Shorenstein Journalism Award panel explores China’s religious landscape
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China is encountering a religious resurgence. Its revival symbolizes tension between the past and the present, as people search for purpose in a country that’s been shaken by expansive reforms and modernization efforts over the past four decades.
That was the message shared by veteran journalist Ian Johnson, the 2016 winner of the Shorenstein Journalism Award, who gave a keynote speech followed by panel discussion titled “Religion after Mao,” part of the Award’s 15th anniversary ceremony at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center on Monday.
Johnson, who has spent 30 years as a journalist, has written extensively about Chinese history, religion and culture, and is also a teacher and published author, most recently releasing the book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao.
“Ian is maybe one of the most remarkable awardees we’ve had in recent years,” said Daniel Sneider, Shorenstein APARC associate director for research, who introduced the event by talking about Johnson’s distinguished career, which has included writing for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and New York Review of Books and led to a Pulitzer Prize win in 2001.
Xueguang Zhou, a Stanford professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and Orville Schell, the director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley, joined Johnson on the panel, while Sneider moderated the discussion.
In a wide-ranging conversation, the panelists discussed the varied history of religion in Chinese society during the 20th and 21st centuries, offering stories of their experiences living and working in China.
According to Johnson, religious persecution in China is often thought to be associated with the anti-religious campaigns of Mao Zedong following the Chinese Communist Party’s assumption of power in 1949, but in reality, it existed decades before and has lingered in national memory.
Into the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Chinese government remained superstitious of religion, trying to redefine religious groups as “culture” alone, under the assumption that religion could be desensitized enough to eventually disappear, Johnson said.
But that did not happen, he said, and instead an opposite trend did. Reaching a high point in the 2000s, China’s economic reforms – both sweeping and fast-paced – brought growing angst and anxiety and prompted people across every socioeconomic background to turn to religion as an outlet.
Johnson, who has spent weeks at a time living among religious groups, noted a shift from the time he was in China in the mid-1980s to the past decade, where now “the government sees that religious groups can provide some sort of moral framework for some people.”
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Chinese people today are searching for meaning, the panelists said, and are driven to join religious groups amid resource competition and mass migration that has usurped traditional family structures and disquieted many people who have moved from close-knit rural towns to alienating urban centers.
“Everybody is out there…trying to reify that part of life which isn’t filled by bread alone, by commerce alone,” said Schell, who has written about China since the 1970s as an author and journalist. “It’s a pretty chaotic quest and it’s very hard to know where it will all end.”
At the moment, religious groups in China remain heterogeneous and fragmented, Zhou said, but cohesion is growing in some regions and participation of local government leaders has drawn greater attention to the practice of faith.
“In grassroots China, religion, spiritual life and the Party, really go hand-in-hand – they’re intertwined,” said Zhou, whose research focuses on Chinese bureaucracy and economic development. “Local elites are involved both in the spiritual world and the Party world, and they shift back and forth simultaneously.”
However, the future of the relationship between religion and the government remains to be seen, according to the panelists.
Religious groups could fracture, or the government could continue to favor “native” religious groups, which if exacerbated over time, could lead to quasi-state religions, Johnson said. (Today, China recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam and Protestantism).
While religious groups increasingly provide a service to some people, the Chinese government continues to be wary of them as an alternative source of knowledge and values, Johnson said, which hold the potential to coalesce into a nascent civil society.
“Every dynasty in China knows that one way dynasties usually ended was with some millenarian movement,” Schell added of the government’s apprehension. “They are afraid of religious movements because they do bespeak of higher values, higher loyalties and different organizational structures that don’t owe fealty to the Party.”
A video of the keynote speech is posted at this link.
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What lower US engagement in Northeast Asia could mean
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Uncertainty about U.S. intentions in Northeast Asia has increased fear that events could spin out of control in the region due to American disengagement. That engagement cannot be taken for granted, Shorenstein Fellow Thomas Fingar writes on the Stanford University Press blog, and it remains to be seen just how well regional political leaders adjust to the Trump administration’s evolving foreign policy.
