fast moving hi-tech industries. Under industry disruptive pressures, how do these corporations adapt and maintain a competitive edge?
Similarly, after more than two decades of rapid economic development, China today is facing enormous challenge to maintain a high growth rate. With a strong government push towards innovation and entrepreneurship as the main drivers of economic reform, can China’s unique innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem be the key to sustainable growth?
Please join Professor Yossi Feinberg from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Professor Dongming Chen, Dean of Peking University's School of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Frank Hawke, China Director of Stanford's Graduate School of Business who will lead an insightful and informative discussion on how innovation and entrepreneurial are changing China’s economy and global corporations at large. The cross-culture salon will take place at the Stanford Center at Peking University, with Professor Feinberg and the Stanford campus audience beamed in through advanced long distance learning technology. Lunch will be provided.
Photo credit: Steve Fyffe
Stanford Center at Peking University
The Lee Jung Sen Building
Langrun Yuan
Peking University
No.5 Yiheyuan Road
Haidian District
Beijing, P.R.China 100871
Tel: +86.10.6274.4170
**LIVE WEBCAST WILL BE AVAILABLE HERE IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO THE EVENT.**
[[{"fid":"219129","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"width":"870","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]
On June 2, 2015, the Taiwan Democracy Project at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) will host a special panel session featuring the President of the Republic of China (Taiwan), Ma Ying-jeou. President Ma will speak via live video feed to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and the long history of the U.S.-R.O.C. relationship. Following his prepared remarks, the president will engage in a question-and-answer session with the audience and a distinguished panel of leading Stanford faculty and fellows, chaired and moderated by the former Secretary of Defense of the United States, William J. Perry.
About the Speaker
Ma Ying-jeou has served as the President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) since May 2008. As president, Ma Ying-jeou has worked to address the repercussions of the global financial crisis, stepping up efforts to bring about a more diversified industrial structure and to jump-start new engines for economic growth in Taiwan. President Ma has also attached great importance to promoting energy conservation and carbon reduction, which has helped Taiwan’s energy efficiency to exceed two percent. In addition, his administration worked to craft a response to regional economic integration, successfully negotiating the landmark Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with the People's Republic of China in 2010. President Ma's creative diplomacy has brought a significant improvement in cross-Strait relations while putting an end to a long and vituperative standoff between the two sides in the diplomatic sphere.
About the Panelists
William J. Perry is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor (emeritus) and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and the Hoover Institution, and serves as the director of the Preventive Defense Project at Stanford University. He was the Secretary of Defense for the United States from 1994-1997.
Lanhee J. Chen is the David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, as well as Lecturer in Public Policy and Law at Stanford University. He served as the chief policy adviser to 2012 U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Karl Eikenberry is the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and is a Lieutenant General, Retired, U.S. Army.
Thomas Fingar is the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He served as the first deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and as chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2005-2008.
Event Details
The live panel will take place in the Bechtel Conference Room of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, at 616 Serra Street, from 5:45-7:00pm on June 2, 2015. An informal reception in the lobby of Encina Hall will follow.
This event is co-sponsored with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, San Francisco and the Office of the President of the Republic of China (Taiwan). It is free and open to the public. RSVP is required.
Stanford’s Asian Liver Center (ALC) held a press conference at SCPKU on April 17 to share progress on the ALC’s Hepatitis B education pilot program in China's Gansu and Qinghai provinces. In addition to media participants, there was representation from the Chinese Center for Disease Control, China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission, and the World Health Organization. Dr. Samuel So, ALC Director, delivered the keynote address. Targeting pregnant women and healthcare workers in Gansu and Qinghai provinces, the ALC has collaborated with local health departments to provide a series of classes, workshops, and public health services to enhance understanding and management of the disease. The program has so far trained over 12,000 local healthcare workers and reached over 3 million residents in the two provinces.
China was for hundreds of years almost entirely an agricultural society, but modern industrialization changed that dynamic, and the impact on health has been startling.
Urbanization, population aging and changes in lifestyle (from mobile to sedentary) have led a transition from an acute to chronic disease-ridden society. Now, 10 percent of China’s adult population is diabetic or pre-diabetic—holding the number one place in the world.
Feng Lin and a team of researchers want to change that reality.
Lin is part of the Corporate Affiliates Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. A visiting fellow, Lin leads a research project focused on innovations in primary health care systems in China, a topic that is also the core of his work at ACON Biotechnology. Throughout his research, Lin has worked with health policy expert Karen Eggleston.
“Thirty to forty years ago, people were talking about infectious disease,” Lin says, referring to Chinese society. “Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes didn’t even register. They were like the black sheep in the flock.”
Now, though, Lin says that China has reached a critical stage. NCDs have a noticeable presence, and the challenge for China is to create an effective healthcare system to serve its population of 1.3 billion. Its health delivery systems are not equipped to address and prevent diseases at such a high demand.
