Five visiting scholars with expertise on Southeast Asia will spend varying portions of the academic year 2008-09 in residence at Stanford. Shorenstein APARC and the Southeast Asia Forum will host four of them: three were selected under the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Initiative on Southeast Asia. and one is a recipient of a 2008-09 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. A fifth scholar will be on campus as a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution.

The five are John Ciorciari, Joel S. Kahn, Mark Thompson, Angie Ngoc Tran, and Christian von Luebke.

John Ciorciari spent the 2007-08 academic year at Stanford as a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC. He finished a book that examines how Southeast Asian states have "hedged" their relations with the United States and China.

Dr. Ciorciari will spend upcoming academic year at Stanford as a Hoover Institution National Fellow. In that capacity he plans to expand his research to include the international relations of India.

Joel S. Kahn is a professor of anthropology (emeritus) in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. He will be at Stanford for the first half of October 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Lecturer.

While at Stanford Professor Kahn will give three public lectures. Their tentative titles are: "A Southeast Asian Modernity?"; "Empires, States, and Political Identities in (Pen)insular Southeast Asia"; and "Religion, Reform, Science, and Secularity." Details including dates, times, and venues will be posted as they become known.

Mark Thompson is a professor of political science at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He will be in residence at Stanford in Winter and Spring 2009 as the 2009 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

While at Stanford, Prof. Thompson will pursue a book project on "Late Democratization in Pacific Asia." The book will question the claim that democratization in Pacific Asia (including Southeast Asia) has been driven by economic growth and offer an alternative perspective. He will present the results of his project in a public lecture in the spring of 2009. Date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). She will be in residence at Stanford for the second half of November 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

In a public lecture on November 17, 2008 (Mobilized Workers vs. Morphing Capital: Challenging Global Supply Chains in Vietnam), Professor Tran will present the results of her study of labor-capital relations in Vietnam and how the different national origins of investors and owners affect workers' conditions, consciousness, and activism. Details including time and venue will be posted as they become known.

Christian von Luebke was a research fellow in Tokyo at Waseda University's Institute for Global Political Economy in 2007-08 following receipt of his 2007 PhD in public policy and governance at the Australian National University. He will be at Stanford for the 2008-09 academic year as a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow.

During his residence Dr. von Luebke will pursue a research and writing project on "Good Governance in Transition: Explaining Local Policy Variations in Indonesia, China, and the Philippines." He will give a public lecture on the results of his project in winter or spring 2009. The date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

For the past ten years, Japan has undergone aggressive, government-driven reforms aimed at changing its financial systems, labor markets, and corporate governance institutions. Faced with the challenges of globalization and an ageing population, Japan undertook these reforms to regain its former competitiveness. What remains uncertain, however, is whether these reforms will also be effective in creating an environment
that is more favorable to entrepreneurship and innovation. If the reforms are effective, at what pace, and in what shape will new firms emerge? Will Japan’s system mirror the institutions that have evolved in regions such as Silicon Valley, or will it develop into a new framework of innovation?

The persistent decline in Japanese asset values during the 1990s engendered many policy and legal responses. Among these was a series of business policy and associated legal reforms intended to foster the creation of new companies, new industries, and new financial institutions. Starting in 1997, these reforms included changes in how firms are formed. For example, the capital required to start a stock-issuing firm was reduced from ten million yen to a mere one yen. The yugen kaisha—a secondary form of Japanese company—was also abolished and the limited liability partnership created instead. Holding companies were allowed, mergers were deregulated, treasury shares were authorized, and the liability of company directors was limited.

Additional reforms were promulgated to encourage new forms of financial intermediation. Tax benefits created for “angel” investors, foreign venture capitalists, foreign private equity, and foreign lawyers became common. Purchase of shares with shares, triangular mergers, and repurchase of shares were all allowed. Moreover, several new stock exchanges were created expressly for relatively new companies.

