Last year the Convention on the Future of Europe proposed a draft EU constitution. The draft was to be approved at an Inter-Governmental Conference last December, but approval was postponed due to disagreements on voting rules in the Council of Ministers. This seminar evaluates the draft constitution. On February 25 Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, Vice-President of the Convention, will give a lecture about the prospects for its adoption. A separate announcement for that lecture will follow.

In this talk Professor Bell will highlight the dangers of implementing Western models of democracy in Southeast and Northeast Asia and argue for ways of varying these models to ensure a better fit with local contexts, including local experience and knowledge. He will begin by drawing on the example of foreign domestic workers in Singapore and Hong Kong to question the Western ideal of ?equal rights for all.? He will then offer a model of democracy ?with Confucian characteristics? intended to remedy some of the limitations of Western-style democracy in East Asian contexts. The overall aim of the talk will be to show the advantages?indeed, the necessity?of taking local knowledge and local traditions into account when proposing political reforms for East Asia that are not only morally desirable but politically feasible as well. Daniel A. Bell is the author of East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia (Princeton, 2000) and Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford, 1993) and co-editor of Confucianism for the Modern World (Cambridge, 2003) and The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge, 1999). Currently an associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong, he has held teaching or fellowship positions at the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, and Princeton University. His degrees include a D.Phil. from Oxford and a BA from McGill.

Drawing on newly released data from the Index of Silicon Valley 2004, Doug Henton will discuss the impact of global economic e-structuring on the Valley's jobs. The talk will examine industry and occupational trends in Silicon Valley. The focus will be on what kinds of jobs are most likely to stay in the Valley.

Doug Henton has more than thirty years of experience in economic and community development. He is nationally recognized for his work in bringing industry, government, education, research, and community leaders together around specific collaborative projects to improve regional competitiveness.

He serves as national coordinator for the John W. Gardner Academy of the Alliance for Regional Stewardship, which is a national network of leaders from over firty regions in the United States. He was project manager for the start-up of the Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network. Doug is a consultant to the California Economic Strategy Panel, California's first state economic strategy process linked to industry clusters and regions. He has served as advisor on regional efforts around the United States, including in San Diego, Sacramento, Massachusetts, Chicago, and others.

Doug founded Collaborative Economics in July 1993 after a decade as assistant director of SRI International's Center for Economic Competitiveness. At SRI, Doug directed strategy projects in diverse regions, including Austin (Texas), Hong Kong, Japan, and China.

With colleagues Kim Walesh and John Melville, Doug has written Grassroots Leaders for the New Economy: How Civic Entrepreneurs Are Building Prosperous Communities (1997) and Civic Revolutionaries: Igniting the Passion for Change in America's Communities (2003). Doug holds a bachelors degree in political science and economics from Yale University and a masters of public policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Chris Berry traces the development and diversification of independent documentary film making in China from videotape to DV since its inception in the early 1990s, and its role in the succession from socialist realism to "on-the-spot realism." Chris Berry received his Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from UCLA in 1999. He taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne for ten years prior to coming to the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include Chinese cinema, Korean cinema, and the role of the cinema in the production of individual and collective identities. He is the author of A Bit on the Side: East-West Topographies of Desire, the editor of Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, the co-coordinator of The House of Kim Ki-Young, and the co-editor of The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O'Rourke's "The Good Woman Of Bangkok." This seminar is part of the Winter Colloquium Series on "Globalizing Asian Cultures."

Born in Shanghai in 1970, Mian Mian first began writing at the age of sixteen. She dropped out secondary school in Shanghai in 1987 and two years later went on her own to Shenzhen, a boomtown in the southern province of Guangdong. She spent five years there delving into society's seedier side before returning to Shanghai, where she continues to reside.

After Mian Mian came home to Shanghai, she started writing again, and by 1997 her short stories and novellas were appearing in Xiaoshuo Jie (Fiction World) and several other widely circulated Chinese literary magazines. The milieu depicted in Mian Mian's work is drawn from her life experience, and many of her fictional characters are also inspired by the subculture she moved in, a subculture peopled by aspiring singers, drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, gangsters, the mentally ill, slackers, and self-proclaimed artists. She became the first Chinese writer to describe drugs. Her style, characteristic of "cruel youth" and her simultaneously hip and introspective attitude toward self-reflection quickly attracted a large following of young readers. In July 1997, with the backing of the New Century Publishing House in Hong Kong, Mian Mian published her first collection of short stories, La La La. Mian Mian's first novel, Tang (Candy), was published simultaneously by Zhongguo Xiju Publishing House and the prestigious literary magazine Shouhuo (Harvest) in January 2000. This novel created a stir in China's literary world and quickly became a bestseller, with a large number of pirated copies produced and sold throughout the country. The publication of Candy was soon followed by the publication of two more collections of short stories, Every Good Child Deserves Candy (Huashan Publishers) and Acid Lover (Shanghai Sanlian Publishing House). In April 2000, the Chinese government banned Candy. Shortly thereafter, the rest of Mian Mian's books were also banned.

Candy has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese. La La La has been translated into German and Italian.

In addition to writing, Mian Mian is also a music promoter, and the only female dance party organizer in China. Following on her experience working as a DJ at Shanghai's Cotton Club in 1996, Mian Mian began bringing rock shows and DJs into clubs in a number of Chinese cities starting in 1997. She has planned numerous large-scale dance parties, where internationally renowned DJs have performed. Her most successful parties include two parties with Paul Oakenfold -- inShanghai in 1999 and at the Great Wall in 2003 -- as well as the Red Age Club party in Chengdu in 2002, a seven-day-long party where the biggest Chinese DJs performed.

In 2002, after the ban on her writing was removed, Mian Mian published Social Dance, a collection taken for the column she writes for the Hong Kong independent newspaper, Apple Daily. At that time, she also signed with the Modern Sky Record Company as her Chinese Agent. In 2003, Mian Mian started to write a column for several famous fashion magazines, marking a departure from her previous policy of shunning the mainstream media. The column focuses on personal issues, such as love relationships and ways of fighting depression. Mian Mian also wrote the screenplay and acted in the film Shanghai Panic which showed in a number of international film festivals.

This program is part of the Winter Colloquium Series, "Globalizing Asian Cultures."