Co-sponsored with the Bush China Foundation

This event is part of Shorenstein APARC's spring webinar series "The United States in the Biden Era: Views from Asia."

The coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the importance of investing in population health domestically and globally, and of public-private collaboration in innovation for health goals--from technology for healthy aging to poverty alleviation and addressing other social determinants of health disparities. China, as the first health system to experience the devastation of COVID-19 and to rebound from pandemic control, offers lessons relevant beyond its borders. What can we draw from China's progress on healthcare development and its aims for innovation and public-private collaboration? In this webinar, Chinese practitioners and experts from academia and government will share their views on post-pandemic health policy and draw lessons for cooperation in global health. Scholars who have worked in and studied both the PRC and US health systems will discuss the challenges facing both—from strengthening risk protection and aligning incentives for quality improvement, to promoting goals articulated in the US’ 5th iteration of population health ‘ten-year plans’ (“Healthy People 2030”) and the PRC’s more recent “Healthy China 2030” and broader 14th Five Year Plan. What will it take to implement these ambitious goals? What is the linkage between health and China's foreign policy objectives and its place in the world? PRC experts share their views in this webinar co-hosted by Stanford’s Asia Health Policy Program and the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations.

Panelists:

Ying Cao is the China country director at Vital Strategies, where she leads the team to strengthen local public health systems through Vital Strategies’ Resolve to Save Lives’ global cardiovascular health initiative, tobacco control program, road safety program and evidence-based communication and policy advocacy. Dr. Cao brings over 15 years of experience in designing, leading, implementing and monitoring projects in the field of health and nutrition. She has extensive experience managing complex programs in China, with a specific focus on government and community-based programs to address unbalanced resource allocations to underprivileged areas.  Prior to joining Vital Strategies, Dr. Cao served as the director of Program Operations in Save the Children in China. Prior to Save the Children, she spent six years working in health and development within the non-profit sector and five years as a senior physician specializing in diagnostic ultrasound at Shanghai Ruijin Hospital.  Dr. Cao holds a master’s degree in public health nutrition from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and a bachelor’s degree in medicine from Shanghai Second Medical University.

Gordon Liu is a leading expert on health and development economics, health policy reform, and pharmaceutical economics in China. He is a key figure in Chinese health care reform efforts and sits on the China State Council Health Reform Advisory Commission. Dr. Liu currently serves as an associate editor for Health Economics and China Economic Quarterly (CEQ) journals and was a coeditor of Value in Health, the official journal of ISPOR, and the editor-in-chief of the China Journal of Pharmaceutical Economics. He is president of the Chinese Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research and served as president of the Chinese Economists Society (CES). Prior to joining Peking University, Dr. Liu was a tenured associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an assistant professor at the University of Southern California.

 Dr. Xiaofeng Liang received his medical degree at Shanxi Medical University in 1984 and a Master's degree in Public Health from the College of Public Health of Peking University of Medicine in 1995. From 1996 to 1998, he worked as a visiting scholar at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, College of Medicine, University of Miami, Florida, USA.  After his return to China, he held the positions of Vice-Director of Epidemic Prevention Station of Gansu Province (1999-2000), Vice-Director of Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology, CAPM (2000-2001), and the Director of Immunization Program (NIP) of China CDC (2001-2011), and deputy director of China CDC.  He is the winner of the 2013 Wu Jieping-Paul Janson Medicine and Pharmacy award and has been recognized as an outstanding contribution expert of the Ministry of Health China 2011-2012. He received the special allowance subsided by the State Council of China in 2010.  Since 2008, he has been a member of the Global Strategy Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization of the WHO. He served as the Vice Secretary-general of the Chinese Foundation of Hepatitis Prevention (2005). He was a member of the Chinese Committee Advisory of Immunization Practice, the Chinese Association of Community Health and the Branch of Biological Products, and the Chinese Association of Prevention Medicine. He was a member of the National Polio Eradication Certification Committee and a member of the National Measles Elimination Verification Committee.  His research in public health led to advances in immunization and vaccine-preventable disease control in China. As the principal investigator on the Key Programs for Science and Technology Development of China since 2004, his main scientific research has focused on the epidemiology regularity and prevention and control countermeasures of Hepatitis B. His current research is focused on non-communicable disease control and nutrition and tobacco control. He is the author of more than 30 articles in national and international journals, such as The Lancet and, The New England Journal of Medicine.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/5616166186207/WN_Zdzl0PrwR7CXSPoASOs5Xg