Corporate governance laws were also revised. For one, Japanese firms may now use U.S.-style board of director committees, with an upper limit placed on directors’ liabilities. Japanese auditors are now required to be outsiders, and consolidated accounting is likewise compulsory, as well as “mark-to-market” rules for financial reporting. These are just a few of the changes, all of which combine to increase transparency in Japan’s markets.

The results were noticeable. By 2006, new companies were garnering price-to-earnings ratios of greater than 100 to 1 in the new markets; the number of IPOs per year was comparable to the rate during the U.S. Internet bubble; and the mergers and acquisition market was transformed from one of the most moribund in the world to one of the most dynamic. Venture capital firms proliferated, as did new law firms, private equity firms, and foreign banks. Existing Japanese banks merged, new banks formed, and money-lending began again. Some new companies even gained sufficient liquidity and stature to turn their founders into celebrities and some of the wealthiest people in Japan. Rakuten, Mixi, ValueCommerce, and Cybird are just a few of these success stories. Japan is currently in its seventy-first month of economic expansion—the longest of the postwar period.

The future, however, is unclear. As Professor Yoko Ishikura, of Hitotsubashi University, recently observed at a SPRIE seminar at Stanford, “Japan is at a turning point and it is uncertain which direction it will choose.” For 2008, IPO valuations have returned to levels more comparable to those in the United States, and the climate for startups has moderated somewhat. New company startup rates are flat and IPO rates have recently dipped significantly. Some prominent studies of the entrepreneurial climate in various countries rank Japan among the least favorable. Many observers are impatient for more evidence of results from the reforms. It remains an open question whether Japan is being affected by the U.S. slowdown and commodity price increases, or if the country is simply retreating from it entrepreneurial gains.

In light of these developments, scholars remain curious: Are the reforms permanently changing the Japanese economy? Are the reforms sufficient to meet the challenges that Japan faces? Will the reforms be effective? Alternatively, are these reforms even desirable? SPRIE and the U.S.-Asia Technology Management Center, in cooperation with selected experts and research organizations in Japan, are undertaking
a major project to study the seemingly contradictory corporate and social climate in Japan, which is at present stretched between entrepreneurial and more conservative forces.

Japan’s economic relationship with the countries of the Pacific Rim—and indeed with the rest of the world—is vital to all of the economies involved. If Japan is transforming into a new economic culture, an understanding of that transformation is relevant both to global economic development and to the study of entrepreneurial growth.

As a 2007-08 Shorenstein Fellow at Shorenstein APARC, John D. Ciorciari pursued a full and varied agenda of research and writing on Southeast Asia.

Fellowships are more often won on the promise of completing a book than books are finished before the fellowships end. Dr. John Ciorciari broke this “rule” by completing his book manuscript in Spring 2008 and submitting it to a university press for possible publication.

Based on his Oxford dissertation, the work is provisionally entitled “Hedging: Using Southeast Asian States as Case Studies.” In it, he examines the range of options that secondary states possess between outright alignment with and neutrality toward the great powers. He argues that secondary states normally seek to "hedge" by limiting their alignments. They do so to avoid the risks of tight security cooperation with the great powers, including diminished autonomy and entrapment, while reaping sufficient rewards in the form of protection. He presented his findings at a Southeast Asia Forum seminar on May 28, 2008 titled “Dating but Not Married: Southeast Asian Security Responses to the Rise of China.” See the link below for an audio file of the seminar.

In addition to finishing his book on hedging, Ciorciari used his fellowship period to pursue his research interest in Asian financial cooperation, which is increasingly central to broader political relations in the region. He focused on the Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI), an effort by China, Japan, South Korea, and the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to develop economic resilience by establishing regional mechanisms for balance-of-payments support.

Ciorciari collaborated on this study with Jennifer Amyx, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and herself a former Shorenstein Fellow and speaker for the Southeast Asian Forum (SEAF) at Shorenstein APARC. Ciorciari and Amyx acknowledge that establishing an effective financing mechanism under the CMI has proven to be a challenging task. Nevertheless, by fostering regular interaction among Asian central bankers and finance ministry officials, the CMI has begun to yield a range of spillover benefits conducive to regional financial resilience. (Schedules permitting, Ciorciari and Amyx may present some of their findings at a SEAF seminar at Stanford in the upcoming academic year.)

