It has been another exciting year for the Sejong Korea Scholars Program (SKSP), an intensive online course on Korean history and culture and U.S.–Korea relations for U.S. high school students. Some of the highlights from this year include the all-star lineup of guest speakers, a revamped curriculum that added an introduction to Korean American history and experience, and a diverse cohort of 23 intellectually curious and hard-working students. 

Each year, scholars and experts join students in Virtual Classroom (VC) sessions to share their scholarly knowledge and expertise on given topics. This year, the lineup of speakers included Professor Danny Leipziger from George Washington University, Professors Kyeyoung Park and Namhee Lee from UCLA, and Ambassador Mark Lippert, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea.

Students learned in detail about South Korea’s rapid economic development after the Korean War from Professor Danny Leipziger, who worked as Senior Country Economist for South Korea in the 1980s during his tenure at the World Bank. With Professor Namhee Lee, students examined the complex and intricate relations among the countries involved in the Korean War; and with Ambassador Mark Lippert, they explored recent developments in U.S.–South Korea relations.

This year, students were introduced to Korean American history within the context of broader Asian American history. They also learned about race relations between Korean Americans and other ethnic communities in the United States from Professor Kyeyoung Park, the author of LA Rising: Korean Relations with Blacks and Latinos after Civil Unrest (2019).

Students expressed their excitement to engage with the scholars and experts in VCs. Likewise, all of the scholars and experts who joined as guest speakers mentioned how much they enjoyed meeting the students and how they were impressed by the insights with which students asked their questions.

Each year, students from across the United States apply to participate in the competitive SKSP, which offers undergraduate-level content and rigor. Not too surprisingly, this year’s cohort of students demonstrated a strong intellectual curiosity, active participation in sharing their diverse perspectives and synthesis of the readings and lectures, and an excellent work ethic shown in assignments and a research paper. Many students mentioned how much they enjoyed interacting with their peers in the course, particularly in discussions, where they engaged in vibrant conversations about the course content in a respectful and positive manner. Many students frequently shared relevant external resources that they had found, which contributed to the richness of the discussion.

Student Clara Boyd commented, “It has been so rewarding and fun for me to complete the readings/lectures … and then discuss ideas with classmates, and it was really cool to have the opportunity to meet with different scholars and experts during the VCs. I always looked forward to interacting with the guest speakers and my classmates on Wednesday evenings! This program has been so impactful and eye-opening, and my perspective of Korea and the world has changed a lot since I started SKSP.”

Many of the students, who are taking multiple AP courses and participating in various extracurricular activities, mentioned that they have never learned much about Korea in their history courses. They are often surprised when they learn about Korean history that involves the United States and the long history of relations between the United States and Korea.

Some of the aims of the SKSP are to provide students with various perspectives on history, encourage them to develop critical thinking skills in assessing historical documents and evidence, and challenge them to interrogate common historical narratives and understand the complexities of history written from different perspectives. The analytic tools that students are encouraged and trained to develop in the SKSP will be a valuable tool as they continue to grow and expand as students and future leaders.

SPICE also offers online courses to U.S. high school students on Japan (Reischauer Scholars Program) and China (China Scholars Program), as well as other student programs for students abroad.

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The American Institute for Indonesian Studies and Michigan State University Asian Studies Center are holding the inaugural Conference on Indonesian Studies this week, June 23-26, 2021. The conference's theme is "Indonesian Studies — Paradigms and New Frontiers." On June 24, APARC's Southeast Asia Program Director Donald K. Emmerson delivered a keynote address, "Scholarship, Autonomy, and Purpose: Issues in Indonesian Studies." Watch the session below:

The Conference on Indonesian Studies seeks to expand research dissemination, activities, and collaboration on the academic study of Indonesia to better understand the archipelago's historical, cultural, linguistic, literary, artistic, economic, environmental, and political dimensions, as well as its role in the Indo-Pacific and the world. The conference connects scholars and academic communities from multiple disciplines based in Indonesia, the United States, the Asia-Pacific, and other global contexts.

This article was originally published in The Wire China on June 20, 2021. You can see the full article here.

Q: In your book, Invisible China, you paint a stark portrait of rural China and those left behind in the country’s economic boom, and you offer some dire warnings about the consequences of such a large and potentially growing underclass. Can you tell us how and why they’ve been left behind?

