China’s State Council has put forth draft legislation that would ban smoking in public spaces, part of the government’s larger advocacy efforts to help curb tobacco use nationwide. Matthew Kohrman, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University, said it’s a step forward but the ban’s long-term success would depend on local enforcement.

Despite popular belief, global cigarette production has tripled worldwide since the 1960s. Leading the surge has been China.

“China has become the world’s cigarette superpower,” said Kohrman, in an interview on National Public Radio’s program, Marketplace.

Moreover, local governments in China have become dependent on tax revenues generated from tobacco sales, thus reinforcing the cigarette’s ubiquity and ease of access.

China has implemented smoking bans in the past, but with varied success. Now rising healthcare costs caused by tobacco-related diseases are creating urgency for new regulations.

“Whether or not these new regulations will be enforced will, in the end, come down to local politics,” he said.

Matthew Kohrman is part of the Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and leads the project, Cigarette Citadels, a peer-sourced mapping project that compiles more than 480 cigarette factories globally.

The full audioclip is available on the Marketplace website.

In conversation with Shorenstein APARC, Yong Lee, the SK Center Fellow, discusses his initial draw to architecture and urbanism, and the nexus of public policy and economics. Lee highlights some of his recent research activities focused on international sanctions on North Korea and educational policy as it relates to migration and housing patterns in South Korea. 

Your background is quite multifaceted, including years working in architecture and a master’s of public policy in addition to a doctorate in economics. How do all of these areas fit together to inform your research?

It took a while for me to figure out what I wanted to pursue as a career. As a high school student in Korea I had to choose a track that focused on either the physical sciences or the humanities/social sciences. At that age, it’s hard to know what you want to be. Simply because my father was an engineer, I chose the physical sciences track. When it was time to apply for college (one actually had to determine a major when applying for college back then), I became interested in international relations and wanted to become a diplomat. But given my training in the hard sciences and the fact that one had to choose a major when applying, I had to decide on a science or engineering major. After browsing through the library a few architecture books caught my eye, and I opted for architectural engineering as my major. 

I truly enjoyed my six years of architectural training but after working for an architectural firm for several years in Seoul, I realized I was more interested in the abstract ideas of architecture and urbanism and less of the actual design process that goes on in an architectural firm. I searched for my next career, became interested in urban and development policy, and pursued a master’s of public policy at Duke University. However, then I realized that economics would allow me to rigorously analyze the policy questions I was interested in. Fortunately, Brown University accepted me as a Ph.D. student and I eventually became an economist. It was through this search process, that I developed an interdisciplinary interest in policy relevant questions. My personal choices constrained by education policy, comparatively experiencing Korea’s transition while living between Korea and the United States each decade since the 1980s, and my interest in architecture and cities have shaped my research interest in economic development and growth with a focus on education, firms and cities.  And now being at FSI, I can immerse myself in international studies, something I had wanted to pursue all along. By joining Stanford, I think I finally discovered what I had wanted to do.

One of your research streams looks at the effects of sanctions on domestic populations, looking at the case study of North Korea. How did you derive data about the closed-off regime? What are your key findings?

Research on North Korea is challenging because of the dearth of data. I had been interested in how sanctions impact the domestic population, but to examine this question one would need regional level data within in North Korea. I decided to use the satellite night-lights data, which in recent years has been used as an alternative means to measure economic activity. I found that sanctions actually increase urban-rural inequality. An additional sanctions index increases the urban-rural luminosity gap by about 1 percent. However, if I focus on the more central urban areas the gap increases to about 2.6 percent. Since urban areas are more than ten times brighter than rural areas, the results imply that the gap further increases by 1 to 2.6 percent with additional sanctions.  Furthermore, I find that the urban areas actually get brighter while the rural areas get darker.

Another of your research focuses on the impact of 1970s education policy in South Korea on intergenerational mobility and migration. Can you explain this phenomenon? Does the case of South Korea relate to reform experiences in other countries?

