Abstract:

For the past several years, and especially since the beginning of the "Arab Spring" in December 2010, Arab regimes have experienced sweeping processes of political decay, disintegration, reform, and revolution. While these are far from finished and clear in their impacts, they have already begun to transform the political parameters affecting peace and stability in the Middle East. The prevailing assumption is that destabilization of the neighborhood has made Israel even more reluctant to take any new initiatives or assume any new risks for a peace agreement with the Palestinians. But the changing regional parameters also generate new opportunities and especially new urgency for obtaining a two-state solution while it is still possible.

Speaker:    Dr. Carl E. Walter, Author of “Red Capitalism”

Moderator:  Michael Harris, President of Finance, Ambow Education

Until China began its highly successful reform effort in 1978, banks as institutions hardly existed, they were mostly a channel to provide funding to state enterprises. Yet after the economic reform in the 1980s, there was a rush of banking privatization and this enthusiasm to drive economic growth led to excessive bank lending and high rates of inflation in the 1990s. Following the Asian Financial Crisis and the collapse of Guangdong International Trust and Investment Co., a single party committee for each of the big state banks was created. The objective was to build relatively independent banking institutions with centralized management structures, thus forming special bond between the Party and Banks in China. Dr. Walter will discuss the modern evolution of China’s banks and the challenges in transiting to a more open, consumption-based model of economic development.

Carl E. Walter has worked in China′s financial sector for the past 20 years, participating in many of the country's financial reforms. He played a major role in China′s groundbreaking first overseas IPO in 1992 as well as the first listing of a state–owned enterprise on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. He held a senior position in China′s first joint venture investment bank where he supported a number of significant domestic stock and debt underwritings for major Chinese corporations and financial institutions. More recently, he helped build one of the most successful and profitable domestic security, risk and currency trading operations for a major international investment bank. He holds a PhD from Stanford University and a graduate certificate from Beijing University.

LOCATION
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall
616 Serra St., 3rd floor
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
» Directions/Map

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The 1950s, the period between the catastrophic Korean War (1950-1953) and Korea’s ambitious industrialization in the 1960s and 70s, has remained relatively "neglected" among historians of modern Korea. The guest speakers will present their studies of this era’s culture, intellectual climate, and politics; and discuss colonial legacy, cold war, and reconstruction in the wake of the Korean War.

Participants:

Carter J. Eckert trained in Western ancient and medieval history at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, and also at Harvard. He subsequently developed a strong interest in Korea and East Asia as a result of his experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Seoul in the late 1960s and 1970s. After several years of working and studying in Korea, he returned to the United States for doctoral study in Korean and Japanese history at the University of Washington. Since 1985 he has been teaching modern Korean history at Harvard, including a popular undergraduate course called "The Two Koreas," and working to build up the Harvard Korean studies program.

Eckert is the author of a number of books and articles, including Offspring of Empire: The Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, and he is also a co-author of Korea Old and New: A History, a widely-used university textbook on Korean history. 

Michael Robinson earned a PhD in history at the University of Washington in 1979. He taught at the University of Southern California for sixteen years after which he moved to Indiana University where he is a Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and an adjunct Professor of History. He has written extensively on the origins and evolution of Korean nationalism. His first book, Cultural Nationalism in Colonial Korea focused on nationalist ideology formation during the 1920s. More recently he has become interested in popular culture and the origins and development of modernity in Korea. With Gi-Wook Shin his Colonial Modernity in Korea examined a number of nodes of modernity appearing during the period of Japanese occupation. He has just finished a new book, Korea’s Twentieth Century Odyssey: a Short History that was published by the University of Hawaii Press in Spring 2007. He has collaborated with Jonathan Lipman and Barbara Maloney on a new text, East Asia Since 1600,  published in 2012 by Littlefield Press in London.

Robinson has worked extensively in program development at the university and national level with a special focus on Korean Studies.

Tae Gyun Park is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University and an Advisor to Minitry of Unification in Korea. He was a Coordinate Researcher at Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2007-2008. He authored An Ally and Empire: Two Myths in Korea-U.S. Relationship (AKS Press,2012) and "Beyond the Myth: Reassessing the Security Crisis in the mid 1960s on the Korean Peninsula" (Pacific Affairs, 2009).

 

Yumi Moon is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University where she has taught modern Korean history since 2007. She received her undergraduate degree and an MA in Political Science and International Relations from Seoul National University, and a PhD in East Asian Studies from Harvard University.

Moon is the author of Populist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910 (Cornell University Press, 2013). She is currently working on a new book tentatively titled Toward a Free State: Imperial Shift and the Formation of Post-Colonial South Korea, 1931–1950.

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China has surpassed Japan to become the second largest economy in the world, and is able to strongly impact the global economy, politics and society.  But can China sustain and maintain relatively high economy growth in the future?  Can China surpass the United States to become the largest economy in the world?  Will the "China Growth Model" change?  These questions are now of great concern to the world.  Being a member of the management team of China's leading investment bank for ten years, Tatsuhito Tokuchi will speak on these themes from his China insider point of view.  He will also touch upon the future prospect of the China-Japan relationship and Chinese foreign diplomatic policy, which are the questions that people in neighboring countries are very much concerend about. 

