The Stanford China Program, in cooperation with the Center for East Asian Studies, will host a special series of seminars to examine China as a major political and economic actor on the world stage.  Over the course of the autumn and winter terms, leading scholars will examine China actions and policies in the new global political economy.  What is China's role in global governance?  What is the state of China's relations with its Asian neighbors?  Is China being more assertive both diplomatically as well as militarily?  Are economic interests shaping its foreign policies?  What role does China play amidst international conflicts? 

Seiichiro Takagi is a professor at the School of International Politics, Economics and Communication at the Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan and a Senior Visiting Fellow of the Japan Institute of International Affairs. He specializes in Chinese foreign relations and security issues in the Asia-Pacific region. Previously, he was the director of the Second Research Department, which was responsible for area studies, at the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo. He also served on the Graduate School of Policy Science of Saitama University (which became the National Graduate Institute of Policy Studies) for over 20 years, and has been a guest scholar at The Brookings Institution and Beijing University. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Japan Association for International Security, and is a member of several other organizations, including the Japanese Committee, Council for Security Cooperation in Asia-Pacific (CSCAP); the Japan Association for International Relations; and the Japan Political Science Association. His recent publications in English include China Watching: Perspectives from Europe, Japan and the United States, 2007 and in Japanese The U.S.-China Relations: Structure and Dynamics in the Post-Cold War Era, 2007.. He earned a B.A. in international relations from the University of Tokyo, Japan, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, California.

This event is part of the China and the World series.

In an emerging economy like China's, institutions are not yet institutions. They are often the playthings of politics and bureaucratic rivalries. China's banking system is a case in point.  Since 1949, banks have bounced around China's institutional landscape as the government tried out first one then another banking model.  This mattered little to the outside world until the last decade when reform brought banks to the international capital markets in search of massive amounts of new capital.  This did not, however, stop institutional in-fighting.  It spread so that today the domestic struggle over bank roles, responsibilities and ownership has expanded to involve international markets, investors, regulators and the reputations of market professionals at a growing cost to the Chinese government and to the banks themselves.

Carl Walter brings to JPMorgan over 20 years of professional experience in a number of senior banking positions across Asia and primarily in China.  Currently Mr. Walter is Managing Director, JPMorgan China.

Prior to joining JPMorgan, Mr. Walter was a Managing Director and a member of the Management Committee at China International Capital Corporation ("CICC"), a joint venture of Morgan Stanley and China Construction Bank. He played a key role in the execution of CICC's international and domestic equity and fixed income transactions. 

While at Credit Suisse First Boston Mr. Walter was responsible for organizing the firm's China investment banking team and established its Beijing Representative Office in 1993 serving as Chief Representative. During this time, he was involved in a number of significant equity and debt offerings. 

A fluent Mandarin speaker, Mr. Walter received an MA in economics at Beijing University in 1979-80 supported by a grant from National Academy of Science. He received his PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 1981 and earned his BA from Princeton University. He is also the author of "Privatizing China: Inside China's Stock Markets" which has been published in a Chinese edition "Minyinghua zai Zhongguo".

This event is part of the China and the World series.

Join us for a discussion on human rights and environmental justice implications surrounding the BP oil spill from regulatory, litigation and conceptual perspectives.

Introduced and moderated by Dr. Helen Stacy, Co-ordinator, Program on Human Rights in the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute.

Panelists:

Meg Caldwell, Director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program; Executive Director, Center for Ocean Solutions, Woods Institute for the Environment. Professor Caldwell's scholarship focuses on the environmental effects of local land use decisions, the use of science in environmental and marine resource policy development and implementation, and developing private and public incentives for natural resource conservation.

Deborah Sivas, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law and Director, Environmental Law Clinic. Professor Sivas's current research is focused on the interaction of law and science in the arena of climate change and coastal/marine policy and the ability of the public to hold policymakers accountable.

Ursula Heise, Director, Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Professor of English; member of the Executive Committee of the Program in Science, Technology & Society; Affiliated Faculty of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Author of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford University Press, 2008), After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture, (forthcoming) and The Avantgarde and the Forms of Nature (in progress).

Heidi Kjærnet will be presenting her paper "Petroleum sector management in Azerbaijan: A case study of the national oil company SOCAR". The paper focuses on the interactions between the Azerbaijani government and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, SOCAR, and explores the complex interconnections between the government and its national oil company (NOC). In the post-Soviet period, SOCAR has played the role as the national partner in consortiums with international oil companies producing oil and gas fields in Azerbaijan, as well as having important policy tasks and social responsibilities.

The paper argues that there is a profound lack of separation of commercial and regulatory responsibility in the Azerbaijani petroleum sector. While Azerbaijan is certainly giving preferential treatment to SOCAR, Heidi argues Baku is less likely to follow the example of Kazakhstan in pursuing a resource nationalist line through curtailing the activities of international oil companies due to the Azerbaijani government's ambitions for regional leadership in the South Caucasus, and its strong commitment to cooperating with the international oil companies.

Heidi's research on SOCAR and Azerbaijan is a part of her PhD dissertation with the working title "Petroleum, politics and power: The National Oil Companies of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia".

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Heidi Kjærnet is a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University.  She is visiting from the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute where she is a Research Fellow.

She holds an MA in Russia and Post-Soviet Affairs from the University of Oslo. She has taken intensive Russian language courses at the Norwegian Center in St Petersburg and interned at the Royal Norwegian Embassy to Azerbaijan. Currently she is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Tromso.

What has the United States accomplished with its unprecedented build-up of immigration enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border and in the interior of the country since 1993? How has this effort shaped the migration projects of Mexicans?  From the standpoint of U.S. policymakers, what has “worked,” what has not, and why?  In explaining major changes in migration flows since 2007, which matters most: U.S. border enforcement or the Great Recession?  In addressing these questions, Professor Cornelius will draw upon extensive fieldwork conducted in 2010 in rural Jalisco, the San Francisco Bay area, and Oklahoma City, as well as a new analysis of survey data from UCSD’s Mexican Migration Field Research and Training Program covering 2007-2010.

Wayne A. Cornelius is Co-Director, Education Programs, of the University of California’s Global Health Institute (UCGHI); Associate Director, UC Center of Expertise on Migration and Health; and a Core Faculty Member, Division of Global Public Health, School of Medicine, University of California-San Diego. He is Director Emeritus of the UCSD Center for Comparative Immigration Studies; Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Emeritus; and Theodore E. Gildred Professor of U.S.-Mexican Relations at UCSD. He is a past President of the Latin American Studies Association and an elected member of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York). One of the world's foremost experts on Mexican migration to the United States, comparative immigration policy, international migration and health, and the Mexican political system, Cornelius conducted field research in Mexico and the United States nearly every year from 1970 to 2009.  His latest among more than 280 publications on migration is a book titled Mexican Migration and the U.S. Economic Crisis: A Transnational Perspective.

Co-sponsored by Bill Lane Center for the American West, Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), Chicana/o Studies, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Institute on the Politics of Inequality, Race and Ethnicity at Stanford (InSPIRES), MEChA, Stanford Humanities Center and Stanford Immigrant Rights Project.