As a Shorenstein Fellow in 2007-08 Ciorciari also worked on two projects on Cambodia: a book chapter on the international politics surrounding the long-delayed and finally ongoing Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and an article on China’s relations with the Khmer Rouge regime during the late 1970s. The article argues that the Pol Pot regime effectively punched above its weight in an otherwise asymmetrical relationship by exploiting China's rigid conception of its security interest in Indochina. In studying the Sino-Cambodian alliance, Ciorciari was able to test and illustrate some of the arguments in his book manuscript as to how small states pursue leverage and autonomy in their relations with major powers.

In 2007 Shorenstein APARC and The Asia Foundation chose Dennis Arroyo to be the first Shorenstein APARC/Asia Foundation Visiting Fellow.  Arroyo spent the 2007-08 academic year researching and completing a monograph on "The Political Economy of Successful Reform:  Asian Stratagems."  An edited abstract follows:

Major economic reforms are often politically difficult, causing pain to voters and provoking unrest.  They may be opposed by politicians with short time horizons. They may collide with the established ideology and an entrenched ruling party.  They may be resisted by bureaucrats and by vested interests.  Obstacles to major economic reform can be daunting in democratic and autocratic polities alike.
 
And yet, somehow, past leaders of today's Asian dragons did implement vital economic reforms. "The Political Economy of Successful Reform:  Asian Stratagems" recounts the political maneuvers used by Asian leaders of economic reform in these countries at these pivotal times:  Thailand under General Prem Tinsulanonda; Vietnam during Doi Moi (or Renovation); Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew; China under Deng Xiaoping; India in the 1990s; and South Korea under Park Chung Hee.

The paper classifies these maneuvers as responses to the main political barriers to reform and develops a "playbook" of tactics for economic reformers.  To overcome ideological obstacles, for example, the reformers packaged and presented reforms as ways of strengthening the party in power. Reformers proceeded gradually.  Initially they sought win-win compromises. They blessed pro-market violations as pilot projects. They even created new provinces in order to dilute the anti-reform vote.

The full text of Arroyo's monograph has been published by the Stanford Center for International Development in its working paper series.

Arroyo came to Stanford well qualified to study economic reform techniques.  In 2005 he was named director for national planning and policy at the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) of the Philippines.  His duties included building public support for the economic reforms championed by NEDA.  He has consulted for the World Bank, the United Nations, and the survey research firm Social Weather Stations, and has written widely on socioeconomic topics.  His critique of the Philippine development plan won a mass media award for "best analysis."  He has degrees in economics from the University of the Philippines.

In May 2008 Arroyo presented his findings in a SEAF lecture entitled "The Foxy Art of Herding Dragons: How Sly Asian Leaders Pulled off Politically Difficult Economic Reforms."

The inaugural (March 2008) issue of PRISM, an undergraduate journal published by the University Scholars Programme (USP) of the National University of Singapore (NUS), carries a dozen essays. Six were written by Stanford undergraduates for a Stanford Overseas Seminar taught in Singapore in September 2006, and six by NUS undergrads in the USP for an NUS course taught at Stanford in May 2007.

The Stanford students, their paper topics, and brief summaries of their conclusions follow:

Jenni Romanek examined Singapore’s national identity. She found that Singaporeans “embody certain shared attributes of national identity, but they do so on a superficial level … If the government truly wishes to impart upon citizens a Singaporean identity, it must allow them to cultivate and define it, at least in part, by themselves. This necessitates a level of self-expression that is not currently acceptable by government standards.” She ended her essay by asking, “Without free speech, whose identity are Singaporeans representing?”