Lin believes that improving access to care by increasing the relevance of community health care centers, improving the quality of care and integrating IT infrastructure could provide pathways forward.
In pursuit of this, he is part of the team developing an open source health index with Yaping Du, a professor at Zhejiang University, and Randall Stafford, a professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.
The index is one of many activities that Lin is involved with at Stanford. Forging a new type of partnership with the Asia Health Policy Program, his company sponsored a public seminar series this past year.
Restructuring quality care
Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Determining how to restructure China’s healthcare system is a tough challenge because it’s a bureaucratic hierarchy – multiple divisions traverse each province, prefecture, township and village.
In 2009, the Chinese government laid out aggressive reforms to its healthcare policy. Lin says he believes the most essential part of that plan is the empowerment of grassroots-level community healthcare centers.
“You cannot just deal with primary level, you must look at the secondary and tertiary segments, too—a whole system approach,” he says.
Resembling a pyramid, China’s system has a finite number of top physicians who are mostly located at major hospitals. Patients who pursue services are likely to go to major hospitals in urban areas, instead of their local health community centers. About 90 percent of health care is delivered in hospitals—leading to overcrowding. Moreover, patients choose to self-treat or self-medicate which can lead to misdiagnosis.
Collecting data in Hangzhou, a coastal city just south of Shanghai (shown in map photo), Lin discovered that these trends could be explained by two reasons.
Patients have a low level of trust in community health centers, and local facilities lack capacity (e.g. having only 20 bed spaces) and expertise (e.g. employing medical personnel with sometimes outdated training). His analysis reinforced earlier outcomes found by Karen Eggleston.
Lin says the solution lies in increasing access to highly skilled physicians and organizing the system more efficiently.
Comparing China to the United States, Lin believes community healthcare centers should become main hubs for service delivery. The centers would operate as the first and last touchpoint for patient care, like “gatekeepers” in the U.S. system, administering advanced services and prevention programs like wellness education.
And while local centers are becoming more prevalent—China has more than 34,081 centers—development isn’t fast enough, not enough physicians exist, and patients aren’t actively choosing to redirect their services to community healthcare centers.
Courtesy: Feng Lin
Figure 1. Strategy for community healthcare center reform advocates "strength at the grassroots." Currently patients seek care at major hospitals as their first stop, but in the future system, patients will go primarily to grassroots community healthcare centers. Courtesy: Feng Lin
Creating ease
Chinese people are typically leery of the quality of health care available at community healthcare centers, and overcoming that trust deficit won’t be an easy task. However, Lin says it’s a matter of informing citizens about local services and training more physicians to deliver quality care.
To address quality concerns, the Chinese government has set out to expand medical training programs. Enhancing the expertise of current and future physicians in rural community healthcare centers is essential, Lin says.
The health index aims to empower patients so that they can determine the best medical accommodation available, and also create a mechanism that rewards good work.
The key is to create a participatory system, one that incentivizes the patient and the physician, he says.
Hosted digitally and in the public domain, the index will list all physicians throughout Zhejiang province. Patients and healthcare professionals can login and share their experience, providing a “satisfaction rating” of hospitals and community health care centers.
Beyond external contributions, the index will support data provided by China’s national Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and local centers for disease control, to include mortality rate and cause of death and many other indicators sourced from publicly available data.
“It will build up a kind of system that people can trust – something that people can rely on,” Lin says.
Similar platforms have been implemented in advanced industrialized nations. Lin hopes that the index will offer a model that could be applied nationwide.
“It’s nearly impossible to have a single policy apply,” he says. “But, if there’s a success in one area or a few areas, the central government will pick up that approach.”
Lin expects that his team will unveil the pilot program at a conference on general practice in October 2015. The conference aims to provide practical ways to improve primary care services and the education and training of general practitioners.
Map shown above is Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
When China first proposed creating the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2013, it generated considerable anxiety in Washington and many other capitals. Many pundits and policymakers view the AIIB as a bid to undermine or replace the international architecture designed by the United States and its allies since the end of World War II. Although several U.S. allies, including Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have declared their intention to join the AIIB, others, including Japan, have expressed ambivalence. For its part, the United States has made it clear that it will seek to influence the institution from the outside. But it would be a mistake to shun or undermine the AIIB. Rather, it should be welcomed. Both the United States and Japan have far more to gain by joining the AIIB and shaping its future than remaining on the sidelines.
The details remain vague, but the AIIB is meant to be a multilateral development institution that will focus on infrastructure needs in Asia. There is no question that this is a deserving cause. Asia’s large population, rapid growth, and integration with the global economy all generate demand for better infrastructure. A report by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) estimates the region needs about $750 billion annually in infrastructure-related financing. Citing historical underinvestment, McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm based in New York City, proclaims a “$1 trillion infrastructure opportunity” in Asia. [...]
This article was originally published on Foreign Affairs on May 7, 2015, and an excerpt has been reproduced here with permission. The full article may be viewed on the Foreign Affairs website.
