Skyline Scholars Seminar Series

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

The Origin and Diffusion of Policy Ideas in China

Drawing on two decades of Chinese policy documents and government work reports, we document over 116,000 distinct policy ideas and trace their complete life cycles. Our analysis reveals three main findings. First, in the 2000s, policy innovation was highly decentralized—more than 80% of ideas originated from local governments, driven primarily by local officials. Second, after 2013, the central government shifted its incentives by ceasing rewards for bottom-up innovation and instead promoting the diligent enforcement of centrally assigned policies, leading to significant centralization of policy innovation. Third, focusing on industrial policies, we highlight tradeoffs between centralization and decentralization. Top-down industrial policies tend to be less aligned with local comparative advantages and are less effective at spurring industrial growth, revealing the cost of centralization. Conversely, under decentralization, strategic competition among local politicians can distort policy diffusion, reducing the fit between policies and local contexts and undermining their effectiveness. Quantitatively, our results indicate that since 2013, the costs of centralizing policy innovation in China have far outweighed its benefits.

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About the Speaker 
 

Shaoda Wang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, a Skyline Scholar (2024-2025) at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions (SCCEI), a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis in Development (BREAD). He also serves as the deputy faculty director of the China branches of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI-China) and the Energy Policy Institute at UChicago (EPIC-China). He is an applied economist with research interests in development economics, environmental economics, and political economy, with a regional focus on China. He holds a BA from Peking University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Harris, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Economics and Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago.

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Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

Talk title: Will Tomorrow's Older Persons Be as Healthy as Their Parents? Implications of Recent Trends for Social Security and Medicare

David Rehkopf is the Director of the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. His research focuses on understanding the health implications of the myriad decisions that are made daily by corporations and government, and how these decisions give the public and policy makers evidence to support new strategies for promoting health and well-being. His work also focuses on the implications of this data for health inequalities.  

Jack Rowe leads the MacArthur Foundation’s Initiative on An Aging Society and chairs the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on the Future Health Care Workforce for Older Americans. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation and is a former member of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. He chairs the Board of Trustees at the University of Connecticut and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. 

Victor Cha of Georgetown University and Ramon Pacheco Pardo of King's College, London team up to explore the history of modern Korea, from the late nineteenth century, Japanese occupation, and Cold War division to democratization, nuclear weapons, and BTS. A country situated amongst the world’s largest powers—including China, Japan, Russia, and the United States—Korea’s fate has been affected by its geography and the strength of its leadership and society. Cha and Pardo shed light on the evolving identities of the two Koreas, explaining the sharp differences between North and South, and prospects for unification.

Victor Cha is president of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is also the distinguished university professor and professor of government at Georgetown University. He was appointed in 2021 by the Biden administration to serve on the Defense Policy Board in an advisory role to the secretary of defense. From 2004 to 2007, he served on the National Security Council (NSC) and was responsible for Japan, Korea, Australia/New Zealand, and Pacific Island nations. Dr. Cha was U.S. deputy head of delegation at the Six Party Talks and received two outstanding service commendations during his tenure at the NSC. He is the author of eight books, including the award-winning Alignment Despite Antagonism: The United States-Korea-Japan Security Triangle (Stanford, 1999) (winner of the 2000 Ohira Book Prize), The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future (Ecco, 2012) selected by Foreign Affairs as a “Best Book on the Asia-Pacific for 2012", Powerplay: Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton, 2018), Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale, 2023), and The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea (Columbia University Press, 2024). He serves on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and is a senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. He is also a foreign affairs contributor for MSNBC and NBC News. Professor Cha received his PhD, MIA and BA degree from Columbia University and a BA Honors from Oxford University.