François Jean-Baptiste examined Singapore’s efforts to inculcate national identity through the school curriculum. He found the education ministry’s top-down methods “generally unsuccessful” and recommended a more student-and-teacher-driven approach. “The real and representative Singapore narrative,” he wrote, involved the ambitions of a wide range of Asian immigrants including “Filipina maids,” “Malay Muslims,” and “opposition leaders like J.B. Jeyaretnam and Slyvia Lim.” Education in the city-state’s secondary schools, he concluded, “should and can incorporate that story.”

Lauren Peate studied the “Four Million Smiles” campaign launched in the run-up to the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held in Singapore in September 2006 while the Stanford seminar was in progress. She found general public support for the campaign except among “young, [more] educated, and electronically connected” Singaporeans, one of whom told her, “We trust the government but it doesn’t trust us [to smile without being told to].” She ended by wondering how the authorities would choose to deal with a young generation of bloggers with critical minds.

Jon Casto explored Singapore’s efforts to instill an entrepreneurial culture despite a general aversion to risk (and a preference for state employment) “perpetuated through cultural norms, the labor market and [government-linked corporations].” He also, however, found entrepreneurship in Singapore “slowly on the rise” and argued that “today’s experiences” in promoting it “may bear tremendous fruit” if and when the economic climate because problematic enough to demand “that Singaporean individuals, not just the [People’s Action Party] government, provide solutions.”

Alexander Slaski researched the implications of illiberal politics for environmental policy in Singapore. He credited the government with having provided its citizens with a high quality of life, including “excellent environmental governance” from the top down. But he was struck by an artifact of the government’s relatively authoritarian approach to being green: the virtual absence in the city-state of a bottom-up or civil-society movement for conservation. To that extent, he concluded, “the authoritarian elements of the government have kept environmental protection from being as strong as it could be.”

Sam Shrank investigated the status and future of renewable energy. Singapore had previously managed to secure for itself “a constant and assured flow of oil and natural gas from abroad at reasonable.” But “peak oil—the year in which the supply of oil peaks—is in sight, and the end of natural gas is not far behind.” Oil and gas prices, he warned, will rise as demand outpaces supply. Amply sunlit as it is, Singapore could and should be doing much more to exploit sources of renewable energy sources, and solar (photovoltaic) energy in particular.

Compared with these essays, the Singaporean students’ essays in PRISM were no less diverse. If the Americans concentrated single-mindedly on Singapore, in keeping with the focus of the Stanford seminar, the Singaporean contributors were more inclined to compare American conditions and experiences with those in their own country.

Dan Goh, the NUS professor who taught the Singaporeans at Stanford, introduced the student essays. His thoughts are excerpted here:

"Reflections on Western civilization have often found themselves seduced by the idea of the American exception. … It seems ironic therefore that a group of American students would travel to this island to study what they have termed as the Singapore exception. Seen in the immediate context of Southeast Asia, Singapore is indeed an exception [whose] culturally diverse [im]migrants [have transformed the city-state] into a forward-looking nation. With little historical gravitas except for founding moments and fathers, it is a young nation filled with anxieties and self-doubt. Yet, it is resolute in forming its citizenry through clever ideological campaigns and in engineering visionary technological and economic projects based on successful foreign examples. For all its democratic institutions, it is beset by political elitism and illiberal tendencies. Despite its Edenic ideals and scientific prowess, it is reluctant to pursue environmental sustainability. These are the themes and contradictions tackled in the articles by the six young American scholars featured in this inaugural volume."

"But if we look closer, these themes and contradictions describe America as well. I have always suspected that the study of the exceptional other is always the study of our self as normal when the two are actually much more similar than they are different. Irony has a way of turning in on itself. However, the American students’ essays show that there is a major difference at the heart of comparing the American and Singapore exceptions."

