Author Sam Olsen interviews Scott Rozelle about the findings in his book "Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China's Rise."
For winter quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.
About the Event: This event is a book talk based on my forthcoming book, Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare. Below is a brief summary of the book.
When Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram were first introduced to the public, their mission was simple: they were designed to help people become more connected to each other. Social media became a thriving digital space by giving its users the freedom to share whatever they wanted with their friends and followers. Unfortunately, these same digital tools are also easy to manipulate. As exemplified by Russia's interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, authoritarian states can exploit social media to interfere with democratic governance in open societies.
Tyrants on Twitter is the first detailed analysis of how Chinese and Russian agents weaponize Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube to subvert the liberal international order. In addition to examining the 2016 U.S. election, David L. Sloss explores Russia's use of foreign influence operations to threaten democracies in Europe, as well as China's use of social media and other digital tools to meddle in Western democracies and buttress autocratic rulers around the world.
Sloss calls for cooperation among democratic governments to create a new transnational system for regulating social media to protect Western democracies from information warfare. Drawing on his professional experience as an arms control negotiator, he outlines a novel system of transnational governance that Western democracies can enforce by harmonizing their domestic regulations. And drawing on his academic expertise in constitutional law, he explains why that system—if implemented by legislation in the United States—would be constitutionally defensible, despite likely First Amendment objections. This book is essential reading in a time when disinformation campaigns threaten to undermine democracy.
About the Speaker: David L. Sloss is the John A. and Elizabeth H. Sutro Professor of Law at Santa Clara University. He is the author of The Death of Treaty Supremacy: An Invisible Constitutional Change (Oxford Univ. Press, 2016) and Tyrants on Twitter: Protecting Democracies from Information Warfare (Stanford Univ. Press, forthcoming 2022). He is the co-editor of International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Continuity and Change (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011) and sole editor of The Role of Domestic Courts in Treaty Enforcement: A Comparative Study (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009). He has also published several dozen book chapters and law review articles. His book on the death of treaty supremacy and his edited volume on international law in the U.S. Supreme Court both won prestigious book awards from the American Society of International Law. Professor Sloss is a member of the American Law Institute and a Counsellor to the American Society of International Law. His scholarship is informed by extensive government experience. Before entering academia, he spent nine years in the federal government, where he worked on U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations and nuclear proliferation issues.
This event is virtual only. This event will not be held in person.
The Economist included SCCEI Co-Director Scott Rozelle's newest book in their lineup of the best books of 2021. Here's what they had to say:
"Invisible China. By Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell. University of Chicago Press; 248 pages; $27.50 and £22
The biggest obstacle to China’s development is that rural children—two-thirds of the total—do terribly in school, argues this stunningly researched book. Many are malnourished, lack reading glasses or suffer from energy-sapping intestinal worms. If these basic problems are not fixed, say the authors, China will struggle to reach its goal of broad prosperity."
See the full list: https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/12/11/the-best-books-of-2021
On December 11, 2021 The Economist published their list of the best books of 2021. Scott Rozelle's newest book, "Invisible China" was listed third on the line up!
Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions 2021 Annual Report is now available.
Learn about the research, impact, student engagement, and more that we have achieved during our inaugural year as a Center. Download your copy or read it online.
At SCCEI, we aim to shed some light on what actually is happening in China, and exactly how these happenings might affect the rest of the world. 2021 was an active and busy year for our team. Take a look at our 2021 Annual Report to see all of the incredible work and accomplishments we have achieved together. Download your copy or read it online.
This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk.
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At the end of 2021 China Evergrande Group—one of China’s biggest property developers—finally defaulted on its bonds. The default didn’t spark a Lehman Moment—as widely prophesied—or any significant market upheaval, but it’s increasingly clear that Evergrande’s problems mark the start of a momentous shift in how China’s economy grows. Over the past 18 months, Beijing has induced a slowdown of the property sector with the goal of better ensuring financial sector stability and the sustainability of property sector growth. However, it has resulted in defaults, restructuring, and consolidation among China’s largest developers, and has implication for local government finance and the pace of economic growth. This talk will discuss the challenges posed by Evergrande’s decline and imminent restructuring, what Beijing is trying to achieve by reining in the property sector, and what risks are involved.