A: Well, China has 1.4 billion people, and nearly 70 percent of them are rural. That’s more than 900 million people. That means one out of nine people in the world is from rural China. They’re factory and construction workers. They’re in the informal service sector. They’re the ones who sweep the streets and collect the garbage and deliver the packages to the door and open little stores and sit on the curbside and hawk apples and plums. 

The ironic thing is that even though there are so many of them, in many ways they are invisible to the outside world. They mostly live in villages in central and western China, which is a separate world from the cities that we see on CNN or read about in The New York Times. They have to send their kids to rural schools in their own remote local counties. They get their health care in home counties. 

In fact, in a number of ways it’s very much like the United States. We have 40,000 school districts in the United States. China has 40,000 school districts. All the school districts in the U.S. are funded by local property taxes. So if you’re rich, like Palo Alto [California] or Cambridge [Mass.], you have lots of resources to invest in your schools. About the only people they hire as new teachers at Palo Alto High School have PhDs. But if you’re in Fresno, California, or in the Appalachians or Mississippi, property taxes are really low, so the localities cannot afford to have very good schools. 

The same thing happens in China. Schools are supported by local fiscal resources, which in rural counties are terribly scarce. So you’ve got this system where there’s really two castes: a rural caste and an urban caste. You can move from rural to urban if you get a college degree but that tends to be very hard.

In fact, China has some of the highest rates of inequality in the world. And yet many of these people will say, “I’m much better off than my parents were…” And until now, this has sort of allowed them to buy into the system. There is also a long-held belief that the progress of the past will continue; that they will be better off 10 years from now. This is the China dream. 

But if some of those people at the bottom begin to lose hope that the future will be better — and, if they see the lives of others, meanwhile, continuing to improve — you could start to have the emergence of a polarized society where wages for those in the lower income strata start to top off or even fall, and their employment prospects also fall. People could begin to say, “I don’t know what my life is going to be like 10 years from now.” 

That’s what I try to address in the book; precisely that danger. It’s not a 100 percent certainty that the economy is going to unfold in that way, but if polarization does begin to emerge, hope for a better life would begin to fade for a large segment of society. And if it is going to happen, it is likely to begin to unfold now, since this often happens when a nation tries to go from an upper middle income society to a high income one; the nature of jobs change and the nature of opportunities in high-skilled economies changes.

Read the full Q&A.

On Saturday, May 22, 2021, Stanford Global Studies (SGS) hosted the 2021 Education Partnership for Internationalizing Curriculum (EPIC) Symposium, which featured presentations by 11 2020–21 EPIC Fellows. SPICE, along with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, is SGS’s EPIC Partner. The following reflection is a guest post by EPIC Fellow Maiya Evans, assistant professor at Skyline College, who gave a presentation on “Reimagining Public Health.”

In a congratulatory note written to the graduating cohort, Tom Fingar, the Shorenstein Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), similarly encouraged the students to lean into the unique perspective they’ve gained from their experiences during this year.

“This year was extraordinary in many ways, but the disruptions and coping mechanisms of the COVID pandemic may be more indicative of the world you will inherit than the one we are leaving behind. Discovering new ways to do normal things has prepared you for whatever comes next as well as or better than any other experiences and accomplishments might have. Go forth with confidence that you are ready for whatever lies ahead.”

For most of the MIP graduates, what lies ahead are careers in government, the military, technology, clean energy, law, diplomacy, and research which will take them afield to Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, Texas, Florida, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Belgium, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates in the coming months. For some, there are a few more years of school as they work to complete joint degrees in additional areas of policy and governance.

For all, the shared experiences of the last fifteen months have created a unique bond. Corie Wieland, a graduating second-year student and the president of the International Policy Student Association, affirmed to her fellow graduates that, “Whether in one month, one year, or ten years, all of us will always be merely a Zoom call or group chat away. No matter the time zone or the country, our friendships have already proven true.”

That commitment and gratitude to the MIP community is shared throughout the Class of ‘21. Anna Nguyen Yip, a specialist in cyber policy and security, says that despite the upheaval of the past year, she feels prepared to move out of the classroom and into the world. 

“As I am graduating from Stanford, I am more confident than ever to embark on the next chapter of my career,” said Nguyen Yip. "This has been the perfect opportunity to combine my passions in education, frontier technologies, and public policy. I will be eternally grateful for the amazing experience I had at MIP.”