Tatsuhito (Ted) Tokuchi is a Managing Director of CITIC Securities, the largest investment banking in China, and Chairman of CITIC Securities International, a subsidiary of CITICS in Hong Kong.  He is known as an only executive of a native of Japan for large indigenous Chinese companies.  Tokuchi was born in Tokyo in 1952.  In 1964, he went to Beijing with his parents, and there he spent thirteen years of his youth.  Tokuchi joined Daiwa Securities Comapny in 1980 in Japan, and during his twenty-year career at Daiwa, he engaged in investment banking and management of teams in Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing.  In 2002, he joined CITIC Securities Company as a head of the investment banking division.  Tokuchi received a B.A. in Chinese Literature from Beijing University in 1976, and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Stanford University in 1985.

Abstract
Since the early years of her career working with children in some of the direst situations in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, Susan Bissell, UNICEF’s Chief of Child Protection, has witnessed children being targeted for such exploitative practices as human trafficking, recruitment into armed forces, and child labor. Violations of the child’s right to protection take place in every country and are massive, under-recognized, and under-reported barriers to child survival and development, in addition to being human rights violations. Children subjected to violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect are at risk of death, poor physical and mental health, HIV/AIDS infection, educational problems, displacement, and vagrancy.

 Protecting children from violence, exploitation and abuse is an integral component of protecting their rights to survival, growth, and development. UNICEF advocates and supports the creation of a protective environment for children in partnership with governments, national and international partners including the private sector, and civil society.  Bissell guides UNICEF’s Child Protection program in 170 countries, working with government officials and other partners to shape child protection policies. During this discussion, she will provide an overview of her role at UNICEF and the work she does to help ensure that governments honor their commitments to strengthen child protection systems and protect children.

In 2009, Susan Bissell was appointed to her current position in New York, heading all of UNICEF’s Child Protection work.  She oversees a team of professionals guiding efforts for children affected by armed conflict, child protection systems strengthening to prevent and respond to all forms of violence against children, and a range of other matters.

Abstract
In 1989 more than 700 South African political prisoners went on indefinite hunger strike to protest their detention. The unprecedented scale forced the South Africian government to release hundreds of incapacitated prisoners into public hospitals and enabled the active intevention of progressive medical professionals, social workers and human rights lawyers.

The presentation explores the widespread impact of these events in galvanizing the anti-apartheid struggle, energizing international human rights organizations and propelling the new international medical protocols on the ethical care of political prisoners on hunger strike.

Nayan Shah is Professor and chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern california. He is the author of Contagious Divides,Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Universty of California Press, 2001) and Stranger Intimacy Contesting Race Sexuality and Law in the North American West (University of California Press 2011) which was awarded the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize by the American Historical Association PAcific Branch for the most distinguished book on any historical subject. Since 2011 Shah is co-editor with Beth Freeman of GLO, The Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Co-sponsored by: American Studies, Comparative Literature. Modern Thought and Literature, History,Theater Arts and Performance Studies

Bio:

Emily Arnold-Fernández is the executive director of Asylum Access, an innovative international nonprofit that transforms the human rights landscape for refugees in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Using a unique combination of grassroots legal assistance and broader advocacy and strategic litigation efforts, Emily leads a team of refugee rights advocates to make human rights a reality for refugees, so they can live safely, work, send children to school and rebuild their lives. 

Emily was a fall 2012 Social Entrepreneur in Residence at Stanford's Program on Social Entrepreneurship. 

Abstract: 

For the last half-century, the international response to refugees has been internment.  Today, the average time in a refugee camp has reached 17 years. 

When refugees reach “safety,” we imprison them behind barbed wire fences, often for years, sometimes for generations.  We relegate them to starvation rations if aid runs low or politics intervenes.  They almost never have adequate access to police, courts, or other mechanisms that could protect them from crime or ensure justice for victims.  Adults are not allowed to go out and get a job, to feed their families and fill their days.  Children grow up knowing no other life. 

And refugees are protesting.  Recently, a riot broke out in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan after Syrian refugees attempted to leave the camp without permission. Hundreds of other refugee protests never make the news. 

Answers to this problem have so far focused on supporting so-called “urban refugees” – refugees who have chosen to leave camps, usually illicitly, to move to the city.  But what if we brought the city to the refugees? 

Building cities, not camps, in refugee arrival zones has the potential to transform refugee response.    Developing urban centers that can attract and support both locals and refugees creates the conditions for refugees to meet their own needs and make choices about their own lives, while also growing the regional and national economy and increasing opportunities for locals to thrive. 

Building a city in place of a camp won't be easy.  It requires convincing and coordinating multiple actors to make long-term investments in a refugee arrival area.  National and local governments must work with development funders to implement roads, high-volume sanitation systems, and other infrastructure.  Corporations must be invited, and at times incentivized, to locate factories, IT centers or other labor-intensive operations in the new location.  Underemployed local populations in other urban centers must be made aware and take advantage of opportunities in the emerging city, so that refugees do not vastly outnumber the local population.  This (correctly) sounds complex, but coordinating diverse actors for rapid development in the context of a mass influx lies exactly within the UN refugee agency's area of expertise. 

To build a successful city also requires a policy framework and enforcement infrastructure that can ensure resources are equitably distributed.  Refugees currently in urban areas often experience deep discrimination, exploitation, and poverty when their rights are not effectively protected.  Refugees must be able to access resources and opportunities equitably with locals if the new city is to live up to its promise. 

These and other challenges must be explored and overcome: Refugee camps may be built in a day (or at least a matter of weeks), but transforming our response from internment to urban center will take careful planning, piloting of iterations, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.  The possibilities if we get it right are enormous: In place of segregated, aid-dependent camps, we'll have integrated, emerging urban economies offering opportunities for millions.