The blog post highlights themes from his book Uneasy Partnerships: China’s Engagement with Japan, the Koreas, and Russia in the Era of Reform (Stanford, April 2017).
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson meets with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during a bilateral meeting in Beijing, China, on March 18, 2017.
Flickr/U.S. Department of State
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Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?
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This event is a joint sponsorship between The Center for International Security and Cooperation and The Hoover Institution
About the Event: In this event, Professor Graham Allison will be interviewed by Niall Ferguson, Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, about his new book, Thucydides’ Trap. In this book Allison argues that China and the United States are heading toward a war neither wants. Behind this dynamic is what Allison sees as a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a hegemon. This phenomenon is as old as history itself. About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” Over the past 500 years, these conditions have occurred sixteen times. War broke out in twelve of them. Today, as an unstoppable China approaches an immovable America and both Xi Jinping and Donald Trump promise to make their countries ‘great again,’ the seventeenth case looks grim. Unless China is willing to scale back its ambitions or Washington can accept becoming number two in the Pacific, a trade conflict, cyberattack, or accident at sea could soon escalate into all-out war (excerpt from www.amazon.com). Audience members will have an opportunity to ask questions after the conversation.
About the Speaker: Director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Graham Allison is a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy with a special interest in nuclear weapons, terrorism, and decision-making. As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton Administration, Dr. Allison received the Defense Department's highest civilian award, the Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal." This resulted in the safe return of more than 12,000 tactical nuclear weapons from the former Soviet republics and the complete elimination of more than 4,000 strategic nuclear warheads previously targeted at the United States and left in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus when the Soviet Union disappeared.
His latest book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in May 2017. His 2013 book, Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States and the World (co-authored with Robert Blackwill), has been a bestseller in the U.S. and abroad. Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, now in its third printing, was selected by the New York Times as one of the "100 most notable books of 2004." It presents a strategy for preventing nuclear terrorism organized under a doctrine of "Three Nos:" no loose nukes; no new nascent nukes; and no new nuclear weapons states. Dr. Allison's first book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971), was released in an updated and revised second edition (1999) and ranks among the all-time bestsellers with more than 450,000 copies in print.
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. He has written fourteen books, including The House of Rothschild, Empire, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, The Great Degeneration, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. His 2011 feature-length film Kissinger won the New York International Film Festival’s prize for best documentary. His PBS series The Ascent of Money won the International Emmy for best documentary. His many prizes and awards include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013). He writes a weekly column for the London Sunday Times and the Boston Globe.
Graham Allison
Professor of Government
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
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Shorenstein APARC experts offer analysis, insights on Xi-Trump summit
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President Trump hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping last week at Mar-a-Lago for their first meeting which set out to address economic, trade and security challenges shared between the two countries. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) experts offered analysis of the summit to various media outlets.
In advance of the summit, Donald K. Emmerson, an FSI senior fellow emeritus and director of the Southeast Asia Program, wrote a commentary piece urging the two leaders to prioritize the territorial disputes in the South China Sea in their discussions. He also suggested they consider the idea of additional “cooperative missions” among China, the United States and other countries in that maritime area.
“A consensus to discuss the idea at that summit may be unreachable,” Emmerson recognized in The Diplomat Magazine. “But merely proposing it should trigger some reactions, pro or con. The airing of the idea would at least incentivize attention to the need for joint activities based on international law and discourage complacency in the face of unilateral coercion in violation of international law.”
Kathleen Stephens, the William J. Perry Fellow in Shorenstein APARC’s Korea Program, spoke to the Boston Herald about U.S. policy toward North Korea and a potential role for China in pressuring North Korea to hold talks about denuclearization. She addressed the purported reports that the National Security Council is considering as options placing nuclear weapons in South Korea and forcibly removing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un from power.
“The two options have been on the long list of possible options for a long time and they have generally been found to have far too many downsides,” Stephens said in the interview.
