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The Institutional Logic of Governance in China

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This talk focuses on the fundamental tensions inherent in governing China. Using examples from bureaucratic personnel management and social media controls, Prof. Zhou Xueguang will explore institutional responses and practices in state policymaking and implementation as governing entities in China have encountered changes and challenges of recent years. The talk will draw from Prof. Zhou’s recent book of the same title (published in Chinese, 中国国家治理的制度逻辑).

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Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of Sociology and a Senior Fellow at FSI, all at Stanford University. His main area of research is institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.

One of Zhou Xueguang's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy.

His recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China (Modern China, 2011), interactions among peasants, markets and capital (China Quarterly, 2011), multiple logics in village elections (Chinese Social Science 2010, with Ai Yun), and collusion among local governments in policy implementation (Research in the Sociology of Organizations 2011, with Ai Yun and Lian Hong; Modern China, 2010).

 

China Toolkit
This event is part of the 2018 Winter Colloquia; An Expanding Toolkit: The Evolution of Governance in China

China has undergone historic economic, social and cultural transformations since its Opening and Reform. Leading scholars explore expanding repertoires of control that this authoritarian regime – both central and local – are using to manage social fissures, dislocation and demands. What new strategies of governance has the Chinese state devised to manage its increasingly fractious and dynamic society? What novel mechanisms has the state innovated to pre-empt, control and de-escalate contention? China Program’s 2018 Winter Colloquia Series highlights cutting-edge research on contemporary means that various levels of the Chinese state are deploying to manage both current and potential discontent from below.

Xueguang Zhou

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-6392 (650) 723-6530
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development
Professor of Sociology
Graduate Seminar Professor at the Stanford Center at Peking University, June and July of 2014
Faculty Affiliate at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
Xueguang Zhou_0.jpg PhD

Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. His main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships.

One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He works with students and colleagues to conduct participatory observations of government behaviors in the areas of environmental regulation enforcement, in policy implementation, in bureaucratic bargaining, and in incentive designs. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy.

Another ongoing project is an ethnographic study of rural governance in China. Zhou adopts a microscopic approach to understand how peasants, village cadres, and local governments encounter and search for solutions to emerging problems and challenges in their everyday lives, and how institutions are created, reinforced, altered, and recombined in response to these problems. Research topics are related to the making of markets, village elections, and local government behaviors.

His recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China (Modern China, 2011); interactions among peasants, markets, and capital (China Quarterly, 2011); access to financial resources in Chinese enterprises (Chinese Sociological Review, 2011, with Lulu Li); multiple logics in village elections (Social Sciences in China, 2010, with Ai Yun); and collusion among local governments in policy implementation (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2011, with Ai Yun and Lian Hong; and Modern China, 2010).

Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the People's University of China. Zhou received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.

The Institutional Foundations of the Chinese Bureaucratic State

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Seminars

Nathaniel Persily

Stanford Law School Neukom Building, Room N230 Stanford, CA 94305
650-725-9875
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James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute
Professor, by courtesy, Political Science
Professor, by courtesy, Communication
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Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and Social Science One, a project to make available to the world’s research community privacy-protected Facebook data to study the impact of social media on democracy.  He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  Along with Professor Charles Stewart III, he recently founded HealthyElections.Org (the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project) which aims to support local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.   

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Sergiy Kvit

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Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2017-2018
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Serhiy Kvit is a prominent expert on educational issues, professor of Kyiv-Mohyla School of Journalism. He has been rector (president) of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy since 2007 until 2014. Serhiy Kvit occupied the position of the minister on education and science of Ukraine in 2014-2016 when progressive Law on Higher Education was adopted. In 2002-07 he was dean of the university’s social studies faculty. He founded the Kyiv-Mohyla School of Journalism in 2001 and became president of the Media Reform Centre, set up to initiate open debate and promote more transparent media and government. In 2005-2011 he served as chairman of the Consortium of University Autonomy. Dr Kvit’s research focuses on educational and media reforms, mass communications, and philosophical hermeneutics; he has published several books and numerous articles. He has a PhD from the Ukrainian Free University in Munich and also holds a doctorate in philology. He subsequently held a Fulbright scholarship at Ohio University, US, a Kennan Institute scholarship at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre in Washington DC and a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship at the University of Cologne. Currently Serhiy Kvit is a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University.