Dinny McMahon is the author of “China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle,” a ground up look at the mechanics of China’s political economy, which he wrote while a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He later moved to MacroPolo, the Paulson Institute’s think tank in Chicago, where he researched China’s efforts to clean up its financial system. Dinny started his career as a financial journalist in China, spending six years in Beijing with The Wall Street Journal, and four years with Dow Jones Newswires in Shanghai, where he also contributed to the Far Eastern Economic Review. Dinny is currently working on a project for the Wilson Center on China’s efforts to reduce its reliance on the US dollar. He also provides independent research on China’s financial system for financial services firms.
This event is part of the 2022 Winter webinar series, The Future of China's Economy, sponsored by the APARC China Program.
Via Zoom Webinar. Register at: https://bit.ly/3pkTQfE
Taiwan. Hypersonic missiles. The South China Sea. In the last few months, China’s activities have grabbed headlines and fueled speculation about its intentions. But how much of this action is posturing, and how much should U.S. policymakers and strategists take seriously?
To help explain what’s going on with our biggest competitor, FSI Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro, a specialist on China’s military and an active member of the United States Air Force Reserves, joins Michael McFaul on World Class to debunk some of the myths that persist about China’s capabilities and reframe how the U.S. needs to think about strategic competition with Beijing. Listen to their full episode and read highlights from the conversation below.
Click here for a transcript of “We Need To Rethink Our Assumptions about China’s Strategic Goals”
Twenty years ago, the Chinese-Taiwan invasion plan was to take a couple of fishing vessels and paddle their way across the strait. In the 1990s, China had very limited, and often no ability to fly over water, or at night, or in weather, and their ships had no defenses.
For many, many years we knew that China was willing to fight if Taiwan declared independence. Fighting a war in any country that is big and resolved is problematic. But it was never the case that the United States was going to lose that war; it was always a matter of, “How many days?” How many days is it going to take us to win?
In the intervening years, China's military has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Now they have the largest navy in the world, and those ships are some of the most advanced surface ships that can be comparable to those of the United States. Same with their fighters; they have fifth generation airplanes and the largest airforce in the region. They’ve put all these capabilities online, and at the same time, they [have also] started developing capabilities to reach out and touch the United States with.
They developed the capability to hit moving ships at sea, which is something the United States doesn’t have the capability to do. They have a huge cruise and ballistic missile program that basically can take out a U.S. base like Kadena in the region in a matter of hours, should they ever be willing to make a direct hit on the U.S.
This doesn't mean that China is more powerful than the United States; China still can’t project power outside the Indo-Pacific region, and even there it’s mostly through space, cyber, and nuclear weapons. But most of the contingencies we're talking about are really close to China, so it doesn’t really matter that they can’t project power. So, on the conventional side, I’m very concerned.
The whole goal of the Communist Party, since its founding in 1949, has been to resolve this Taiwan issue.
Now they have the ships, the aircraft, and they’ve reorganized their whole military so that they can do joint operations, so that the navy and the air force can do an invasion of Taiwan. And a lot of those efforts came to a successful conclusion at the end of 2020. And that's why people like myself, not because of the capabilities, but because when I was in Beijing and talked to the Chinese military and government officials, they said, “We could do this now, and maybe we should think about it.”
We know from behavioral economics that countries and people are much more willing to take risks to not lose something that they think is theirs, versus when they are trying to get something which they don't think is theirs. In the Chinese mindset, Taiwan, the South China Sea, East China Sea, etc. is already theirs, and the United States is trying to take it from them. That makes the situation even more problematic.