Ramon Pacheco Pardo is Professor of International Relations at King’s College London and the KF-VUB Korea Chair at the Brussels School of Governance of Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is also King's Regional Envoy for East and South East Asia, helping to shape and implement the university's strategy for the region. He is also Adjunct Fellow (Non-Resident) with the Korea Chair at CSIS, Scientific Council member at Elcano Royal Institute, Steering Committee member at CSCAP EU, Advisory Committee member at Jeju Forum and Advisory Committee member at the Reset Korea Campaign of JoongAng Ilbo, a major Korean newspaper. He has held visiting positions at Korea University, the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Melbourne University. His publications include the books North Korea: Survival of a Political Dynasty (Agenda Publishing, 2024), Korea: A New History of South & North (Yale University Press, 2023; with Victor Cha), South Korea's Grand Strategy: Making Its Own Destiny (Columbia University Press, 2023), Shrimp to Whale: South Korea from the Forgotten War to K-Pop (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2022) and North Korea-US Relations from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un (Routledge, 2019). Prof Pacheco Pardo has participated in track 1.5 and 2 dialogues with China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the United States. He has testified before the European Parliament and consulted and advised NATO, the OECD and the governments of Canada, the EU, South Korea, Spain, the UK and the United States as well as several private firms, among others. Professor Pacheco Pardo is a regular columnist with JoongAng Ilbo. He is also a frequent media commentator on North East Asian and affairs and Europe-East Asia and Europe-Indo-Pacific relations.

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In December 2022, then-Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made global headlines when he announced a historic revision of Japan’s national security strategy. The Kishida Cabinet’s defense pledges were as remarkable for their substantive ambition and breadth as for what they revealed about political leaders’ growing alarm concerning the rapidly worsening security environment surrounding Japan. Including but not limited to unprecedented and headline-grabbing commitments to surge defense spending and acquire “counterstrike” capabilities, Japan’s new National Defense Strategy was especially significant. Nevertheless, over the past two years, several core aspects of Japan’s plans have been widely misunderstood, leading many to claim a far more radical defense transformation than the facts actually warrant.

In this public talk, Professor Liff will introduce key elements of Japan’s (FY2023-2027) national defense strategy and highlight the significance of, as well as the reasons for, several widespread misconceptions about it. He will draw particular attention to how widely-overlooked domestic political factors quietly “bent the curve” of Japan’s reform trajectory—effectively watering down national security leaders’ more ambitious policy goals in several subtle and oft-ignored, but profoundly consequential, ways.

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Adam P. Liff is Associate Professor of East Asian International Relations at Indiana University’s (IU) Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, where he also serves as Founding Director of its multidisciplinary 21st Century Japan Politics and Society Initiative (21JPSI). Beyond IU, he is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for East Asia Policy Studies and an associate-in-research at Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. He is also the former Visiting Chair in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where he launched and directed its Japan and the World public event series. Dr. Liff's research and teaching focus is on contemporary international security and foreign policy challenges in East Asia—with a particular emphasis on Japanese politics and foreign (esp. defense) policy; the U.S.-Japan alliance; U.S. allies and Taiwan, and U.S. Asia-Pacific strategy. In addition to regularly engaging Japan-focused scholarly communities across North America, East Asia, and Europe, he also frequently exchanges views with policymakers and is an active participant in Track 1.5 policy dialogues (e.g., the DC-based U.S.-Japan Security Seminar and Tokyo-based Mt. Fuji Dialogue). Dr. Liff’s past academic and policy research affiliations include the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, Institute of Social Science, and Graduate School of Law and Politics; Waseda University’s Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies; the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Japan Chair; and the Wilson Center’s Indo-Pacific Program, among others. An active institution-builder and fundraiser to support contemporary Japan-focused initiatives at IU, he has also received multiple teaching awards—including IU’s Trustees Teaching Award in 2024. Dr. Liff holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, a postgraduate research certificate in international politics from the University of Tokyo, and a B.A. (with honors and distinction) in East Asian Studies and Psychology from Stanford University. 

Limited number of lunches available for registered guests on day of event.

About the event: Climate change has been deemed the greatest threat to global public health, yet critical gaps remain in understanding how this anthropogenic phenomenon impacts health-relevant infrastructure and decision-making. My research leverages ecological principles and data science to address a subset of these gaps at the intersection of extreme environmental change and adaptive interventions for planetary and human health. In this talk, I present work evaluating how rising temperatures affect the design and deployment of vector-borne disease prevention strategies, using Aedes aegypti mosquitoes as a case study. I discuss the methodological challenge of predicting how unprecedented ecological perturbations drive disease persistence and transmission, leveraging historical dengue outbreaks to interrogate the capacity of data-driven methods for forecasting explosive, environmentally sensitive epidemiological events. Finally, I outline how economic forces contribute to and can mitigate anthropogenic change, focusing on the role of targeted investments in antibiotic research and development to reduce ecological contamination and address the growing crisis of antimicrobial resistance. Throughout, I highlight the utility of scientific software for advancing equity and efficiency in human and planetary health management. 