Featured Faculty Research: Elaine Treharne

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Elaine Treharne
Elaine Treharne earned her PhD from the University of Manchester, with a year as a Procter Graduate Fellow at Princeton University. She came to Stanford in 2012, after five years at Florida State, and fifteen years at the University of Leicester, where she had been Chair of the English Department, and interim Dean of the Faculty of Arts. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, of the Royal Historical Society, and of the English Association; and has won grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the NEH, the American Philosophical Society, and the Cyber Initiative. At Stanford, she is the Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and Director of Stanford Text Technologies. She is a Fellow of the STS Interdisciplinary Program, and a Stanford Fellow 2017-2019.

Elaine’s research is focused on medieval British manuscripts from c.600CE to 1450CE. Numerous publications—including The Old English Life of St Nicholas and Wiley-Blackwell’s Old and Middle English: An Anthology (which is about to be published in its fourth edition)—present edited and translated texts, ranging from sermons and religious poetry to extracts from Beowulf and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Other books and articles concern the prestige of the vernacular and the transmission of works in English from the late Anglo-Saxon period into the thirteenth century. This research has overturned previous scholarly opinion that held there to be little or nothing of value written in English between the Norman Conquest and the thirteenth century. In Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, Elaine discussed the significant corpus of manuscripts that survive from this period, and highlighted the contemporaneity and political functionalism of many of the works copied by English scribes.

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Her very recent work is focused on a History of Text Technologies (with Claude Willan for Stanford University Press), which traces trends in the production and consumption of all forms of human communication from 30000BCE to the present day. And in The Phenomenal Book, Elaine is focused on the interpretation of the handwritten book as an embodied whole (even where the only evidence is fragments and parts of books), which represents the traces and experiences of users and readers through time. It includes a chapter on ‘invisible things’, highlighting the sensual and emotional qualities of book production and use. She has also just completed the CyberText Technologies Project in CESTA—using historical patterns of textual facture and consumption to predict future text technologies; and she is just beginning a new digital project, Stanford Ordinary People’s Extraordinary Stories (SOPES), which recuperates the lives of otherwise unknown people whose ephemera (like letter collections, scrapbooks, notebooks, autograph albums, postcards, receipts, and photo albums) can be acquired from Ebay and bric-a-brac shops. Preliminary research shows that the amazing stories of people’s lives emerge from their written remnants.

Elaine’s teaching focuses on Text Technologies, Medieval English Literature, and the study of the Handwritten Book.

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100 Shades of Red

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This event has reached full capacity, please email Shannon at sj1874@stanford.edu to get on the waitlist.

 

Mikhail Zygar will talk about the perception of the Russian revolution of 1917 a hundred years later. He will explore how the centenary of the revolution is ignored by the Russian government and about the evolution of the attitude of the Russian society towards the revolution.

 

Mikhail Zygar is a Russian journalist, writer and filmmaker, and the founding editor-in-chief of the Russian independent news TV-channel, Dozhd (2010 - 2015). Prior to Dozhd, Zygar worked for Newsweek Russia and the business daily Kommersant, where he covered the conflicts in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Serbia, and Kosovo. His recent book All the Kremlin’s Men is based on an unprecedented series of interviews with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, presenting a radically different view of power and politics in Russia. Zygar is the founder of Project1917. Free History, an online project that enables participants to learn about the events of 1917 from those who lived during this defining moment of history. He is also the founder of Future History Lab - the team behind Project1917. His new book, The Empire Must Die, will be released in the US on November, 7th. It portrays the years leading up to the Russian revolution and the vivid drama of Russia's brief and exotic experiment with civil society before it was swept away by the Communist Revolution.

