The Korea Program at Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) will mark its 20-year anniversary with a conference focused on North Korea’s geopolitics and South Korea’s pop culture wave (Hallyu), two aspects of Korea that continue to intrigue the public. Exploring how to translate this public attention into an increased academic interest in Korea, the conference will be headlined by Ban Ki-moon, former United Nations Secretary-General, and Soo-Man Lee, Founder and Chief Producer of SM Entertainment, who will join a lineup of speakers including SUHO, leader of K-pop group EXO. The two-day event will take place on May 19 and May 20, 2022, at Stanford’s Bechtel Conference Center, and is free and open to the public.

Breaking with the format of a traditional academic conference, the event will bring together scholars and experts to envision new horizons for the field of Korean Studies. It will include panel discussions on issues such as security on the Korean peninsula, North Korean human rights, U.S.-DPRK relations, and the rising global popularity of South Korea’s soft power, with a focus on K-dramas and K-pop. Scholars from Stanford and other prestigious North American universities will join on-stage conversations with leading practitioners including Joohee Cho, Seoul Bureau Chief at ABC News, and Angela Killoren, CEO of CJ ENM America, as well as government officials including Kim Sook, the former South Korean Ambassador to the UN, and Joon-woo Park, the former South Korean Ambassador to the EU, both former visiting fellows at the Korea Program.

Kim Hyong-O, the former speaker of South Korea’s National Assembly as well as a Korea Program alum, and Geun Lee, the president of the Korea Foundation, will deliver remarks at a private dinner event, which will recognize major donors and supporters of the Program.

“We are delighted to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Korea Program with such an outstanding lineup of speakers,” says Gi-Wook Shin, William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea at Stanford and the Program’s founding director. “For the past two decades, the Program has produced exceptional research on pressing issues, fostered connection between scholars and policymakers, and nurtured numerous students,” Shin notes. These accomplishments will be on display in the Korea Program’s new digital archives, which will be unveiled at the conference.

The event will also feature previews of two brand new documentaries, one on K-pop and the other on North Korean human rights, directed by Hark Joon Lee. “It is our hope that these documentaries will deepen global understanding of these issues and be used to help teach the next generation of students about Korea,” says Shin, who provided input on the films along with his research team at the Korea Program.

“We are incredibly grateful to those who have helped the Korea Program thrive over the past two decades,” notes Shin. “This conference will be an opportunity to share our thanks and reflect on our achievements while looking forward to the Program’s future.”

For conference registration, as well as the full agenda and speaker list, please visit the event page. Registration will open on Monday, May 2, 2022, at 9:00 a.m. PDT.

The conference will be live-streamed on APARC's YouTube channel.

About the Korea Program

The Korea Program at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is a West Coast hub of scholarship on contemporary Korea and the issues shaping the future of the Korean Peninsula and U.S.-Korea relations. Our work examines these topics from regional and comparative perspectives through cultural, political, and economic lenses. We train and support emerging Korea scholars and convene experts from academia, government, business, and civil society for dialogue, research, and publishing activities that inform policymakers in the United States and Korea and strengthen the bonds between the two countries. For more information, visit our website.

Media Advisory and Press Contact

Journalists interested in covering the conference should contact Shorenstein APARC’s Associate Director for Communications and External Relations Noa Ronkin at noa.ronkin@stanford.edu by May 17 at 9:00 a.m. PT to register. At the venue, they will be required to present a press credential from an established news organization. Freelance reporters should email a letter from the news organization for which they work to Noa Ronkin by the May 17 deadline. The press area is limited and press seating is not guaranteed.

Why would authoritarian regimes lacking electoral incentives invest in deliberative institutions designed to respond to citizen appeals? There are many reasons, according to APARC Predoctoral Fellow Tongtong Zhang, who argues that providing responses through such channels can incentivize citizens to conform to the regime and appease potential dissidents, while also informing them and the general public that organized opposition is not an effective way to pursue their interests.

