Browse FSI scholarship on geopolitics, global health, energy, cybersecurity and more.
Featured Publications
Security Through Cooperation: Space, Nuclear Weapons, and U.S.-Russia Relations after the Cold War
Rose Gottemoeller uses lessons learned from U.S.-Russia relations during the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations to offer insights into how Russia today may be convinced to end its war against Ukraine and resume cooperation for the sake of global security.
Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder
A clear-eyed look from Michael McFaul at how the rise of autocratic China and Russia are compelling some to think that we have entered a new Cold War—and why we must reject that thinking in order to prevail.
The National College Entrance Examination shapes the future of millions of students in China each year, but Hongbin Li and Ruixue Jia illuminate how this test of all tests is also shaping education, labor markets, political legitimacy, and social values beyond the PRC.
This report examines how the assertiveness of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has escalated tensions in the Indo-Pacific, leading to dangerous encounters with key regional players, and evaluates how China’s actions have influenced countries’ strategic planning and deterrence postures.
Background Mental health problems among children at preschool age are a common issue across the world. As shown in literature, a caregiver’s parenting style can play a critical role in child development. This study aims to examine the associations between a caregiver’s parenting style and the mental health problems (or not) of their child when he/she is at preschool age in rural China.
Methods Participants were children, aged 49 to 65 months, and their primary caregivers. The primary caregivers of the sample children completed the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire, Short Version, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, and a questionnaire that elicited their socio-demographic characteristics. The level of cognitive development of each sample child was assessed using the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Fourth Edition. Pearson correlation analysis, linear regression analysis, and multivariable regression analysis were used to analyze the data.
Results The prevalence of mental health problems among sample children at preschool age was high (31.6%). If a caregiver practices an authoritative parenting style, it was found to be negatively associated with the mental health problems of their child. In contrast, a caregiver’s authoritarian parenting style was positively associated with the mental health problems of their child. Compared to those in a subgroup of primary caregivers that used a combination of low authoritative and low authoritarian parenting style, primary caregivers that used a combination of high authoritarian and low authoritative or a combination of high authoritative and high authoritarian were found to have positive association with child health problems. A number of demographic characteristics were found to be associated with the adoption of different parenting styles.
Conclusion Different parenting styles (including authoritative, authoritarian, and combination of authoritative and authoritarian) of the sample caregivers had different associations with the mental health problems of the sample children. Parenting programs that aim to improve the parenting styles (favoring authoritative parenting styles) should be promoted in an effort to improve the status of child mental health in rural China.
A new Stanford Internet Observatory report examines how to improve the CyberTipline pipeline from dozens of interviews with tech companies, law enforcement and the nonprofit that runs the U.S. online child abuse reporting system.
A growing body of literature explores the effect of higher education on the urban–rural divide in China. Despite an increasing number of rural students gaining access to college, little is known about their performance in college or their job prospects after graduation. Using nationally representative data from over 40,000 urban and rural college students, we examine rural students’ college performance and estimate the impact of rural status on students’ first job wages in comparison to their urban peers. Our results indicate that once accepted into college, rural students perform equally as well, if not better, than their urban counterparts. Additionally, we discovered that rural students earn a 6.2 per cent wage premium compared to their urban counterparts in their first job after graduation. Our findings suggest the importance of expanding access to higher education for rural students, as it appears to serve as an equalizer between urban and rural students despite their significantly different backgrounds.
Economic Development and Cultural Change,
March 15, 2024
We study how an elite college education affects social mobility in China. China provides an interesting context because its college admissions rely mainly on the scores of a centralized exam, a system that has been the subject of intense debate. Combining the data from a large-scale college graduate survey and a nationally representative household survey, we document three main findings.First, attending an elite college can change one’s fate to some extent. It raises the child’s rank in the income distribution by almost 20 percentiles. Nevertheless, it does not change the intergenerational relationship in income ranks or guarantee one’s entry into an elite occupation or industry. Second, while elite college access rises with parental income, the disparity is less pronounced in China than in the United States. In China, top-quintile children are 2.3 times more likely to attend an elite college compared to bottom-quintile children, versus an 11.2-fold difference in the U.S. Third, the score-based cutoff rule in elite college admission is income neutral. Overall, these findings reveal both the efficacy and limitations of China’s elite colleges in shaping social mobility.
As government agencies move to adopt AI across a range of programs, choices made in system design can ensure individuals’ ability to effectively challenge decisions made about them.