"Given the American political culture of suspicion of state authority, it is not surprising that [in the Stanford students’ essays] the state sticks out visibly in the landscape of Singapore society. For the Singaporean students traveling to the Bay Area however, the feeling is best described by the excitement and trepidation of a Western naturalist traveling from sedate urban London to the rich jungles of Borneo. The state monolith fades and vibrant cultural diversities, intriguing identity evolutions and self-organizing chaos beckon. But always with Singapore in their minds, the young scholars reflected their study of Silicon Valley and San Francisco back unto Singapore. What they found was that the same diversities, evolutions and chaos were also evident in Singapore, but with the roots of the state apparatus sunk deeper into the rich soil here."

"Singapore is not anything like America and yet is everything American, except for the leviathan that stands over our shoulders. Nonetheless, the diversities and hybridities of vernacular everyday life continue to grow as ideas, images and identities speed around the global circuits of capitalism, … connecting young people across the deep Pacific …"

In his own preface to the PRISM issue, SEAF Director Donald Emmerson, who taught the Stanford seminar in Singapore, had this to say:

“In Praise of Bad Teaching.” Years ago at the University of Wisconsin-Madison I pinned a page of text under that title to a bulletin board next to my office door. The author argued that bad teachers were really good teachers because their boring lectures drove their students out of the classroom and into the real world where real learning could occur.

The argument is not wholly facetious. Conventional undergraduate education is notoriously indirect. Independent field work is the preserve of professors and graduate students. Undergraduates sit, listen, read, take notes, and take exams. Technology—the ability to google—has reduced the teacher’s ability to control information. But in standard classrooms, it is still the teacher who selects, interprets, and conveys knowledge, and who then tests and grades its retention. In humdrum pedagogy at its worst, the professor and the student are, respectively, faucet and sponge. A charismatic lecturer—a supposedly “good” teacher—may fill lecture hall seats only to reinforce the enthralled passivity of the sitters.

Fortunately, the National University of Singapore and Stanford University are not conventional institutions. Both campuses encourage their students to go abroad. Professors are not dispensed with. But by affording students direct contact with foreign cultures, NUS and Stanford necessarily challenge the teacher’s span of control. In that loss of unquestioned professorial authority lies a chance for serious learning by students and teacher alike. …

For lack of space, alas, we could not [publish in PRISM] all thirty essays written for our seminars. But those that are printed herein should give readers a feel for what happened when two sets of undergraduate students were “turned loose” on each other’s turf. I am grateful to [Dan Goh and the other individuals who made this issue and the seminars possible] and above all to both complements of students, including those not represented in these pages, for giving me one of the most enjoyable and memorable “teaching”—that is to say, learning—experiences of my life.

PRISM is not available on line, but it can be ordered (stock permitting) from

The Editor, PRISM
University Scholars Programme
National University of Singapore
BLK ADM, Level 6,
10 Kent Ridge Crtescent
Singapore 119260

Private sector leaders, senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, and academic experts convened at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) for a forum on a revolutionary development in disaster response: the rise and pervasiveness of social network communications, and the way these networks will reshape the flow of information when disasters strike. 

The July 28, 2008 forum, “Applications of Pervasive End-User Information Technologies in Emergencies,” generated a broad range of recommended changes in DHS policy. Most important, participants concluded that the paradigm of government control over information flow – as embodied in the National Incident Response System – needs to be entirely rethought. Facebook, Twitter, and other social network communications will enable citizens to link up when disasters strike in a way that has never before been possible.  DHS can take a number of concrete steps to facilitate those communications and make them more useful for disaster response.  These include new mechanisms for DHS to support data authentication; targeted liability coverage for private sector firms in the social network realm; and a revamped exercise system to familiarize government, non-governmental organization and private sector disaster responders with the capabilities of social network communications.

The forum provided the first-ever opportunity for DHS and the private sector leaders in social network communications to examine these issues.  Participants agreed that the findings of the forum should be used to launch a new research program.  That design of that program is now underway.  Topics will include a comprehensive review of scholarly research on the impact of social network technologies on human behavior in emergencies; an analysis of the way these technologies can be applied to homeland security field; and additional measure that DHS should adopt to facilitate the use of these networks.

The forum was co-sponsored by CISAC and the Homeland Security Institute.