Zhang is currently at work on her dissertation, entitled “Whose Voice Matters? Loyalists, Dissidents, and Responsiveness in China,” which examines this very question by looking at deliberative institutions as well as other political communications channels in China. After completing her predoctoral residency at APARC this summer and earning her PhD, she will join the Stanford Internet Observatory at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center as a Postdoctoral Scholar. While at Stanford Internet Observatory, she will collaborate with Dr. Shelby Grossman and other scholars on research projects studying authoritarian regimes’ online political communication.

In the following Q&A, Zhang discusses her research and fellowship experience at Stanford. The interview was slightly edited for length and clarity.

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Your research centers on how authoritarian regimes (particularly the Chinese government) perpetuate their rule over societal actors and how preferences and behaviors of these societal actors are shaped as a result. How did you come to develop an interest in this topic?

I think it’s a combination of my life experience in China and the literature I read in the seminars on comparative politics in my first year of PhD. Those readings introduced me to differences in the logic of governance between democratic and authoritarian governments. In democracies, the behavior of officials is mainly shaped by the incentive to win elections. In non-democracies, the governance behavior of officials is largely shaped by the desire to secure citizen compliance and, by extension, to maintain social stability. Existing literature on how autocracies obtain citizen conformity has largely focused on two strategies — co-optation and repression. However, while growing up in China, I observed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has more tools at its disposal to control the public. 

Among these tools, I am particularly interested in the fast-growing channels for public deliberation under authoritarian rule because, without free popular elections, authoritarian rulers should have little incentive to invest in these institutions designed for citizens to express grievances and make appeals to the government. So I am curious about what role these quasi-democratic, participatory institutions play in authoritarian control and how societal actors (e.g. citizens, firms) feel about and react to the regime thanks to these institutions.  

You are working on your first book project; can you tell us a bit about what to expect from it? 

The book is based on my dissertation and asks why dictators lacking electoral incentives invest in deliberative institutions that are designed to respond to citizen appeals. An overarching question is whether the government actually responds. If it does, do all citizen appeals receive equal consideration? Previous research on authoritarian responsiveness largely contends that autocrats prioritize the appeals of potential dissidents. However, my research leads me to argue that autocrats may respond to all appeals but with qualitatively different types of responses.

More specifically, I hypothesize that for autocrats, providing substantive responses — responses that resolve the appealed problems — to regime loyalists can incentivize more citizens to conform to the regime. On the other hand, providing symbolic responses — responses that are rhetorical without solving the problems — to potential participants of collective action can appease these potential dissidents while also informing them and the general public that organized opposition is not an effective way to pursue their interests. Taken together, I theorize that authoritarian officials would selectively provide substantive responses to citizens who show higher compliance with the regime’s control and that officials would selectively provide symbolic responses to citizen appeals that are more likely to elicit collective action. I support this argument using primary government documents, interviews with local officials, and original, large-scale datasets of online appeals and government responses in China.

You have mentioned your interest in political communication in non-democracies. What are some aspects of political communication that you find especially interesting? 

My research primarily focuses on deliberation and responsiveness in non-democracies. I am curious as to why dictators invest in deliberative institutions designed to answer citizen grievances, under what circumstances these institutions would help citizens resolve their problems, and perhaps more importantly, how these deliberative institutions shape citizen attitude towards the regime and their political behaviors.

Beyond deliberation and responsiveness, I’m also interested in other communication strategies (e.g. education, media) that authoritarian regimes use to secure citizen compliance. For example, I’m currently working on a paper studying the political behavior of teachers at Confucius Institutes (CI), the Chinese government’s overseas program for cultural and language promotion. The prevailing view in media and policy writings is that the Chinese regime prescribes specific actions that CI teachers must take (e.g. censorship) when encountering politically sensitive questions. However,  using interviews, a global survey, and experimental methods among CI teachers in over 70 countries, we find that the Chinese regime only prescribes broad goals to CI teachers, such as “defending China’s national interests,” without specifying how to pursue these goals behaviorally. We also find that under these ambiguous instructions, men and women CI teachers choose divergent behaviors to advance the regime's goals.​​

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges to development in non-democracies? 

