Stanford University

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Problems in China's External Economic Engagement: The Thread Running Through ECFA with Taiwan, Trade Imbalances with USA and Negligence of WTO

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For the last decade, China has been at the forefront of pushing for regional economic integration, e.g. ASEAN-China FTA, Hong Kong-China CEPA, and China-Taiwan ECFA. Could this process culminate into a movement toward a European Union-style economic bloc? What are the implications of this development for US economic welfare? US unions have long viewed the cheap goods from China as harmful to US workers; and some US economists have recently blamed the cheap credit from China for the 2008 implosion of the US financial system. The present escalation of Chinese and US rhetoric on the exchange rate is worryingly akin to the mutual pawing on the ground before the great leap forward at each other. What is the sensible solution? There is no sign that the impasse over the Doha Round of trade negotiations would be resolved in the medium-term.  It is very surprising that China has adopted a near hands-off approach on this issue because it has been the biggest beneficiary of the open multilateral trading system. Has China's failure to help strengthen the WTO framework emboldened protectionism, much to its own detriment and the world's? In this seminar, Professor Woo will examine China's strategy of external economic engagement, including the recently signed ECFA between Beijing and Taipei. Woo argues that part (and only part) of the reason why China does not already have a coherent strategy could be that its present governance institutions create disincentives to move quickly to embrace such a strategy.  

 

Wing Thye Woo is Professor of Economics at U.C. Davis, Yangtze River Scholar at the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, Director of the East Asia Program within The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received an M.A. in Economics from Yale University, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He has advised the U.S. Treasury Department, the IMF, World Bank, and the United Nations. Professor Woo has published extensively, and his current research focuses on the economic issues of East Asia, international financial architecture, comparative economic growth, state enterprise restructuring, fiscal management, and exchange rate economics.

Philippines Conference Room

Wing Thye Woo Professor of Economics Speaker University of California at Davis
Seminars

Joon Nak Choi

Shorenstein APARC
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Joon Nak Choi is the 2015-2016 Koret Fellow in the Korea Program at Stanford University's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). A sociologist by training, Choi is an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research and teaching areas include economic development, social networks, organizational theory, and global and transnational sociology, within the Korean context.

Choi, a Stanford graduate, has worked jointly with professor Gi-Wook Shin to analyze the transnational bridges linking Asia and the United States. The research project explores how economic development links to foreign skilled workers and diaspora communities.

Most recently, Choi coauthored Global Talent: Skilled Labor as Social Capital in Korea with Shin, who is also the director of the Korea Program. From 2010-11, Choi developed the manuscript while he was a William Perry postdoctoral fellow at Shorenstein APARC.

During his fellowship, Choi will study the challenges of diversity in South Korea and teach a class for Stanford students. Choi’s research will buttress efforts to understand the shifting social and economic patterns in Korea, a now democratic nation seeking to join the ranks of the world’s most advanced countries.
 
Supported by the Koret Foundation, the Koret Fellowship brings leading professionals to Stanford to conduct research on contemporary Korean affairs with the broad aim of strengthening ties between the United States and Korea. The fellowship has expanded its focus to include social, cultural and educational issues in Korea, and aims to identify young promising scholars working on these areas.

 

2015-2016 Koret Fellow
Visiting Scholar

Values and History in U.S.-South Korean Relations

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". . . History, values, memory, and identity are significant elements that can influence the 'soft power' of an alliance built on 'hard power,' and policy makers of both nations should not overlook their importance," says Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Stanford Korean Studies Program, in the chapter that he contributed to the recently published book U.S. Leadership, History, and Bilateral Relations in Northeast Asia.

In his chapter "Values and History in U.S.-South Korean Relations," Shin discusses developments in the types of issues that the United States and South Korea have collaborated on in recent years--including free trade agreements, Iraq and Afghanistan military operations, and policy coordination toward North Korea--and the significance of issues of history, values, memory, and identity--such as inter-Korean reconciliation and memories of U.S. military maneuvers in Korea--that have given the U.S.-South Korea relationship a "more complex and multidimensional" nature.

Published by Cambridge University Press in October 2010, the book was edited by Gilbert Rozman of Princeton University's Department of Sociology.

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Cambridge University Press in "Issues of History, Values, Memory, and Identity in the U.S.-South Korea Relationship"
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Gi-Wook Shin

Edith Sheffer

Department of History 200-120

(650) 724-0074
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Former Assistant Professor of Modern European History
Former Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
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Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center

The German National Archive for Literature at Marbach: A Vision of 21st Century Culture

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Born in 1950, Professor Raulff studied philosophy and history (Doctorate from Marburg in 1877, Habilitation at Humboldt University, Berlin, in 1995. Since 1994, he has been an editor in the arts pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and culture editor since 1997. Since 2001, Professor Raulff has been Executive Editor in the arts section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In summer 1996, he was a fellow of the Getty Research Institute in Santa Monica (USA), and in the winter of 2003/2004 a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Since November 2004, he has been Director of the German Literature Archive Marbach and since November 2005 a Member of the Presidium of the Goethe-Institut. Professor Raulff is the winner of the Anna-Krüger prize of the academic staff in Berlin for scientific prose (1996), the Hans-Reimer Prize of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung in Hamburg (1997) and the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair 2010 (nonfiction).