 

About the Event: Conventional wisdom on proxy warfare exclusively focuses on explaining governments’ provision of military, logistical, and financial support to rebel groups involved in conflict abroad. In reality, foreign militant groups play a much larger role in these partnerships than recognized: foreign militants often provide government partners with intelligence, logistical support, access to their military infrastructure, and send elite units to train and supplement their state partner’s troops. Because armed non-state actors are smaller and face greater difficulties accessing resources, the fact that they provide any type of support – let alone deploying their forces to conduct joint combat operations with state armed forces abroad – is puzzling. In this presentation, I provide insights into the strategic benefits that foreign militants receive from supporting states, identify factors that influence the types of support foreign militants provide to government partners once the decision to provide support has been made, and highlight how foreign militants can constrain and influence their government partners’ future behavior. To do so, I conduct an in-depth examination of the overtime trends in the various types of support that Shia paramilitary groups from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan provided to the Syrian regime and Russian forces throughout the course of the decade-long Syrian conflict.

 

 

About the Speaker: Melissa Carlson is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for International Security and Cooperation’s Middle East Initiative. She received her PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley. Her research examines cooperation between states and non-state actors in conflict, and her book manuscript explains variations in the types of support that governments and foreign militants provide to each other. Previously, Melissa has worked with the International Organization of Migration’s Missions in Jordan and Iraq to examine relations between refugees, host governments, and aid organizations.

* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Seminar Recording:  https://youtu.be/t4xteN7N99U

 

About the Event: In The State from Below, we seek to understand democracy through ground-up knowledge of the state. We use a new technology and civic infrastructure, Portals, to initiate conversations about policing in communities where these forms of state action are concentrated.  Portals are virtual chambers where people in disparate communities can converse as if in the same room.  Based on over 850 recorded and transcribed conversations across fourteen neighborhoods in five cities – the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of the police to date – we analyze patterns in political discourse.  We reveal four currents that challenge liberal-democratic framings of political life:  that an arrangement of distorted responsiveness characterizes the relationship between policed communities and the state; that the political desire of policed communities is not for greater engagement and responsiveness but for political recognition – to be known by the state; and that in contrast to prevailing wisdom about uninformed electorates, these citizens have too much knowledge of and too little power vis-à-vis state representatives.  Finally, we observe among policed communities an “ethics of aversion” in their political responses, a belief that power is best achieved by receding from state institutions in the short term and forging their own collective, community autonomy in the long term. At a broader level, we observe that it is not exclusion from democratic institutions that characterizes political inequality in our time, but inclusion in what we call racial authoritarianism, and the experience of misrecognition that results.

 

 

About the Speaker: Vesla Mae Weaver is the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and a 2016-17 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. 

She has contributed to scholarly debates around the persistence of racial inequality, colorism in the United States, the causes and consequences of the dramatic rise in prisons and police power for race-class subjugated communities. She is co-author with Amy Lerman of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control, the first large-scale empirical study of what the tectonic shifts in incarceration and policing meant for political and civic life in communities where it was concentrated. Weaver is also the co-author of Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (with J. Hochschild and T. Burch). She is at work on a new book, The State From Below, based on the largest archive of policing narratives using an innovative civic infrastructure called Portals (https://www.portalspolicingproject.com).

This event is part of the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2020-21 Colloquium series "Health, medicine, and longevity: Exploring public and private roles"

We will hear from distinguished speakers on public-private collaborations in accelerating improvements in palliative care in Singapore and parts of South Asia, as well as informal care and technology-enabled self-management of chronic illness among Asian-Americans. Joining us from Singapore is Mr. Laurence Lian, Chairman of the Lien Foundation, sharing evidence about the impact of the Foundation’s work on end of life care, collaborating with the public sector in palliative care training, improving access to pain medication, and other initiatives. Dr. Ranak Trivedi of Stanford will discuss her work to address the stress management needs of patients and their families and to improve culturally concordant care for South Asian women with breast cancer and their caregivers.

Speakers:

Laurence Lien is Co-Chair and CEO of the Asia Philanthropy Circle (APC), a membership-based platform for Asian philanthropists to exchange, learn and collaborate.  Laurence is also the Chairman of Lien Foundation, a family foundation that has become well-regarded for its forward-thinking and radical approach in the fields of education, eldercare and the environment, as well as the Chairman of Lien AID, the foundation humanitarian arm for enabling sustainable access to clean water and sanitation for Asia’s rural poor.

