The Henan bank protest, the Evergrande crisis, and the ongoing local government debt issue in China all point to one thing: there’s something wrong with the country’s banking system. Beijing needs to better regulate the numerous small banks that are now intimately intertwined with much of China's economic challenges. 

They’re working on it, but there’s no easy solution.

Adam Y. Liu will tell us the origins of the dilemma, the increasing role of small banks in China and local development, and what tradeoffs China will likely have to make to prevent a run-away banking crisis.

Speaker

Adam Y. Liu is assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His main research interests include Chinese politics and political economy. He is currently working on a book project that explores how central-local politics drove the formation, expansion, and operation of what he calls a "state-owned market" in China's banking sector. The project is based on his dissertation, which won the 2020 BRICS Economic Research Award. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral associate with the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at Yale University. 

Experts from academia and the policy world will discuss the ongoing human rights crisis in North Korea, with a focus on the roles of the South Korean and United States governments in addressing this issue. The conference will also explore the human rights implications of North Korea’s response to the massive coronavirus outbreak in the country as well as China’s complicity in North Korea’s human rights abuses. Against this backdrop, the event will emphasize the role that the South Korean and United States special envoys for North Korean human rights can play in engaging the North Korean regime on human rights issues. This is especially important given that the Biden administration still has yet to fill the position of a Special Envoy on North Korean Human Rights—a position mandated by the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004.

Agenda

10:30 – 10:40 AM PT | Welcoming Remarks
Victor Cha, Senior Vice President for Asia and Korea Chair, CSIS; Vice Dean and D.S. Song KF Professor of Government, Georgetown University
Gi-Wook Shin, Director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, Stanford University

10:40 – 11:50 AM PT | SESSION I : The Role of Congress and U.S. Government in North Korean Human Rights
Panelists:
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), Co-Chair, Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission; Ranking Member, Congressional-Executive Commission on China
Frank Wolf, Commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom

Moderator:
Gi-Wook Shin, Director of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, Stanford University

11:50 AM – 12:00 PM PT | Break

12:00 – 1:30 PM PT | SESSION II : The Role of Special Envoys in the North Korean Human Rights Issue
Panelists:
Ambassador Shin-wha Lee, Ambassador of International Cooperation on North Korean Human Rights, Republic of Korea
Ambassador Robert King, Senior Adviser (non-resident), Korea Chair, CSIS; Former U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights

Moderator:
Victor Cha, Senior Vice President for Asia and Korea Chair, CSIS; Vice Dean and D.S. Song KF Professor of Government, Georgetown University

This signature event will be co-hosted with the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS)

This event is part of APARC’s 2022 Fall webinar series, Asian Perspectives on the US-China Competition.

With rising Sino-U.S. tensions, South Korea has increasingly been in a difficult position to choose policy decisions that may tilt it towards one hegemon or the other. The new Yoon Administration signaled its strengthened alliance with the U.S. by attending the NATO summit and joining the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), but there are concerns that such actions run the risks of potential economic backlash from China. With increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, what diplomatic and economic options are left for South Korea? How does the domestic political environment such as the rise of anti-China sentiments and the return of pro-alliance conservatives back to power influence South Korea’s outlook on international affairs? Former South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwan, in conversation with Professor Gi-Wook Shin, will discuss the South Korean perspective on the rising U.S.-China rivalry.

 Myung Hwan Yu, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of South Korea, also served as Ambassador to Israel, Japan and Philippines, and as Minister of the Permanent Mission to UN. His experience extends across a broad range of issues in international relations including trade, security and nuclear negotiations with North Korea. After his retirement from the foreign ministry, Ambassador Yu was board chairman of the Sejong University in Seoul, visiting scholar in the Korea Program at APARC; and he is currently a senior advisor at Kim & Chang Law Office.

This event is made possible by generous support from the Korea Foundation and other friends of the Korea Program.

SCCEI Fall Seminar Series 

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022      11:00 am -12:15 pm Pacific Time

Goldman Room E401, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way | Zoom Meeting 

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Sovereign-Biopolitics and Tobacco’s Annihilation of China's Male State

This talk takes up a historical and theoretical puzzle: how has it come to be that nation states, which are run by men, are reputedly biopolitical in design yet facilitate their male citizens' exposure to the greatest cause of preventable death today. The analytical answer offered centers around a phenomenon long ago dubbed the pharmakon, something that simultaneously heals and poisons. The story told here is a smoky one, wafting across territorial boundaries, epochs, big business plays, and an uncanny cast of characters. 

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About the Speaker

 Matthew Kohrman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and a SCCEI Faculty Affiliate. His research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.

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Seminar Series Moderators

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Most recently, Rozelle's research focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition in China. In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner. 

 

Hongbin Li is the Co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

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A NOTE ON LOCATION

This seminar is a hybrid event. Please join us in person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing, or join remotely via Zoom.

Questions? Contact Heather Rahimi at hrahimi@stanford.edu

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Following the launch of his new book, America's Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition, Wyne joins the China Program’s Author Series to discuss how the United States must avoid complacency and consternation in appraising China and Russia. Rather than attempting the unfeasible—countering their current and future initiatives and forestalling subsequent provocations—Wyne argues that Washington should formulate a more practical, creative, and sustainable foreign policy that can advance U.S. national interests regardless of what steps Beijing and Moscow take, and that recent competitive missteps give the U.S. space to undertake this task.

For more information about America's Great-Power Opportunity or to purchase a copy, please click here.

Speaker

Ali Wyne is a Senior Analyst at the Eurasia Group’s Global Macro Geopolitics practice and Author of the brand-new book America’s Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition.

Negative Behavioral Transmission

Behavior change programs, including much of early education curricula, assume the positive transmission of behavior from one context to another. We randomize a hand hygiene edutain- ment program in schools in Bangladesh to trace school-to-home transmission of handwashing behavior and randomize the proportion of students who receive handwashing resources at home to track home-to-school transmission. We find that children induced to wash more at home exhibit less washing at school. Likewise, children induced to wash more at school wash less at home. This negative transmission spills over to other household members and non-school days, such that the cumulative impact of school edutainment on total washing is negative. Our results are consistent with the mechanisms of crowd-out, cue-based habit formation, and ‘reverse’ vertical transmission of behavior. They highlight an unintended consequence of behavior change interventions, like those often implemented in education, that presume complementarities in behavior across contexts but evaluate effects only at the site of intervening. 

Reshma Hussam, PhD, is an assistant professor of business administration in the Business, Government and International Economy Unit at Harvard Business School, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a faculty affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD).

Her research explores questions at the intersection of development and behavioral economics, with research in three areas: migration, health, and finance.  Her most recent work engages refugee populations including the Rohingya in Bangladesh, examining the psychosocial value of employment in contexts of mass unemployment, the role of home in migration decisionmaking, and refugee preferences for repatriation, integration, and resettlement. In her work in health, which involves field experiments across South Asia, she considers the puzzle of the ubiquitously low adoption of low cost, high return goods, behaviors, and technologies in the developing world, exploring the role of learning and habit formation in behavior change.