Despite growing evidence that China's success in taking advantage of the global system is a function of its willingness to accede to existing norms, pundits, and many academics, continue to predict that China's rise will transform the international system, usually for the worse.  Indeed, one can make a stronger case that China's participation in the US-led global system has transformed China far more than it has changed the institutions and norms that support globalization and facilitate China's rise.

Dr. Thomas Fingar is the Oksenberg/Rohlen Distinguished Fellow. In 2009, he was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. From May 2005 through December 2008, he served as the first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and, concurrently, as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

This event is part of the China and the World series.

The 21st century has been branded the century of the worldwide return of ethnonationalisms. Conflicts based on cultural differences are boiling up in many regions, leading to civil wars and to the breakup of states. Many of these conflicts are direct and indirect consequences of modernization and transnationalization; and they are usually as complex as they are enduring and difficult to settle, because rooted in the "deep“ dimensions of culture and religion. The result is in many cases a conflict pattern where political solutions are often only of temporary value, because the far deeper rooted ethnic and cultural dimensions sooner or later undermine them and spiral the conflict up again. As a consequence, there is a new debate today about the advantages of partition and separation, and an increasing number of scholars and politicians seems to believe that the still most humane lasting solution for ethno-cultural conflicts is to institutionally divide ethnic groups once and for all, accepting to a certain extent (non-recurring) ethnic cleansing and new flows of refugees. Answering such approaches (like the one of Jerry Z. Muller propagated paradigmatically in Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008), Roland Benedikter presents a functioning and long-term proven model from Central Europe, where different ethnic groups have managed it to find a unique institutional arrangement that permits them to live together without territorial and political partition. In presenting core features of the model of autonomy of the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, a border region between Northern Italy and Austria where three ethnic groups coexist and have made the area formerly ridden by civil wars (until 1972) now one of the wealthiest regions of Europe, Roland Benedikter shows how cornerstones of this model may be successfully applied also to other ethnic conflict regions.

Roland Benedikter, Dott. Dr. Dr. Dr., is European Foundation Fellow 2009-2013, in residence at the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies of the University of California at Santa Barbara, with duties as the European Foundations Research Professor of Political Sociology. His main field of interest is the multidimensional analysis of what he calls the current "Global Systemic Shift", which he tries to understand by bringing together the six typological discourses (and systemic order patterns) of Politics, Economy, Culture, Religion, Technology and Demography. Roland is currently working on two major book projects: One about the "Global Systemic Shift", and one about the "Contemporary Cultural Psychology of the West", the latter comparing culturo-political trends in the European and American hemispheres. With both projects he is also involved in European Policy Advice.

Kirk R. Smith will speak about his current research on health-damaging and climate-changing air pollution from household energy use in developing Asia, including field measurement and health-effects studies in India, China, and Nepal, compared to other countries such as Mexico and Guatemala. The work encompasses developing and deploying small, smart, and cheap microchip-based monitors as well as tools for international policy assessments.

Dr. Smith is Professor of Global Environmental Health and Director of the Global Health and Environment Program at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.  Previously, he was founder and head of the Energy Program of the East-West Center in Honolulu, where he still holds appointment as Adjunct Senior Fellow in Environment and Health after moving to Berkeley in 1995. He serves on a number of national and international scientific advisory committees including the Global Energy Assessment, National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Science and Climate, the Executive Committee for WHO Air Quality Guidelines, and the International Comparative Risk Assessment. He participated along with many other scientists in the IPCC's 3rd and 4th assessments and thus shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He holds visiting professorships in India and China and bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley. In 1997, he was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2009, he received the Heinz Prize in Environment.

Professor Ogawa will present recent work on declining fertility and the rising cost of children in East Asian countries, using measures of investment per child from the National Transfer Accounts analysis of public and private investments in children's education and health. He and his co-authors also study whether the amount of resources allocated to children has been crowded out by the increasing amount of resources needed for support of the elderly in Japan and other aging societies.

Naohiro Ogawa is professor of population economics at the Nihon University College of Economics and Advanced Research Institute for Sciences and Humanities (ARISH), Tokyo. He is also Director of the Nihon University Population Research Institute (NUPRI). Over the past thirty years he has written extensively on population and development in Japan and other Asian countries. More specifically, his research has focused on issues such as socioeconomic impacts of low fertility and rapid aging, modeling demographics and social security-related variables, as well as policies related to fertility, employment, marriage, child care, retirement and care for the elderly. His recent work includes measuring intergenerational transfers. He has published numerous academic papers in internationally recognized journals. In collaboration with other scholars he has also edited several journals and books among which the most recent one is Population Aging, Intergenerational Transfers and the Macroeconomy (2007). Naohiro Ogawa has served on a number of councils, committees and advisory boards set up by the Japanese government and international organizations such as the Asian Population Association, the IUSSP and the WHO. He is currently an associate member of the Science Council of Japan.