Laurence was the CEO of the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre in Singapore from 2008-2014, and was the Chairman of the Community Foundation of Singapore from 2013-2019.  Prior to his work in the non-profit sector, Laurence served in the Singapore Government.  Laurence holds degrees from Oxford University, the National University of Singapore, and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.  He was also a Nominated Member of Parliament in Singapore from 2012-2014. 

Dr. Ranak Trivedi is a clinical health psychologist, assistant professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University and an investigator at the Center for Innovation to Implementation at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She completed her PhD in clinical health psychology at Duke University. Her NIH, VA and foundation-funded studies are focused on improving outcomes for Veterans with mental health conditions, and improving the self-management of serious illnesses by enhancing the collaboration and coping of patients and their caregivers. Her studies have provided insights into how caregivers and chronically and seriously patients collaborate around their mutual health, understanding the impact of their interpersonal relationship on chronic illness self-management, and the individual, dyadic, and systems-level barriers that they encounter. These insights have been used to develop two technology-enabled dyadic self-management programs to address the stress management needs of both patients and their framily. Dr. Trivedi is a Sojourns Scholars Leader, and she is using this platform to improving culturally concordant care for South Asian women with breast cancer and their caregivers. Dr. Trivedi was selected for the year long Leadership Institute for Women in Psychology hosted by American Psychological Association in 2020. Dr. Trivedi serves as the Director of Training and Education at the Center for Innovation to Implementation at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, site PI and Training Director for the Elizabeth Dole National Center of Excellence for Veteran and Caregiver Research, and the Director of Caregiving and Family Systems at the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education (CARE).

China Chats with Stanford Faculty

The Rise of Robots in China with Professor Hongbin Li

China’s production and adoption of robotic technology have accelerated rapidly in recent years, surpassing Japan, US, and Germany. Stanford professor Hongbin Li and a team of scholars draw on multi-year field research data to show fresh insights into China’s aggressive push into automation—specifically, the increasing use of robots—to maintain its status as the “world’s factory.” His analysis offers an unprecedented look at what’s happening at the factory level, and fresh insight into how rising labor costs, an aging population and government policies are reshaping Chinese manufacturing.

In this Stanford alumni event, Hongbin Li, co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, was joined by Scott Rozelle, co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who moderated a discussion about the major themes of the research. 

Watch the event recording:

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About the Speakers:

Hongbin Li is the Co-Director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions (SCCEI) and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). 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 also founded and served as the Executive Associate Director of the China Social and Economic Data Center at Tsinghua University. 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.

 

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 China Center for Agricultural Policy in Peking University. In recent years Rozelle spends most of his time co-directing the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). 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 Premier Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner. 

 

About this Event:  American political observers express increasing concern about affective polarization (i.e., partisans’ resentment toward political opponents). We advance debates about America’s partisan divisions by comparing affective polarization in the USA over the past twenty-five years with affective polarization in nineteen other Western publics. We conclude that American affective polarization is not extreme in comparative perspective, although Americans’ dislike of partisan opponents has increased more rapidly since the mid 1990s than in most other Western publics. We then show that affective polarization is more intense when unemployment and inequality are high; when political elites clash over cultural issues such as immigration and national identity; and in countries with majoritarian electoral institutions. Our findings situate American partisan resentment and hostility in comparative perspective and illuminate correlates of affective polarization that are difficult to detect when examining the American case in isolation.

 

About the Speaker: 

Noam Gidron is an assistant professor (lecturer) at the Department of Political Science and the Joint Program in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His research interests lie at the intersection of political behavior and political economy. 

This seminar has been cancelled. Please join us for our next seminar in the series with Professor Albert Park on April 27, 2021.

Controlling the Narrative with Professor Joseph Piotroski, Stanford University

This seminar provides an overview of corporate news reporting in China, with a focus on understanding the political and market-based incentives behind Chinese newspapers' biased coverage of China's listed companies. And, given these prevailing incentives, we will explore how politicians in China use the Party's flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily, to coordinate the reporting of corporate news in China.