Writing for Tokyo Business Today, Daniel Sneider, the associate director for research at Shorenstein APARC, offered an assessment of the summit. He argued that two events - the U.S. airstrike on an airbase in Syria following the regime's chemical weapons attack and the leaked reports about tensions between White House staff - shifted the summit agenda and sidelined, at least for now, talk of a trade war between China and the United States.
“Instead of a bang, the Mar-a-Lago summit ended with a whimper,” Sneider wrote in the analysis piece (available in English and Japanese). “On the economy, the summit conversation was remarkably business-as-usual, with President Trump calling for China to ‘level the playing field’ and a vague commitment to speed up the pace of trade talks. When it came to North Korea…the two leaders reiterated long-standing goals of denuclearization but ‘there was no kind of a package arrangement discussed to resolve this.”
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping upon his arrival on April 6, 2017, to West Palm Beach, Florida.
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Spent Nuclear Fuel in South Korea and China
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Abstract: Relative to the struggles Western nuclear powered countries have experienced in the recent past, South Korea and China have had notable success building up nuclear power at an impressive scale. China today leads the world in new builds of nuclear reactors. Moving beyond indigenous construction, South Korea is on the verge of completing its first exported power reactor in the UAE, marking an impressive accomplishment for this relatively new nuclear startup. However, China and South Korea now face a challenge other more established nuclear powered countries have yet to solve, an unresolved structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. Despite the uncertainty that exists about the ultimate fate of the spent fuel, the more immediate problem of interim storage is urgent. In this talk, I will review the status and urgency of this problem in the two countries with quantitative results from modeling accumulation, storage and transportation. I will then outline immediate policy mitigations needed in the short term as well as strategies for designing a more permanent solution.
About the Speaker: Rob Forrest is currently a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories where his research interests include nuclear power, cybersecurity, and nonproliferation. As a member of the systems research group, he specializes in data driven methods and analysis to inform policy for national security.
As a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, his research focused on one of the most pressing technical issues of nuclear power: what to do with spent nuclear fuel. Specifically, he looked at the more short term issues surrounding interim storage as they affect the structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. He focuses mainly on countries with strong nuclear power growth such as South Korea and China.
Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.
Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he performed a search for signs of a theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for NASA.
Robert Forrest
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rforrest@gmail.com
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Rob Forrest is currently a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories where his research interests include nuclear power, cybersecurity, and nonproliferation. As a member of the systems research group, he specializes in data driven methods and analysis to inform policy for national security.
As a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, his research focused on one of the most pressing technical issues of nuclear power: what to do with spent nuclear fuel. Specifically, he looked at the more short term issues surrounding interim storage as they affect the structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. He focuses mainly on countries with strong nuclear power growth such as South Korea and China.
Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.
Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he performed a search for signs of a theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for NASA.
As a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC, his research focused on one of the most pressing technical issues of nuclear power: what to do with spent nuclear fuel. Specifically, he looked at the more short term issues surrounding interim storage as they affect the structure of the back end of the fuel cycle. He focuses mainly on countries with strong nuclear power growth such as South Korea and China.
Rob’s interest in policy and nuclear issues began during his fellowship in the 2008 Public Policy and Nuclear Threats program at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at UC San Diego. In 2010, he also participated in the PONI Nuclear Scholars Initiative at CSIS.
Before coming to CISAC in 2011, Rob received his Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of California, Davis. Most of his graduate career was spent at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, IL where he performed a search for signs of a theory called Supersymmetry. Before beginning his graduate work, Rob spent two years at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. In 2001, Rob earned his B.S. in physics from the University of California, San Diego where, throughout his undergraduate career, he worked for NASA.
