Predicting Chinese Foreign Policy: Signals and Outcomes, 1949-2010
Abstract: This dissertation chapter examines signaling credibility in Chinese foreign policy over 1949-2010. The analysis is based on two new datasets: all 2,000 diplomatic interactions between the United States and China over 1949-2010 and sentiment trends in all 50,000 People's Daily articles on the United States over 1949-2010. I find that China's bellicosity toward the United States is a reliable predictor of conflict initiation the following month. I also find that Chinese foreign policy is responsive to urban unemployment. I find no evidence that China's signaling credibility is affected by its military capabilities.
About the Speaker: Erin Baggott is a Zukerman predoctoral fellow at CISAC for 2014-2015. She is completing her PhD in international relations at the Harvard University Department of Government. She studies Chinese foreign policy with techniques from computational social science and machine learning. Her dissertation examines the sources of trust, distrust, cooperation, and conflict in US-China relations over 1949-2012, using day-level datasets of actions and perceptions on both sides.
Previously, she completed a MSc in Modern Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford and a BA in Government and Economics at Harvard College. She speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and has conducted several summers of field research in Beijing.
Encina Hall (2nd Floor)
Since Kim Jong Un came to power, interest in North Korea (DPRK) has increased but it is difficult to judge whether the growing range of media reports and the commentaries based on them are accurate or not. Spending almost 30 months in the DPRK from March 2012, mainly in Pyongyang but also making visits outside, offered an opportunity to collect up-to-date materials, especially photographs, which may offer an insight into the changes taking place. These might offer a new angle to be considered and hopefully stimulate further discussion about what is really happening in the DPRK now.
Jessie Marino, a DMA candidate in Composition at Stanford, recently returned from Copenhagen’s SPOR festival, where she was selected as one of five artists from a field of 140 (representing 34 nationalities) to perform her original work, titled “Heartfelt bird, vivid and great in style.” “I was commissioned by the SPOR Festival to compose a new piece featuring percussionist Serge Vuille and pianist Mark Knoop (photo inset) which was featured in a concert of all world premiere works,” writes Marino. “This event allowed me to meet new musicians, artists, curators, and composers who are working under similar guises and to exchange ideas about how our art can expand and develop in the 21st century.” 
Marino (inset) is also a recipient of a summer travel grant from the Center’s Graduate Student Grant Program. She will be traveling to Germany to attend the 2014 Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music. Marino writes that the opportunity will give her the chance to “practice and perform my own compositions,” to “work and develop new ideas with composers and academics,” and to “attend lectures on current research, developments and discoveries in sound production and music technology.”
David Laitin and his co-author Rafaela Dancygier’s article in the Annual Review of Political Science, “Immigration into Europe: Economic Discrimination, Violence, and Public Policy,” investigates and reviews recent research on changing Western European demographic patterns, and its implications for labor-market discrimination, immigrant-state relations, and immigrant-native violence. The authors “discuss some of the methodological challenges that scholars have not fully confronted in trying to identify the causes and consequences of discrimination and violence,” and propose pathways to resolve contradictory results in existing studies regarding the economic consequences of immigration policymaking. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.