About the speaker: Dr. Váleri Vásquez is a Biotechnology Innovation and International Security Fellow at Stanford University, with appointments in the Department of Biology and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research develops mathematical frameworks to render infectious disease management more robust to environmental uncertainty, as well as scientific software to guide strategic policymaking in public health. Dr. Vásquez completed her PhD at the University of California Berkeley in August 2023, with an emphasis in Computational Data Science and Engineering. Prior to her doctorate she specialized in international climate policy at the U.S. Department of State, serving on the senior team shaping the 2015 Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Dr. Vásquez holds an MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an MS in Energy and Resources, both from UC Berkeley. She earned her BA from the College of William and Mary.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.

The influx of marriage migrants and their children of mixed heritages has reconstructed the demographic landscape and national membership in East Asia. Through in-depth interviews with sixty adult children from cross-border marriages in Taiwan, Lan’s research explores their identity management at the intersection of geopolitical tensions and multicultural policies. Taiwan's evolving regime of “geopolitical multiculturalism” started to associate Southeast Asian immigrants with a reward for difference, while PRC immigrants are still considered a threat of similarity. Accordingly, Southeast Asian second-generation youths are increasingly encouraged to claim a bicultural identity, but the children of PRC Chinese immigrants continue to face geopolitical stigmas and conflicting identities. Three major strategies of second-generation identity work are identified: majority identity, biculturalism, and rescaling. Lan will also discuss policy implications for immigrant incorporation and multicultural future in the region. 

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University and also a 2024-25 Stanford-Taiwan Social Science Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006, won a Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars) and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).

A growing literature finds high returns to firms connected to legislative office. Less attention has been paid to benefits from bureaucratic connections and to organizations beyond for-profit firms. Using new data recording the first post-bureaucracy position occupied by all former civil servants in Japan, Incerti reveals a bifurcated job market in which the highest-ranking civil servants from the most prestigious ministries retire into for-profit firms while others join non-profit and public organizations. Incerti will show that for-profit firms receive larger government loans and stock price boosts following bureaucratic hires, and that these effects are driven by hires from prestigious economic ministries. Incerti will also show that non-profits leverage their bureaucratic hires by receiving higher value contracts in periods when former officials are in director positions at the organization. While top civil servants are therefore of value to for-profit firms, others find post bureaucracy employment in non-profits supported by government funding.

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Trevor Incerti is an Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service Asian Studies Program. Incerti’s main area of research is in comparative political economy, with a focus on the role of money in politics and business influence in politics. Additionally, his research explores how economic stimuli shape political behavior and preferences. Much of his work focuses on East Asia, particularly Japan. He also conducts research in quantitative methods, where he is particularly interested in the reliability and validity of measurement strategies. Incerti’s research is published in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis, among other outlets. Incerti received his Ph.D. from Yale University and B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an Expert at the Leiden Asia Centre and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Prior to academia, he worked in data science and economic consulting.

Taiwan is host to a panoply of popular spiritual-religious practices that reach back to the 17th century. Since 1987, these folk institutions have proliferated, blurring among other things the boundary between secularism and religiosity. They permeate different facets of contemporary Taiwanese society, from politics to technology, grassroot movements to elections. Regardless of faction, political and social groups negotiate and exert new configurations of social power in this spiritual space, which is also used transnationally. This talk focuses on the most influential among them and discusses how one may approach such a study in new and interdisciplinary ways.

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Jing Tsu is Jonathan D. Spence Chair Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. She holds an affiliation with the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and has also taught in the Grand Strategy program. Her research spans cultural and social history, nationalism, diaspora, and history of science and technology. Her most recent book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Penguin Random House, 2022), examines how the Chinese written script negotiated its way into the technological age of global communications dominated by the western alphabet. The book was named a 2023 Pulitzer Finalist. Her current research focuses on the social and political life of spirituality and technology in Taiwan.