Development is a huge topic. I’m only able to provide some observations based on my research about authoritarian responsiveness. In this area, the biggest challenge I observe is still the lack of institutional channels for citizens to hold the government accountable. It is a sign of development that authoritarian governments are investing increasingly in deliberation channels, online and offline, for citizens to express grievances and demand public service. While less than 10% of appeals in my sample receive a substantive response from the government, it also shows that some citizens do get their problems resolved through these participation channels. 

Yet, when authoritarian officials fail to provide substantive responses, citizens have no legal, formal channels to punish officials. In democracies, unsatisfied petitioners can vote for the opposing party in the next election, expose government unresponsiveness to media outlets, and even sue the government in court. However, in autocracies, these methods of punishment are weak or absent. Some citizens may use non-institutional methods to punish the government, such as protesting or exposing official misconduct on social media. But these behaviors, which aim to attract a lot of public attention, are often cracked down on if they achieve this goal. Without credible punishment from the bottom-up, authoritarian officials treat these deliberative institutions as a tool for their social control rather than a channel to serve the public.

My research also finds that the Chinese central government does conduct regular audits on government responsiveness at the local level. But this top-down monitoring is largely symbolic and focuses on the quantity rather than the quality of officials’ responses to citizens. Therefore, I think that to improve government responsiveness in non-democracies, it is still crucial that the customers of these deliberation channels, that is, citizens, have some formal, legal channels to punish officials when officials fail to resolve the appealed problems. 

Your robust research methodology includes qualitative interviews, archival research, computational methods with large-scale datasets, and survey and field experiments. How did you develop this approach?

My PhD department (Political Science) provides us with many training opportunities for both quantitative and qualitative methods since our first year in the program. Our course sequences in quantitative methods and formal theory introduced me to a variety of powerful analysis tools and causal inference designs. I’ve also received quantitative training from the departments of Statistics, Communication, and Computer Science. In particular, the methods courses taught by Prof. Jennifer Pan and Prof. Dan Jurafsky helped me lay a good foundation for skills in web-scraping and natural language processing. 

My qualitative training started from the Chinese politics course sequence taught by Prof. Jean Oi. Later on, I continuously learned from Prof. Oi every time I talked with her about doing fieldwork in China. She guided me to extract and focus on the “big question” from lots of seemingly unstructured details I collected in the field, and she also gave me many helpful suggestions on what homework I should do before going to the field, how to approach people in the field, and how to design my questions and learn to improvise during the interviews. 

This combination of quantitative and qualitative training has made me a strong believer in mixed-methods research. I think that quantitative methods are powerful in showing systematic patterns and qualitative methods are powerful in uncovering the mechanism underlying these patterns. Moreover, qualitative fieldwork has helped me a lot in understanding how things actually get done at the micro level (e.g. the step-by-step workflow of a specific bureau within a municipal government when handling a citizen appeal), which I think is useful for identifying important research questions and developing hypotheses before collecting data systematically. 

Beyond your book project, what are you working on while at APARC? How has your time here aided your research?

I very much appreciate APARC’s support in the 2021-22 academic year. I was applying for postdoctoral fellowships in the past fall, and the Center’s generous funding and supportive staff have greatly helped me concentrate on market preparation. I also enjoyed the office space provided by APARC. Due to the pandemic, we were not in the office all the time but while I was there, I had very interesting conversations with several other fellows at the Center. Chatting with them broadened my horizon about the Asia-Pacific region. They also offered me some fresh perspectives on my research, which I find helpful while revising my dissertation. 

Thanks to these valuable resources provided by APARC, I was able to make progress on my dissertation and several related projects. In one paper, I show that citizen petitioners can increase government responsiveness by using certain rhetoric to communicate with local officials in China. I find that compared to appeals using a “legal script”, which invokes citizens’ legal rights to obtain public service, appeals using a script of “performance legitimacy,” which invokes the CCP’s moral commitment to deliver socio-economic welfare to the public, have a significantly higher likelihood to obtain substantive responses from local governments. Another paper I’m working on investigates how the characteristics of petitioners, appeals, and government responses change over time in China by comparing the appeals under Hu Jintao’s rule vs. appeals under Xi Jinping’s rule.

