By any measure, China’s economy and defense budget are second only to those of the United States. Yet tremendous uncertainties persist concerning China’s military development and national trajectory, and areas with greater information available often conflated misleadingly. Fortunately, larger dynamics elucidate both areas. Particularly since the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Crisis, China has made rapid progress in aerospace and maritime development, greatly facilitating its military modernization. The weapons and systems that China is developing and deploying fit well with Beijing’s geostrategic priorities. Here, distance matters greatly: after domestic stability and border control, Beijing worries most about its immediate periphery, where its unresolved disputes with neighbors and outstanding claims lie primarily in the maritime direction. Accordingly, while it would vastly prefer pressuring concessions to waging war, China is already capable of threatening potential opponents’ military forces should they intervene in crises over islands and maritime claims in the Yellow, East, and South China Seas and the waterspace and airspace around them. Far from mainland China, by contrast, it remains ill-prepared to protect its own forces from robust attack. Fortunately for Beijing, the non-traditional security focus of its distant operations makes conflict unlikely; remedying their vulnerabilities would be difficult and expensive. Despite these larger patterns, critical unknowns remain concerning China’s economic development, societal priorities, industrial efficiency, and innovation capability. Dr. Erickson will examine these and related issues to probe China’s development trajectory and future place in the international system. 

The views expressed by Dr. Erickson are his alone, and do not represent the policies or estimates of any organization with which he is affiliated.

Dr. Andrew S. Erickson is an Associate Professor in the Strategic Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College and a core founding member of the department’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI). He is an Associate in Research at Harvard University’s John King Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies (2008-). Erickson also serves as an expert contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report (中国实时报), for which he has authored or coauthored 25 articles. In spring 2013, he deployed in the Pacific as a Regional Security Education Program scholar aboard USS Nimitz (CVN68), Carrier Strike Group 11.

Erickson received his Ph.D. and M.A. in international relations and comparative politics from Princeton University and graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College with a B.A. in history and political science. He has studied Mandarin in the Princeton in Beijing program at Beijing Normal University’s College of Chinese Language and Culture and Japanese language, politics, and economics in the year-long Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University.

Erickson’s research, which focuses on Asia-Pacific defense, international relations, technology, and resource issues, has been published widely in English- and Chinese-language edited volumes and in such peer-reviewed journals as China Quarterly, Asian Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, Orbis, Asia Policy (forthcoming January 2014), and China Security; as well as in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, Joint Force Quarterly, China International Strategy Review (published in Chinese-language edition, forthcoming in English-language edition January 2014), and International and Strategic Studies Report (Center for International and Strategic Studies, Peking University). Erickson has also published annotated translations of several Chinese articles on maritime strategy. His publications are available at <www.andrewerickson.com> and <www.chinasignpost.com>.

This event is co-sponsored with CEAS and is part of the China under Xi Jinping series.

The Stanford Korean Studies Program (KSP) and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), with support from Hana Financial Group, are offering a very exciting and intensive professional development opportunity for secondary school teachers: The Hana–Stanford Conference on Korea for U.S. Secondary School Teachers. This three-day summer conference will feature scholarly lectures and curricular presentations on topics such as Korean history, North Korea, inter-Korean relations, politics, economics, culture, and U.S.–Korean relations. We hope to bring together educators who are interested in incorporating Korean studies into their curricula and to provide a venue for them to learn and exchange ideas.

All conference meals and registration costs will be covered by the conference. For those who reside more than 50 miles from Stanford University, shared hotel accommodations and reasonable airfare expenses will be covered. Each teacher will be given a $300 stipend to cover incidental expenses and also receive an excellent selection of books and complimentary teaching materials about Korea. In addition, teachers can earn an optional 2 units of credit from Stanford Continuing Studies.

Space is limited to 30 teachers from secondary schools throughout the United States. Teachers from out of town are encouraged to arrive on July 27, 2014. To apply to attend the conference, please fill out the Applicant Registration Form and return it to the address below by February 7, 2014. We will notify you once your applicant registration form has been reviewed by the selection committee. 

For more information, please contact Sabrina Ishimatsu at sishi@stanford.edu.