Students in South Korea traditionally had to take an entrance exam to enter high schools. After the exam, high schools would choose students based on the exam scores. Given the variation in school quality, a hierarchy of high schools had existed and students who performed well would enter the top tier high schools. This system was heavily criticized since wealthier families could tutor children to prepare for the entrance exam. Eventually in the mid-1970s, the South Korean government abolished the exam-based system and moved to a school district based system where students would attend high schools based on residential location. By moving away from an exam system to a district system, policymakers hoped that educational opportunities would alleviate the persistence of inequality. However, what I find is that, to the contrary, the district system generated substantial sorting of households by income. Now wealthier households could simply move to districts and cities with the prestigious high schools. Given that the purchase of housing is purely determined by income, school quality became even more segregated by income and actually exacerbated the persistence of inequality across generations. This transition is now happening in several Chinese cities and in the United States – the sorting across school districts by educational outcome has created highly segregated towns. The Korea experiment allowed me to examine not just an equilibrium outcome, but also the transition when the policy changed.

In the coming year, you’ll be teaching courses related to the economies of East Asia. Can you provide an outlook on this?

I’ll be teaching an International Policy Studies course titled, “Economic Growth, Development, and Challenges of East Asia,” in the spring. The course will focus on China, Japan, and Korea, but also draw on Southeast Asian countries, when relevant. I will cover the rapid economic growth in recent decades and development policies pursued. However, I will also cover the current major economic challenges these countries face, some of which are rising income inequality, entrepreneurship, and an aging workforce. I hope to add to our rich set of courses by providing an economics and empirical viewpoint.

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

I sometimes split my sleep. That is, I go to bed to sleep for a few hours and then wake up in the middle of the dark, do some reading or work, and then sleep for one or two hours before I start my morning routine. It started during my high school years and it has stuck with me for quite a while now. Don’t worry, though. I sleep fine most of the time. I just sometimes enjoy the dead of the night.

The rise of China as a global and regional power has created areas where the interests of China and the United States overlap in competition, the senior U.S. military commander in the Pacific told a Stanford audience. But Admiral Samuel Locklear III, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), rejected the traditional realpolitik argument, which predicts inevitable confrontation between the United States, a status quo power, and China, a rising power.

“Historians will say this will lead to conflict,” Locklear said, during an address at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center last Friday. “I don’t believe it has to.”

The United States and China have a “mutual skepticism of each other,” the Pacific Commander acknowledged, but he characterized the relationship as “collaborative, generally.”

He said the dangers of direct military confrontation between the two powers is low, but warned against Chinese tendencies to perceive the United States as engaged in an effort to ‘contain’ the expansion of China’s influence. Instead, Locklear urged China to work with the United States to build new security and economic structures in the region.

Economic interdependence between the countries makes it impossible for the two countries to avoid working together, he told the seminar, co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.

He said that China has also benefited from the security environment that the United States has helped shape and maintain in the region.

Locklear reminded the audience of the central importance of the vast area under his command, which stretches from the Indian subcontinent across the vast Pacific Ocean. More than nine out of 10 of the largest ports in the world are in the Asia-Pacific region, and over 70 percent of global trade passes through its waters. The U.S. rebalance to Asia, a policy pursued by the Obama administration as early as year 2009, largely happened because of the economic and political importance of that area.

The mutual interest in economic prosperity depends, however, on a stable security environment. Washington has an interest in maintaining the structure of security that has ensured peace for the last few decades. Beijing seeks to change the status quo, to build a regional system that reflects its growth as a power.

Locklear called on China to work with the United States and other nations in the region, such as Japan and Australia, as well as the countries of Southeast Asia, to take the current “patchwork quilt” of bilateral and multilateral alliances and build a basis to maintain economic interdependence and security. He pointed to the U.S.-led effort to form a Trans-Pacific Partnership as a 12-nation economic structure, which could eventually include China.