Has the global pandemic affected your ability to travel and do research? How have you adapted?

I was planning to conduct field interviews in the Sichuan province of China in 2020 and had to cancel because of the pandemic. However, on the positive side, the travel restrictions provided me with a relatively long period of time to concentrate on the quantitative parts of my dissertation and enabled me to make substantial progress on some time-consuming work such as scraping Weibo and reading and coding the posts. 

What is on the horizon for you? What's next? 

I plan to graduate this summer and will join the Stanford Internet Observatory at FSI’s Cyber Policy Center as a Postdoctoral Scholar. While at Stanford Internet Observatory, I will collaborate with Dr. Shelby Grossman and other scholars on research projects studying authoritarian regimes’ online political communication. I will also go onto the tenure-track academic market and hopefully get a faculty position in a university.

FSI scholars are now engaged with their network of Ukrainian alums, checking in on their safety and plans, while also advocating on behalf of a democratic Ukraine in major media outlets. McFaul has given Congressional testimony, written op-eds, been involved in back-channel discussions with senior administration officials, and even appeared on the Stephen Colbert show to discuss the issue. He is the co-editor of "Revolution in Orange," a 2006 book that examines Ukraine’s democratic breakthroughs.

Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow and former director of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), has recently published articles on the strategic situation in Ukraine while sharing everyone’s deep concerns for Ukrainians under assault.

“We’ve been trying to help them in any way we can,” he said.

To deepen FSI’s expertise on Ukraine, the institute has established a Director’s Fund for Ukraine Initiatives, which will provide discretionary support for research, teaching, and policy outreach on Ukraine.

From Activism to Political Leadership

Well before the Russian invasion, FSI was already helping Ukraine cultivate its democracy.

“Our theory of change,” Fukuyama said, “is that we understand we can’t do things like provide policy advice very well to a country that’s so far away from us. But what we can do is try to help train a new generation of leaders who will inherit power, and in the near future, hopefully lead the country to a better outcome as we keep in touch with and support them.”

Toward this, the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program provides a 10-month academic training fellowship in support of three mid-career practitioners working actively as policy-makers, legal professionals, entrepreneurs and leaders of civil society organizations in Ukraine.
 

Alums of this and other programs include Artem Romaniukov, a civil society activist now in Ukraine who trained in the Emerging Leaders Program during 2019-20; the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk, a visiting scholar in 2021; and Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Draper Hills alum from 2018 and Ukrainian journalist who’s now writing about the war, including social media posts in real-time – “I’m reporting on the ground in Kyiv on what I see with my own eyes,” she wrote.

Oleksandra “Sasha” Ustinova, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and alum of the Ukrainian Emerging Leaders Program (2018-19), is lobbying members of Congress. “We are still negotiating for help. And I tell them that every day of negotiations is thousands of lives,” Ustinova told the Washington Post. She was in Washington, D.C., when Russia invaded Ukraine, and has been unable to return.

Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, a Ukrainian rock musician who also holds a degree in theoretical physics, was a visiting scholar in 2017-18. After his time at Stanford he created a new political party, Holos, in his country. More recently, after the Russians bombed a children’s and maternity ward in Mariupol, he posted a video on Twitter on his observations while assisting on the scene there. In another video, Vakarchuk is seen singing to Ukrainians who are sheltering in the subways. He has traveled to major cities during the conflict — including badly targeted ones such as Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and Zaporizhzhya — raising morale among troops and civilians.

Changes may be afoot for the Emerging Leaders Program. Fukuyama said it may not be viable for next year, because Ukrainian men are currently not allowed to leave the country. “One thing we’ve been thinking of is possibly converting that program into a more research-oriented program on Ukraine,” he said.

Fukuyama said that for the Leadership Academy for Development, rather than bringing people to campus, FSI sends faculty to countries like Ukraine to deliver one-week intensive training sessions to classes of 25. He says the academy has been held in Ukraine a half dozen or so times, including in its capital of Kyiv, with an estimated 150-200 participants.