• 2013 Conference Agenda
• 2012 Conference Agenda

ABOUT THE TOPIC: No country was as devastated by the Cold War as Afghanistan, yet the historical understanding of how the global conflict came to Kabul remains tentative, generally limited to studies that begin in the late 1970s.  Scholars have generally treated the American role in pre-invasion Afghanistan as minimal, or have seamlessly connected Kabul's half-turn toward Moscow in the mid-1950s with the 1979 invasion.  Extensive research, however, demonstrates the profound impact Americans had in mid-century Afghanistan.  Based on multinational research, this paper will explore how Americans helped to bring the Cold War to the mountain kingdom in the early 1950s.  While the Truman administration considered Afghanistan marginal and strategically indefensible, a fateful combination of local initiative, misperception, and ideology helped to add the kingdom to the roster of Cold War battlegrounds, where it would remain until the conflict's end.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Robert Rakove is a lecturer for the International Relations Program.  He studies the modern history of U.S. foreign relations, paying particular attention to the Cold War in the Third World.  He received his PhD in History from the University of Virginia in 2008, and is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World.  He is presently at work on a history of the U.S.-Afghan relationship in the decades before the Soviet invasion.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: The intellectual history of nuclear arms control has largely been written as a history of ideas, untethered from personal biography and social context. This paper reinterprets the early history of arms control thought by placing it within a community of disarmament advocates, located mainly in the Boston area, during the late 1950s. Arms control thought was not simply a functional response to external developments in Cold War politics or the technology of nuclear weapons. Local and contingent factors, too, shaped its history. In particular, the idea of "stability" was contested within the early arms control community. As opposed to the static stability of deterrence preferred by strategic analysts, Jerome Wiesner—a control systems engineer and cyberneticist by training, and a participant in the Boston disarmament group—proposed to stabilize and correct the arms race through comprehensive arms control systems and processes of long-term dynamic feedback.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Benjamin Wilson is a predoctoral fellow at CISAC for 2013-14, and a doctoral student in MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society. He is writing a dissertation on the history of the community of nuclear arms control experts in the United States during the Cold War. The dissertation examines the evolving relationships between arms control intellectuals, the state, and the wider nuclear disarmament movement in a variety of settings—university-based research and defense consulting, Congressional advising, and within private foundations and specialized non-governmental arms control organizations. He holds master's degrees in physics from Yale University and the University of Toronto, and a bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Saskatchewan.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Why was nuclear war deemed unwinnable in the United States? Pace conventional wisdom, the truth was not self-evident. The determination that nuclear weapons were useful in a negative sense (deterring conflict), but not a positive sense (pursuing victory), became axiomatic in the Kennedy Years. Standard accounts explaining how a nuclear taboo arose highlight policymakers’ and thought leaders’ moral revulsion toward great loss of human life. This paper looks at studies of post-attack environments to argue that economic and ecological considerations were of equal if not decisive importance. The core question was how to protect and conserve the natural foundations of an advanced industrial state according to the tenets of modernization theory. Economists and ecologists thus clashed because of incompatible methods and political competition. Their collective inability to deliver concrete recommendations for overcoming an all-out thermonuclear attack reinforced a gathering international norm that the possession and use of nuclear weapons merited legal circumscriptions and prohibitions. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Jonathan Hunt is a MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC for 2013-2014. He was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC for 2012-2013, and received his PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2013. His dissertation, “Into the Bargain: The Triumph and Tragedy of Nuclear Internationalism during the mid-Cold War, 1958-1970,” examined how decolonization, the meanings of nuclear power, discord in Cold War alliances, and a schism in internationalist thought shaped how a burgeoning international community brought order to the Nuclear Age. Jonathan graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Plan II Honors Liberal Arts; History; and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. In 2011, he was a residential fellow at the George F. Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and, in 2012, at the Security and Sustainability Program of the International Green Cross in Washington, DC. He was also a Dwight D. Eisenhower/Clifford Roberts Graduate Fellow for 2012-2013. He has published in Passport, Not Even Past, The Huffington Post, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Barton J. Bernstein is Professor Emeritus of History at Stanford University. He was Professor of History at Stanford from 1965-2012. Additionally, he was previously Co-Chair of the International Relations Program and the International Policy Studies Program. Professor Bernstein received his PhD in History from Harvard University and his BA from Queens College. He has taught extensively at Stanford; in the past, his courses have included: The United States Since 1945; The Politics and Ethics of Modern Science and Technology; and Decision Making in International Crisis: The A-Bomb, the Korean War, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Professor Bernstein has published extensively in numerous academic journals, and his books include: The Truman Administration: A Documentary History; Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History; Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration; and Twentieth-Century America: Recent Interpretations.

Fifty years have passed since the Bracero Program formally ended, yet its legacies endure. During this event, Professor Rodolfo Dirzo (Director, Center for Latin American Studies; Bing Professor of Environmental Science, Stanford University) will address the significance of the Bracero Program not only to the ancestry but also to the human and social capital of people of Mexican descent in the United States. Professor Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar (Director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, Stanford University) will examine the legacy of the Bracero Program on the “here and now” of immigration reform. Their comments will be followed by “teachable moments” that will be shared by former high school teacher Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez, who currently works in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford, where he conducts research on the Bracero Program. Following the talks and dinner, ten former braceros will be recognized.