“We want China to be a net security contributor,” he said, “And my sense is that both the United States and the nations on the periphery of China are willing to allow China to do that – but with circumstances.” He said conditions for the United States included open access to shared domains in sea, air, space and cyberspace.

The Pacific Commander cautioned against the danger, however, of unintended conflict, fueled by territorial disputes and Chinese assertiveness that worries its neighbors. Locklear stressed the need for more dialogue, including among the militaries in the region, an effort that the U.S. Pacific Command is currently carrying out.

“There’s a trust deficit in Asia among the nations, as it relates in particular to China,” he said.

Relations have been so icy that the top political leaders of Japan and China didn’t meet for nearly two years, only breaking the divide for a 20-minute meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit (APEC) in Beijing last month.

Refusing to engage at the highest level has made it difficult for countries to work on solutions to shared problems. The region now sees a confluence of old and new challenges that could threaten global stability if ill-managed, said Locklear, who has led the U.S. military command in the Pacific since 2012.                 

For decades, China and Japan have been at odds about sovereignty claims over islands in the East China Sea. In the past, during the time of Deng Xiaoping’s rule in China, the two countries agreed to, as Deng reportedly put it, ‘kick the issue into the tall grass’ for future generations to deal with it. These disputes have resurfaced in recent years, threatening to trigger armed conflict between the air and naval forces of the two countries.

Locklear said he believed that China and Japan would avoid inadvertent escalation, thanks to improved communications and tight command and control over their forces. But he also warned  that at least seven nations have conflicting claims in the South China Sea, which could easily escalate into direct conflict.

These situations, paired with an upsurge in Chinese military spending and the growing belief that the United States is a declining power, raise doubts about China’s intentions in the region. China’s Asian neighbors increasingly question the intensions of the world’s most populous nation, and second largest economy.

“Is it a return to the old days where you had basic tributary states? Is that the model that China is looking for? Or is it a 21^st century model?”

Locklear said China and other nations in the Asia-Pacific, as well as the United States, need to work harder to form shared views and consensus, particularly among those who “own the guns.”

Dialogue and interactions among the militaries are crucial, especially those who are called upon to make quick decisions during a possible flashpoint, for instance an accidental clash of boats or planes.

“Trust really does fall in many ways to military leaders to get it right and to lead, to some degree, the politicians and the diplomats,” he said. Locklear spoke of a tangible example of collaboration in the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, also known as RIMPAC, hosted by USPACOM. Twenty-two countries participate in the world’s largest maritime warfare exercise in Hawaii, which this year included naval forces from China.

“Does it fix those friction points? No, it doesn’t.” But, Locklear concluded, “We hope that this kind of thing opens the door for future interaction.”

The audio file and transcript from the event can be accessed by clicking here. 

The recently manifested massive failure of America's intervention in Iraq has led outside observers to speculate that the ongoing rapid drawdown of international military forces in Afghanistan will lead to similar chaos in that country, Karl Eikenberry writes in this Foreign Policy commentary about the new Asia Foundation survey of the Afghan People.

Eikenberry notes that Ahmed Rashid, a commentator on Afghanistan security issues and author of the superb book Taliban, wrote in a recentNew York Times op-ed that the U.S. troop withdrawal plan formulated in 2009 "is proving catastrophically wrong now." Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham warned two months ago: "If the President repeats his mistakes from Iraq and withdraws all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, based on a certain date on a calendar, we fear a similar failure will unfold ... as we have seen Iraq."

Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, writes that the Asia Foundation's just-released 2014 Survey of the Afghan People indicates that while the Afghans do worry about the future of their country, they by no means share the deep pessimism of the foreign prophets of doom who assert that it is only a matter of time until the disaster on the Euphrates is repeated on the Kabul River. Comparing the attitudes of the Afghan and Iraqi people on key political, security, and economic issues helps explain why this is so.