Capital in its many facets is variable.  Like quicksilver, it can divide, reunite, and metamorphose seamlessly across a spectrum of ownerships by foreigners, the state, and domestic private
entrepreneurs.  

What does variable capital mean in and for Vietnam?  Who are the different investors?  How do they respond to state efforts to attract investments from overseas Vietnamese?  How do global supply chains—corporate buyers, contract factories, and subcontractors—shape the changing nature and impacts of capital in Vietnam?  How does a self-described socialist state use policies on investment, employment, and the privatization of state-owned factories to control the relations between workers and owners?  What roles in this mix are played by journalists who can ignore neither the party line nor the workers who protest in spite of it?  

In addition to addressing these questions, Prof. Tran will argue that workers in Vietnam are not resigned to being squeezed between morphing capital and state control.  They defend their interests flexibly in diverse forms of protest, overt and covert, including appeals to the state’s own socialist vision.  Fresh from extensive fieldwork in labor-intensive industries such as textiles, garments, and footwear, Prof. Tran will show how Vietnamese workers use origin, class, gender, and ethnicity to mobilize collective action against morphing capital in a one-party state.

Angie Ngoc Tran is a professor of political economy at California State University, Monterey Bay.  Her latest publications include articles in the Labor Studies Journal (2007) on labor media and labor-management-state relations in Vietnam.  Her PhD is from the University of Southern California (1996).

About the speaker
George C. Herring is Alumni Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of Kentucky. A leading authority on U.S. foreign relations, he is the former editor of Diplomatic History and a past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, among other books.

Dr. Herring’s From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 is the twelfth and latest book in the Oxford History of the United States, and the first book in the series to focus on a single subject, U.S. foreign policy.

Dr. Herring earned a PhD in history from the University of Virginia, and has been a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

About the moderator
David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and co-director of The Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. Professor Kennedy is the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for his book, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War. Reflecting his interdisciplinary training in American Studies, which combined the fields of history, literature, and economics, Kennedy's scholarship is notable for its integration of economic and cultural analysis with social and political history. His 1970 book, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, embraced the medical, legal, political, and religious dimensions of the subject and helped to pioneer the emerging field of women's history. One of his later books, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980), used the history of American involvement in World War I to analyze the American political system, economy, and culture in the early twentieth century. He is a graduate of Stanford University (BA, history) and Yale University (MA, PhD, American Studies).

About From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776:

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From the American Revolution to the fifty-year struggle with communism and conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 tells the dramatic story of America’s emergence as a superpower—its birth in revolution, its troubled present, its uncertain future.

» Buy it from Oxford University Press: "From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776" (Oxford University Press, 2008)

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation in print. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winner of prestigious Bancroft and Parkman prizes. From Colony to Superpower is the only thematic volume commissioned for the series.  Here, George C. Herring uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America’s dramatic rise from thirteen disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world’s greatest superpower.

Quotes in praise of From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776:

“George Herring’s well-paced, readable, and up-to-date history of U.S. foreign relations will be the authoritative account for this generation.”
- Emily S. Rosenberg, University of California, Irvine
“In this splendidly detailed account, George Herring expertly guides us through the rich and fascinating story of America’s foreign relations. This is history on a grand scale, clearly and elegantly rendered. Anyone who wants to understand how the Untied States has come to occupy its current place on the world stage should read this magisterial book."
- Fredrik Logevall, co-author of A People and a Nation

The inauguration of Lee Myung-bak as president in February represented a significant shift in South Korea's foreign policy. After ten years of "progressive" rule in Seoul, Lee's skepticism about North Korean intentions and his unambiguous support for the U.S. alliance stand out in great contrast. Prof. Paik will analyze President Lee's foreign policy and its implications for dealing with North Korea and for relations with the United States, including in view of the upcoming change in U.S. administration.

Jin-Hyun Paik is a professor at the Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS), Seoul National University (SNU). He is also director of its Institute of International Affairs (IIA), which publishes, among others, the Journal of International and Area Studies (formerly Asia Journal). He specializes in Korea’s foreign and security policy, international security and conflict management, and international law and organization. Educated at Seoul National University (LL.B.), Columbia Law School (LL.M.), and Cambridge University (Ph.D.), Prof. Paik has been a research associate at the Hague Academy of International Law; a visiting fellow at the Rand Corporation and the Hoover Institution, Stanford; and a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He was a member of the Presidential Commission on Policy Planning, Korea, and of official advisory committees to a number of Korean government agencies, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the National Security Council. Prof. Paik has edited six books and written over 100 articles in his fields of interest, in both English and Korean. He is also a frequent contributor and commentator on international affairs to major Korean newspapers and international media. Prof. Paik is an attorney-at-law (a member of the New York Bar). He is currently president of the Korean Academic Council on the United Nations System (KACUNS).

This is a CDDRL seminar within our Democracy in Taiwan Program.

Cliff Tan is Consulting Professor and formerly Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for International Development. At SCID, Mr. Tan is writing a book on financial market retrospectives of the Asian financial crisis, how those might or might not differ from well-recorded views of policymakers and academics, and if they differ, whether they offer lessons for the financial market crises of today.  Mr. Tan is also a founding partner in a new charity that will partly invest in global microfinance, and occasionally consults to hedge funds

Prior to SCID, Mr. Tan headed up local markets strategy in fixed income and foreign exchange for Citigroup in Asia. Over 19 years of research on Asia and Japan, Mr. Tan worked as FX/Interest Rate Strategist and co-head of Asian Economics at Warburg Dillon Read (now UBS), Japan/Asia Economist at Wellington Management Company, LLC, and proprietary trading/credit risk economist at Bankers Trust Company. Mr. Tan has been voted a top five currency strategist several times by Asiamoney (including a #1 ranking in 2003) and has also been cited for work as both an economist and strategist by The Asset magazine.

Before entering financial markets, Mr. Tan covered Greater China at the US Federal Reserve Board, was a Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong and was a Visiting Fellow at the Korea Development Institute.

Mr. Tan received M.Phil. and M.A. degrees in Economics from Yale University, an A.M. in East Asian Regional Studies from Harvard University and an A.B. (magna cum laude) in Journalism and East Asian Studies from the University of Southern California.

Professor Schaede's seminar will focus on the themes of her new book, Choose and Focus: Japanese Business Strategies for the 21st Century (Cornell UP, 2008). She will argue that Japan has undergone a strategic inflection point so fundamental that relying on what we used to know about Japan from the 1980s is insufficient to understand the new Japanese competitiveness.

In addition to analyzing this recent shift away from diversification to focused, lean organizations among Japan's leading companies, Professor Schaede will also discuss the newly emerging takeover market in Japan, as well as the changing role of venture capital and startups in Japan's newly emerging open system of innovation.

Ulrike Schaede is Professor of Japanese Business at UC San Diego's School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. Schaede has written extensively on business organization and the financial system in Japan. Her recent working papers discuss changes in business groups and Japan's main bank system; investment funds, institutional investors and hostile takeovers; legal reform and "revitalization", as well as changing employment strategies and non-regular work. She is also an investigator for SPRIE's Japanese Entrepreneurship project.