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Mei Li Inouye
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minouye@stanford.edu
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SCPKU Pre-Doctoral Fellow, July-September 2017
On U.S.-China Relations: Avoiding the Trap
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The Thucydides Trap is real. Whether China’s rising power leads to conflict or cooperation is up to us. Whether the gears of our two nations grind or mesh depends on the effort and creativity we put into the endeavor. The question is how to avoid the trap. American diplomacy with China is dated. U.S exceptionalism and sense of superiority sometimes undermines our good intentions. U.S.’ views tend to be short term, unfocused, and pre-occupied with ad hoc developments elsewhere in the world. The U.S. government needs a much better long-term framework or strategy that deals with the China reality. So far, the U.S. and China have avoided major controversy. However, as China continues to grow and establish itself as a dominant world power, the U.S. must be more creative and willing to take increasingly thoughtful and considered risks.
A Chinese flag and American flag fly on a lamp post along Pennsylvania Avenue near the U.S. Capitol in Washington during Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit, January 18, 2011.
Max Sieben Baucus is the former U.S. Ambassador to the People's Republic of China (2014-2017) and a former U.S. Senator from Montana (1978-2014). On January 7, 2014 U.S. President Barack Obama nominated Max Sieben Baucus to be Ambassador of the United States of America to the People's Republic of China. He served as Ambassador from February 21, 2014 until January 19, 2017. Ambassador Baucus formerly served as the senior United States Senator from Montana from 1978 to 2014 and was Montana’s longest serving U.S. Senator as well as the third longest tenure among those serving in the U.S. Senate. Senator Baucus was Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Finance, Vice Chairman of the joint Committee on Taxation, member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, and a member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (Super committee). Before his election to the U.S. Senate, he represented Montana in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1975 to 1978. Ambassador Baucus has extensive experience in international trade. As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, he led the passage and enactment of the Free Trade Agreements with 11 countries: Australia, Bahrain, Jordan, Chile, Colombia, Morocco, Oman, Panama, Peru, Singapore and South Korea. He also was deeply involved in orchestrating the congressional approval of permanent normal trade relations with China in 2000 and in facilitating China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Ambassador Baucus was also the chief architect of the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA), which was signed into law on March 23, 2009. Ambassador Baucus earned a bachelor’s and law degree from Stanford University. He is married to Melodee Hanes and they have three children and one granddaughter.
The Oksenberg Lecture, held annually, honors the legacy of Professor Michel Oksenberg (1938–2001). A senior fellow at Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Professor Oksenberg served as a key member of the National Security Council when the United States normalized relations with China, and consistently urged that the United States engage with Asia in a more considered manner. In tribute, the Oksenberg Lecture recognizes distinguished individuals who have helped to advance understanding between the United States and the nations of the Asia-Pacific.
At times beginning in 2009 the decision was made to expand this series from its original lecture format to a workshop in order to bring scholars and policy makers together to discuss the ever-changing role China is playing in today's world. This new format allows for the exchange of ideas and opinions amongst today's top experts.
For directions to the Black Community Services Center, please click here.
Black Community Services Center
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Max Baucus
<i>U.S. Ambassador to the People's Republic of China (2014-2017), U.S. Senator Montana (1978-2014) </i>
Michael H. Armacost
<i>Former U.S. Ambassador to Japan and the Philippines, Shorenstein APARC Fellow, Stanford University</i>
Kathleen Stephens
<i>Former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea; William J. Perry Fellow, Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University</i>
Daniel R. Russel
<i>Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, Diplomat in Residence and Senior Fellow, Asia Society Policy Institute</i>
Lectures
PBS NewsHour interviews Kathleen Stephens about North Korea
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U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced in Seoul “the policy of strategic patience has ended” and “all options were on the table” regarding the United States’ efforts to address the North Korean nuclear threat. Kathleen Stephens, the William J. Perry Fellow in Shorenstein APARC’s Korea Program, spoke on PBS NewsHour about Tillerson’s remarks, the viability of tougher sanctions against North Korea, and deployment of the U.S. ballistic missile defense system (THAAD) to South Korea.
Watch and read about the interview here.
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A member of the public reads a newspaper report regarding a North Korea test-fired missile.
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