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About the Speaker

Joseph Piotroski is the Robert K. Jaedicke Professor of Accounting at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and a Senior Fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER). Professor Piotroski earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999, an MBA from Indiana University in 1994, a BS in Accounting from the University of Illinois in 1989, and worked as a tax consultant for Coopers and Lybrand in Chicago. His research focuses on corporate transparency, governance, and regulation in a global context. His current research examines the impact of legal, political, and regulatory forces on capital market behavior and corporate decision-making, most notably in China and other emerging economies. His research has been published in scholarly journals in the areas of accounting, finance, and economics, and his research on value investing has been frequently cited in the popular press and is widely used in practice. 

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Seminar Series Moderators:

Scott Rozelle holds the Helen Farnsworth Endowed Professorship at Stanford University and is Senior Fellow in the Food Security and Environment Program and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies. 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). In recent years Rozelle spends most of his time co-directing the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). 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 James Liang Director of the China Program at the Stanford King Center on Global Development, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). 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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Register Here

Register once to receive the Zoom meeting link that will be used for all lectures in this series.

About this Event: There is no shortage of scholarship on the rise of strategic experts—campaign strategists, consultants, and the like—in Western politics. Some accounts treat the rise of the strategist as an effect of the functional demands of party competition, linked with technological change and the accumulation of political data; others see the rise of the strategist as a symptom of a larger process of party decline. In this seminar I'll present a different argument: the rise of the strategist was linked with a turn, especially on the left, toward prioritizing markets over constituents. This argument is built on an "inside-out" (or refraction) analysis that traces the rise and fall of dominant party experts, attending to the link between their social location and their conceptions of the economic world, democratic politics and experts' public roles.  I will conclude by outlining a new project that builds on this work, tentatively titled Strategy and Democracy.

 

About the Speaker: Stephanie Mudge is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis and co-editor of a new book series, Cambridge Studies in Historical Sociology. Her recent book, Leftism Reinvented (2018, Harvard University Press), is a cross-national study of how Western parties of the mainstream left shifted from socialism, to Keynesianism, to neoliberalism over the course of the 20th Century. She has published on a range of topics including neoliberalism, the sociology of parties and European technocratic expertise in venues including the Socio-Economic Review, the American Journal of Sociology and the Annual Review of Sociology. She is presently developing projects on the trajectory of "independence" in the case of the European Central Bank and the rise of strategists in American politics.

About this Event: In this book project, we walk in the footsteps of the pioneers of the nonviolent approach to provide a reinterpretation of the histories of the great movements of the twentieth century from a game theoretic perspective, bringing to bear a host of new quantitative analyses to understand the challenges they faced, when they were successful at overcoming them and why. We develop a simple conceptual framework for understanding the strategies available to both the leaders and the followers of political movements, the media and outside audiences, as well as the regimes that they seek to influence, and how these decisions interact. We use this framework to highlight the presence of three key tensions that exist in many political movements.

These tensions include: those between the allure of violence and the seeming pedestrianism of nonviolence, between the need for numbers and the need for focus, and between organizations that depend on grassroots mobilization versus hierarchies and leadership. 

In light of the framework and new quantitative evidence, we then retrace and re-examine the decisions of the participants of the Indian Independence Movement in each of their three great nonviolent drives for change---the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s, the Civil Disobedience Movement of the 1930s and the Quit India Movement of the 1940s---and how they succeeded or failed in addressing these tensions. At each step, we also discuss both grand strategy and the effectiveness of local tactics. We next compare the Indian experience with the movements that came after, including the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Arab Spring and recent protests around the world. Finally, we draw on what we have learned to suggest ideas for better implement nonviolent protests today.

 

About the Speaker:

Along with being a Senior Fellow at FSI, Saumitra Jha is an associate professor of political economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and, by courtesy, of economics and of political science, and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. He is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In 2020–21, he is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

 

About the Event:

Even in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts and flip flops, setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world and some venture capitalists refuse to invest in any company run by someone wearing a suit.

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants who dressed like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet and fur were reserved for the nobility and ballooning pants called “trunk hose” could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States and in the 1940s the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast.

 

About the Speaker:

Richard Thompson Ford is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He writes about law, social and cultural issues and race relations and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, CNN and Slate.   He is the author of the New York Times notable books The Race Card and Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality.  He has appeared on The Colbert Report, The Rachel Maddow Show, andThe Dylan Rattigan Show.  He is a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the board of the Authors Guild Foundation.