Making the transition from civil society into actual politics is one of the key messages in the 17-year-old Draper Hills Summer Fellows program, Fukuyama noted. An alumna, Svitlana Zalishchuk (’11), won a seat in Ukraine’s parliament, along with alumni Serhiy Leshchenko (’13) and Mustafa Nayyem (’14). Before joining government, Zalishchuk led a Ukrainian NGO focused on freedom of speech. After serving in parliament, all three of these alums are now working directly to defeat Putin’s invading army: Leshchenko is an aide to Zelenskyy’s chief of staff; Nayyem is the Deputy Minister of Infrastructure of Ukraine, and Zalishchuk works for Ukraine’s state-owned gas company, Naftogaz.

In a recent BBC interview, Zalishchuk said, “I think the Ukrainian president made it very clear — he will not surrender, the Ukrainian army is backing him, the Ukrainian people are backing him, and the international community also demonstrated an incredible unity to stand up to Putin.”

Long before the Russian invasion, FSI’s special relationship with Ukraine attracted prominent coverage. In 2016, The New Yorker article, “Reforming Ukraine After the Revolutions,” described how the Draper Hills Summer Fellows program helped Ukrainian journalists Leshchenko and Nayyem rise to political leadership around the time of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in 2014.
 

Fukuyama explained how the program works: “We teach them about the structures of democracy as if they were Stanford undergraduates – this is what different political systems look like, here is how you can effect political change.”

Another on-campus program designed to offer research and teaching opportunities to former senior government officials is the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow program, which brought the former prime minister of Ukraine, Oleksiy Honcharuk, to FSI in 2021. Honcharuk said then, “Stanford is the best place to rethink Ukraine’s past and plan the future, and that’s why I am especially happy to be here and add my expertise and experience to this important process.”

Alum Perspective from the Frontlines

Artem Romaniukov ('20), is now in Ukraine fighting the Russians with a rifle in hand and his family nearby.

“I was with my wife and six-year-old daughter in Kyiv when Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began. I grabbed my family and brought them to a place I thought they would be safer. Then I immediately volunteered to join the Ukrainian Defense Force. I have already seen active fire, which has resulted in a dreadful number of casualties, both for Ukrainians and Russians,” he wrote in an article for FSI. He is currently in Western Ukraine awaiting a new deployment.

An entrepreneur with his own start-up company, Mriya, Romaniukov worries about the consequences the war is having on Ukraine's economy. 'For my own company, and with many Ukrainian businesses, we have managed to move our operations to safe places and are ready to export services. But international companies are concerned about the security situation and whether it is viable to place orders with Ukrainian firms. But it is crucial to keep the Ukrainian economy working right now.”

Ukrainian Student Perspectives

In a time of great uncertainty and anxiety, Ukrainian and other students on campus have found solace and solidarity at teach-ins and events hosted by FSI scholars, sharing what they’re doing to help family and friends back home and to raise awareness on campus.

Writing in the Stanford Magazine, Anastasiia Malenko, a junior studying economics and political science, described an online chat she was participating in with friends back home when the first Russian bombs began hitting Ukrainian cities. On the day after the invasion, Malenko organized a protest with a Stanford Ukrainian student group, urging immediate sanctions on Russia as well as military and humanitarian aid to the country. She also helped create a website, standwithukraine.how, and joined in the writing of a Stanford Ukrainian Community Joint Statement on Russia’s War Against Ukraine.

She later wrote in an email, “My family and friends are now demonstrating continued resilience in their fight for freedom against the Russian invaders. From coordinating humanitarian aid to managing local volunteer networks, they are writing the history of an independent democratic Ukraine.”

Malenko, who will join the CDDRL honors program as a senior, considers herself fortunate be in touch with friends and family back home. “As the rest of the world, I am hearing their stories of resilience, perseverance, pain, and calls for help … One of the bright moments is telling them about the support I’ve been witnessing on the Stanford campus and beyond — it makes them feel seen.”