Hosted by the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford (CLAS), the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (FSI), and the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE).

Over the past 35 years of the reform period Beijing has tried to make its state-owned enterprises more efficient and competitive. In the early 1990s it adopted a strategy modeled closely on the Western corporation and the equity and debt capital markets that support its operations. But China's big SOEs have demonstrated more and more independence despite outright economic and ownership control by the government and the Communist Party. And this independence has not led to greater efficiencies or, arguably, even competitiveness. Instead the National Champions represent monopolistic economic and political power. Today China's new leadership confronts the National Champions seeking to regain control over the state's principal assets. How did this happen and what can be done to reassert Beijing's rights?  

Carl E. Walter worked in China and its financial sector for over 20 years and actively participated in many of the country’s financial reform efforts. While at Credit Suisse First Boston he played a major role in China’s groundbreaking first overseas IPO in 1992. Later at Morgan Stanley he was a member of senior management at China International Capital Corporation, China’s first and most successful investment bank. While there he supported a number of groundbreaking domestic and international stock and bond underwritings for major Chinese corporations. More recently at JPMorgan he was China Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer of its China banking subsidiary. During this time Carl helped build a pioneering domestic security, risk and currency trading operation. In his spare time he enjoyed driving his Jeep to distant provinces.

A long time resident of Beijing before his recent return to the United States, Carl is fluent in Mandarin and holds a PhD from Stanford University and a graduate certificate from Peking University. In Spring 2013, Carl returned to Stanford as a visiting scholar at the Shorenstein-Asia Pacific Research Center, FSI. He is the co-author of Red Capitalism: the fragile financial foundations of China’s extraordinary rise, which has been published in Chinese in China. His earlier book, Privatizing China: inside China’s stock markets, was also published in China and, like Red Capitalism, contributed to the government’s policy debate.

This event is co-sponsored with CEAS and is part of the China under Xi Jinping series.

Stanford-Sasakawa Peace Foundation New Channels Dialogue 2014

Energy Challenge and Opportunities for the United States and Japan

February 13, 2014

Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall, Stanford University

Sponsored and Organized by Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) and Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (S-APARC) in Association with U.S.-Japan Council

Japan Studies Program at Shorenstein APARC, Stanford University has launched a three-year project from 2013 to create new channels of dialogue between experts and leaders of younger generations from the United States, mostly from the West Coast, and Japan under a name of "New Channels: Reinvigorating U.S.-Japan Relations," with the goal of reinvigorating the bilateral relationship through the dialogue on 21st century challenges faced by both nations, with a grant received from the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.

The dialogue would be structured to examine the new challenges of the 21st century, in particular, economic growth and employment creation; innovation and entrepreneurship; energy; and East Asian regionalism, including regional security issues, with the aim of developing mutual understanding and constructing a new relationship for cooperation in dealing with 21st century challenges through the dialogue between scholars, entrepreneurs, and policy makers from the two countries. We are hoping that this multi-year initiative will generate a network of trans-Pacific expertise as a vital supplement to existing avenue of communications.

Given the recent dramatic changes in energy environments in both countries, such as shale gas developments in the U.S, and after Fukushima challenges in Japan, this year, as an inaugural year, we will be examining energy issues. Panel discussions open to the public, with the title of "Energy Challenges and Opportunities for the U.S. and Japan," will be held on February 13^th, followed by a dialogue among invited participants on 14^th, at Stanford University with the participation of policy makers, business leaders, scholars, and experts from both countries.

In the panel discussions we will examine following issues:

1. Discovery of shale gas deposits in various parts of the world has drastically changed the geopolitics of energy.
2. New technologies for energy production have been creating various challenges to the existing system of energy supply.
3. As emerging economies grow rapidly, they will demand increasing amount of energy. They face a challenge of creating a sustainable and secure energy supply system.
4. After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the call for enhancing safety of nuclear power plants has intensified. While public’s trust in nuclear technology wanes, increasing number of nuclear power plants are built in emerging countries. Nuclear energy policy has become politically contentious.
5. Use of information technology, such as smart grid, is likely to change the ways energy is supplied and distributed.
6. The world has not found an effective international framework for slowing the global warming and securing reliable energy supply to support economic growth.

We are very pleased that we were able to invite quite impressive participants, policy makers, business leaders, scholars and experts from the two countries, who would appear as panelists in the panel discussions on February 13^th.

We expect that through this panel discussion we would be able to define the challenges we are facing, indicate the pathways we should proceed to, and identify the areas for cooperation.

On the following day, February 14^th, we will have the dialogue closed to the public discussing issues and possible cooperation between the U.S. and Japan on energy among invited participants.

We hope to publish a summary of conference presentations and the dialogue discussion after the conference.