The Biden administration is doing a lot of political maneuvering to show that the United States is willing to defend Taiwan. And I think it’s just upsetting Beijing, because they think we’re changing the political status quo. It also does nothing to enhance our deterrence, because it doesn't signal anything about our capability to defend Taiwan.
The Chinese basically assume the United States will intervene. Their big question is, can they still win? We need to show China that they cannot win, and that’s about showing out capabilities in the region. It’s about aggressively negotiating new host arrangements, more access for the U.S. military, and new international institutions and treaties that constrain the ways China leverages power.
I'm a military person, but I'm totally on board with leading with diplomacy. But I don't see those types of efforts coming out of the Biden administration. They seem to want to double down and do the same things, just with more allies and partners. I'm supportive of it, but I just don't think it's enough.
On the World Class podcast, Oriana Skylar Mastro argues that in order to set effective policy toward China, the United States needs to better understand how and why China is projecting power.
Scott Rozelle introduces his recent publication, "Publishing and Assessing the Research of Economists: Lessons from Public Health" in a blog post for the China Economic Review's official Wechat account to celebrate its 30th anniversary.
On October 21, 2021, the APARC China Program had the opportunity to host Peter Martin, Defense Policy and Intelligence Reporter for Bloomberg News, for a program on Chinese displomacy. In honor of his recently released book, China's Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, Mr. Martin gave us a deep dive into the origins of this contentious diplomatic style and what it tells us about domestic politics in China. The panel was moderated by Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program.
As many who follow Chinese politics will be aware, Chinese diplomacy in the past several years has become increasingly assertive and its diplomats have used sharper language. Based on Chinese action movies of the same name, this pointed style of communication has earned these diplomats the title "wolf warriors." Some of the more stand-out examples of wolf warrior diplomacy include China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Zhao Lijian's claim that COVID-19 was actually created by the United States, or the uncomfortable exchange between American and Chinese diplomats at the US-China Alaska summit in March, 2021.
In this program, Mr. Martin traced the roots of China's approach to diplomacy back to the communist revolution of 1949 and told the story of how it has evolved through social upheaval, famine, capitalist reforms, and China's rise to superpower status. His book draws on dozens of interviews and--for the first time--on the memoirs of more than 100 retired Chinese diplomats. The program was followed by a robust Q&A session between Mr. Martin and the audience. Watch now:
For more information about China's Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy or to purchase a copy, please click here.
Peter Martin discusses the advent of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy in Chinese politics — is it really such a new phenomenon after all?
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung recently published an interview with SCCEI's co-director Scott Rozelle. The article was originally publshed in German and later translated to English. You can read the full article in either language online:
Katrin Buchenbacher from Neue Zürcher Zeitung interviewed Scott Rozelle about his recent book on China's rural population.
On October 6, 2021, the APARC China Program hosted the panel program, "Engaging China: Fifty Years of Sino-American Relations." In honor of her recently released book of the same title, Director of the Grassroots China Initiative Anne Thurston was joined by contributors Mary Bullock, President Emerita of Agnes Scott College; Thomas Fingar, Shorenstein APARC Fellow; and David M. Lampton, Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Thomas Fingar also moderated the panel.
Recent years have seen the U.S.-China relationship rapidly deteriorate. Engaging China brings together leading China specialists—ranging from academics to NGO leaders to former government officials—to analyze the past, present, and future of U.S.-China relations.
During their panel, Bullock, Fingar, Lampton, and Thurston reflected upon the complex and multifaceted nature of American engagement with China since the waning days of Mao’s rule. What initially motivated U.S.’ rapprochement with China? Until recent years, what logic and processes have underpinned the U.S. foreign policy posture towards China? What were the gains and the missteps made during five decades of America’s engagement policy toward China? What is the significance of our rapidly deteriorating bilateral relations today? Watch now:
For more information about Engaging China or to purchase a copy, please click here.
Was the strategy of engagement with China worthwhile? Experts Mary Bullock, Thomas Fingar, David M. Lampton, and Anne Thurston discuss their recent release, "Engaging China: Fifty Years of Sino-American Relations."