She said FSI’s programs fully demonstrate the institute’s commitment to Ukraine. “Through my undergraduate career, these programs have been invaluable as they provided room for Ukrainian perspective in a field of Eastern European studies, usually dominated by the focus on Russian colonial history.”

Stanford’s Unwavering Support

FSI’s support of Ukrainian democracy reflects what Stanford stands for as a university dedicated to research, teaching and engagement – its slogan is “the winds of freedom blow.” When President Marc Tessier-Lavigne addressed the Faculty Senate on Feb. 24 shortly after the Russian invasion, he said, “There are scholars within our community who bring experience and deep insight to this range of issues, and who will help policymakers as they navigate this situation.”

He added, “It is important to remember that an international conflict of this scale will have effects and consequences for many members of our community, in many different ways. This is a difficult moment, and my thoughts are with all who are affected.”

A few days earlier, as Russian forces massed and an attack loomed, Tessier-Lavigne had joined McFaul to meet with Ukrainian students and scholars who had assembled for a dinner gathering at the latter’s home. The Stanford president was also instrumental in lighting up the iconic Hoover Tower on March 11 in the blue and yellow colors of the Ukrainian flag as a show of solidarity with the country and its people.

Policy, Research and Discovery

Steve Pifer, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and William J. Perry Research Fellow at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), said the Ukrainians have resisted the Russian invasion with courage, tenacity and determination, surprising many, particularly in the Kremlin, which significantly underestimated the resistance that the Russian military would encounter.

“For many Ukrainians, this is an existential fight.  If they lose, they lose their democracy, however imperfect it might be.  And they also lose the vision that many, particularly the young, hold for Ukraine: to become a normal European state, such as the Czech Republic or Slovenia” he said.

Pifer has worked with CDDRL on conferences and panels on Ukraine and has many relationships with fellows from the Emerging Leaders Program. “That is a great project that gives young, rising Ukrainians the chance to study and think at Stanford about how best they can develop a modern Ukrainian state. And they have gone back to do some remarkable things.”

He says CDDRL maintains an active network of Ukrainian alumni of its programs:  “It has been interesting to keep up with some of them, both via Zooms and in person when I have visited Kyiv.”

FSI scholars like Pifer have long studied Ukraine, Russia and post-Soviet bloc nations in the context of emerging democracies. In 2002, McFaul wrote about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the prospects for democracy in Eastern European countries like Ukraine.
 

In his article “The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World,” McFaul noted that “the balance of power and ideologies at the time of transition had path dependent consequences for subsequent regime emergence,” whether democratic, partially democratic or autocratic.

In another essay, “Indifferent to Democracy” prescient of FSI’s future Ukrainian efforts, he argued for boosting democratic aspirations in those countries by “empowering human rights activists through high-level meetings with U.S. officials” and launching “assistance programs designed to strengthen the independent media, trade unions, political parties, civil society and the rule of law.”

In February of this year, as Russia built up its forces near Ukraine, McFaul wrote about Russian president Putin’s greatest fear: “To Putin, the Orange Revolution undermined a core objective of his grand strategy: to establish a privileged and exclusive sphere of influence across the territory that once comprised the Soviet Union.”

Rose Gottemoeller, the former Deputy Secretary General of NATO and Steven C. Házy Lecturer at CISAC, has written that, “In some ways, the simplest solution for NATO and the United States would be for Ukraine to decide that it didn’t want to join NATO, take it out of the constitution, and reinsert a provision about nonalignment.” However, she notes that the U.S. should make it clear that Ukraine won’t be ready for this for decades, and that a “moratorium is the best way of doing this at this point.”

On Russia’s misinformation efforts, Kathryn Stoner, the Mosbacher Director at CDDRL and an expert on Russian politics, told the Los Angeles Times that Russian outlets like RT harbor Russian propaganda.

“It is definitely the mouthpiece of the Russian government,” said Stoner, author of the 2021 book, "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order."

Fukuyama makes an optimistic case for what the post-invasion world might look like: “A Russian defeat will make possible a ‘new birth of freedom,’ and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.”