Sponsored by The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Department of German Studies, SULAIR, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Green Library, Bender Room

Ulrich Raulff Director, German National Archive for Literature at Marbach Speaker
Lectures

Shorenstein APARC publishes final book in regionalism series

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Shorenstein APARC proudly announces the publication of Does South Asia Exist? Prospects for Regional Integration, the final volume in its three-part series on regionalism in Asia. With a special focus on India, this lively and broad-based volume uses a comparative perspective to draw on theories of trade, security, great-power influence, and domestic political theory to examine the prospects for South Asian regionalism. Other titles in the Asian regionalism series include Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (2008) and Cross Currents: Regionalism and Nationalism in Northeast Asia (2007).
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Payne Distinguished Lecture Series 2010: Mexico at a Crossroads

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President Obama nominated Carlos Pascual as the next United States Ambassador to Mexico in June 2009. The United States Senate confirmed the nomination on August 7 and Ambassador Pascual presented his credentials to the Mexican government on August 9, 2009. 

Ambassador Pascual has had a 23 year career in the United States Department of State, National Security Council (NSC), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

He served as coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at the U.S. Department of State, where he led and organized U.S. government planning to help stabilize and reconstruct societies in transition from conflict or civil strife.  

Ambassador Pascual was Coordinator for U.S. Assistance to Europe and Eurasia (2003), where he oversaw regional and country assistance strategies to promote market-oriented and democratic states. From October 2000 until August 2003, Ambassador Pascual served as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. From July 1998 to January 2000, Ambassador Pascual served as Special Assistant to the President and NSC Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, and from 1995 to 1998 as Director for the same region. From 1983 to 1985, Ambassador Pascual worked for USAID in Sudan, South Africa and Mozambique and as Deputy Assistant Administrator for Europe and Eurasia.

Most recently, Ambassador Pascual was Vice President and Director of the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. Ambassador Pascual received his M.P.P. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1982 and his B.A. from Stanford University in 1980. He has served on the board of directors for the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and the Internews Network. He has also served on the Advisory Group for the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund.

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Bechtel Conference Center

Carlos Pascual '80 U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Speaker
Lectures
Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Lecture Series

Immigration and Integration in Scandinavia: The Jewish Case

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As exemplified by the recent election results from Sweden, immigration is one of the most important and heated topics of debate in contemporary Scandinavian society. Immigrants are accused of being unwilling to integrate and adopt Scandinavian cultural values and practices, while the countries themselves are often criticized for not realizing that they have, in fact, become multicultural. By comparison, Jewish immigration to Scandinavia is generally regarded as a success and a strategy for others to emulate. In her presentation, Vibeke Kieding Banik will highlight some key features of Scandinavian Jewish history (with a particular focus on Norway) and argue that the skepticism characterizing the current debate was also present when Jews were allowed to emigrate to Scandinavia, and especially during the arrival of Eastern European Jews in the early 1900s.

Vibeke Kieding Banik, a Norwegian national, received her PhD in history in 2009 from the University of Oslo, where she is currently affiliated as a part time lecturer. She teaches a course entitled "The Holocaust" and supervises and examines undergraduate and postgraduate students. Her research interests include gender studies, modern Jewish history and immigration, integration and identity in Scandinavia. During her Anna Lindh fellowship at The Europe Center, Vibeke will begin work on her new project, “Gendered integration? The Jewish Encounter with Scandinavia, 1900-1940."

 

Audio Synopsis:

Dr. Kieding Banik begins by outlining the historical context of the Jewish experience in Scandinavia. She describes how early Jewish immigrants faced a homogenous, largely Lutheran Scandinavian population with strong anti-Semitic prejudices, with Norway even banning Jewish immigration entirely until 1851, for fear Jews would "overflow" the country. Immigration in all parts of Scandinavia was greatly restricted between 1880 and the beginning of World War I, before and after which time Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in greater numbers, often en route to other destinations.

While by 1918 Jews had full legal rights in Scandinavia, the amount of assimilation of Jews into local society differed between countries. For example, Jews in Denmark demonstrated higher levels of cultural assimilation, and prominence in society, academia, politics and civil society than in Sweden or Norway.

Dr. Kieding Banik goes on to describe the challenges immigrants faced as they attempted to balance assimilation with their Jewish identity; the effects of the Holocaust on Jewish populations in Scandinavia; the response of established Jewish communities to new immigrants; and the differences of experience between present-day Jewish immigrants to Scandinavia and their predecessors.

A discussion session addresses issues such as: the reasons for variety in the Jewish experience between Scandinavian countries; how post-war attitudes changed to facilitate increased Jewish integration; the relationship ofJews to other immigrant groups in Scandinavia; and the level of assistance for immigrant groups in Scandinavia today.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Vibeke Kieding Banik

616 Serra Street
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

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Visiting Scholar
Anna Linde Fellow
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Vibeke Kieding Banik is currently affiliated as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo. Her main focus of research is on the history of minorities in Scandinavia, particularly Jews, with an emphasis on migration and integration. Her research interests also include gender history, and her current project investigates whether there was a gendered integration strategy among Scandinavian Jews in the period 1900-1940. Dr. Banik has authored several articles on Jewish life in Norway, Jewish historiography and the Norwegian women’s suffragette movement. She has taught extensively on Jewish history and is currently writing a book on the history of the Norwegian Jews, scheduled to be published in 2015.

Vibeke Kieding Banik was a visiting scholar and Anna Lindh Fellow with The Europe Center in 2013-2014.

Vibeke Kieding Banik Speaker
Seminars
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