Liz Carlson is a 2010-2011 pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL and a PhD candidate in the department of Political Science at UCLA (to be completed in 2011). While at CDDRL, she will work on her dissertation which uses experimental and survey methods to investigate whether ethnic voting in Uganda is fundamentally expressive or has its roots in the experience or expectation of ethnic patronage. She will also work on projects on the distribution of electrification in Kenya and a panel study on the impact of new oil on democratic consolidation in Ghana and Uganda. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, among other sources.

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He serves on the boards of the Meta-Activism Project (MAP) and Digital Democracy. Patrick was previously the co-director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's (HHI) Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. He has consulted for several international organizations on numerous crisis mapping and early warning projects in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Patrick is completing his PhD at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His dissertation focuses on the the impact of information and communication technologies on the balance of power between repressive regimes and popular movements. He has an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an alum of the Sante Fe Institute's (SFI) Complex Systems Summer School.

The world watches closely as China, the world's top energy consumer, announces its plans for the next five years: a series of comprehensive economic reform, development, and transformation guidelines that will shape how the country - and to a large extent the world - uses energy and addresses climate change.

How will China balance economic growth with environmental concerns? How will it manage its transformation from an investment-based and export-led economy to one having a robust domestic demand, all the while ensuring energy efficiency and sustainability? And what role will China play in developing renewable and clean tech solutions for the rest of the world? These are questions that have a profound impact on the world energy and climate landscape for years to come.

In this EWG discussion, we will highlight some of the proposed energy, efficiency and climate goals and policies, look back on China's progress and challenges in achieving its last five-year plan, and consider broader implications on the road ahead.

Northeast Asian countries share a tumultuous history from the last century. But South Korea stands alone in that it has launched a comprehensive national investigation to take a more balanced look at its tortuous modern history and finally give voice to the many thousands of people who perished in state-sponsored political killings but whose stories have long been silenced.

In the past several years, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has led an effort to dig into this grim hidden history. It has confirmed dozens of mass political killings during the Korean War—summary executions of leftists and supposed sympathizers, including women and children, who were shot and dumped into makeshift trenches, mine shafts or the sea. Grave by mass grave, investigators and victims' families have unearthed the skeletons and buried truths. No longer shackled by the repression of free speech, victims of the Communist witch-hunts by the post-war military governments in Seoul also began speaking out. The Commission investigated their cases and concluded that state interrogators used torture to extract false confessions from the victims. Its findings led courts to reopen the cases, reverse the old convictions and clear the victims' names, sometimes posthumously. But the Commission's work has also reawakened the painful memories and stoked political controversy in South Korea. It exposed the deep-running ideological divide, reminding South Koreans of the long shadow the Korean War still casts over their society.

Mr. Sang-Hun Choe, whose Pulitzer-winning journalism identified and helped spur the desire of South Koreans to revisit their recent history, has written extensively about the Commission's investigations.

For years, Japanese economists and public officials described regional development in East Asia as a unitary thing, something akin to a flock of flying geese -- with Japan as the lead goose, transferring capital and technology to its slower neighbors. But times have changed. For one thing, China is now the biggest bird in East Asia. So what has happened to the traditional "flying geese" pattern of development, and how has this impacted Japan?

Walter Hatch is an associate professor of government and the director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights at Colby College in Maine. He is the author of Asia's Flying Geese: How Regionalization Shapes Japan (Cornell UP, 2010), co-author of Asia in Japan's Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance (Cambridge UP, 1996), and the author and co-author of numerous articles on the politics and political economy of East Asia, especially Japan and China. He is now editing a book about NGOs and civil society in China, and working on his own new book about the way in which war memories continue to haunt international relations in East Asia. He received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2000.

Larry May is a political philosopher who has written on conceptual issues in collective and shared responsibility, as well as normative issues in international criminal law. He has also written on professional ethics and on the Just War tradition.  

In addition to being W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, he is also a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University in Canberra.  He has previously taught at Washington University, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin, and University of Connecticut. 

He has published 25 books and 100 articles. His five most recent authored books have been published by Cambridge University Press, including: "Genocide: A Normative Account" (2010) and "Global Justice and Due Process" (2011). 

His authored books have won awards from the American Philosophical Association, the North American Society for Social Philosophy, the International Association of Penal Law, the American Society of International Law, and the American Library Association. His writings have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Serbian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Professor May has lectured extensively around the world, including, in the last two years, keynote or plenary addresses at conferences in: Oxford, St. Andrews, Oslo, Helsinki, Krakow, Belgrade, Bielefeld, The Hague, Delft, Leiden, Montreal, Victoria, Toronto, Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney.  

He has served on the board of directors of the American Philosophical Association and is past president of AMINTAPHIL, the American section of the International Society for Philosophy of Law. In addition, he has occasionally taken a criminal appeals case, and has worked on several death penalty cases, in the United States.