 

Co-sponsored by The Europe Center, European Security Initiative and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

 

 

Mikhail Zygar journalist
Lectures
European Security Initiative
European Security Initiative Lecture Series

Meduza: Doing New Media in a Perfect Storm

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Headquartered in Riga, Latvia, Meduza.io is the world’s number one independent source for professional reporting on Russia. The site also operates an ambitious translation project, making its content available to the global community at Meduza.io/en. Meduza launched in October 2014 and by August 2017 the monthly readership of Meduza exceeded 7.5 million unique visitors, with more than 700,000 app downloads and more than 2,000,000 followers on social media. Meduza and Buzzfeed recently announced an editorial partnership focused on joint investigative reports. Ilya Krasilshchik, Meduza’s publisher, will explain what it takes to mount such a project in an environment flooded by the Kremlin’s propaganda, and Anna Veduta, Meduza’s global outreach director, will discuss Meduza’s English-language edition.



Meduza is an online newspaper and news aggregator covering Russia and the Eurasian region, headed by Galina Timchenko, the former chief editor of the news website Lenta.ru, which during her tenure became the most popular news outlet on the Russian Internet. Meduza is run by a team of Russian journalists who resigned from their jobs at Lenta.ru, following Timchenko’s unexpected removal from her post by Alexander Mamut, the Putin-connected oligarch who owns the website.

Not long before the annexation of Crimea, Mamut fired Timchenko and replaced her with Alexey Goreslavsky, who had previously managed the pro-Kremlin website Vzglyad and later was a high-level official at the state-run news agency Interfax. The reason given for Timchenko’s dismissal was an official warning issued to Lenta.ru by Russia’s state censor because one of Lenta’s stories (an interview with a Ukrainian nationalist leader) contained a hyperlink to materials deemed extremist. More than 80 editors and reporters – nearly Lenta’s entire newsroom – quit in protest, publishing an open letter calling Timchenko’s ouster “an act of censorship” and a violation of Russia’s media laws. Timchenko and most of the staff who resigned with her went on to found Meduza. Explaining the decision to base Meduza in Latvia and register it outside the .RU domain zone, Timchenko told Forbes: “Right now, establishing an independent Russian-language news outlet in Latvia is possible, while in Russia it is not.”

 

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Ilya Krasilshchik is Meduza’s publisher. In 2008, after leaving college at 21, Ilya became the chief editor of Afisha, then Moscow’s most influential entertainment and city life magazine. In his five years at Afisha, the magazine published more the 100 issues, including an issue dedicated to “Coming Out” stories (a response to Russia’s criminalization of so-called “gay propaganda”), as well as several special editions, including issues on “the oral history of the Russian media” and “the oral history of the Russian Internet.” In October 2014, he left Afisha and joined two partners to launch Meduza, a groundbreaking Russian-language news outlet based in Riga, Latvia. As of July 2017, Meduza’s monthly readership exceeded 7 million unique visitors, with 750,000 app downloads, and a reach of more than 15,000,000 people on social media. Seventy percent of Meduza’s audience is based in Russia.

 

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Anna Veduta is Meduza’s global outreach director, and also heads Meduza in English in Washington, D.C. Prior to Meduza, Anna served as Press Secretary to Alexey Navalny, Russia’s leading opposition politician and 2018 presidential hopeful. Anna headed Navalny's press office during his Moscow mayoral campaign in 2013, when he leveraged social media channels to break a blockage by Russia’s traditional media, nearly forcing a runoff vote. Anna holds degrees in political science and international relations from Moscow State University and Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs.

 

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Ilya Krasilshchik Meduza.io
Anna Veduta Meduza.io
Lectures

Hye Sung Kim

616 Serra StreetEncina Hall E301Stanford, CA94305-6055
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Hye Sung Kim joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) during the 2017–18 academic year from MBC (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation), one of the leading South Korean TV and radio network companies. During her career as a reporter at MBC, she reported from Baghdad in 2004 on the war in Iraq, and also covered North Korean issues in a weekly news magazine program Unification Observatory in 2013-14.

Kim's research interests focus mainly on inter-Korean relations and the interactions between the powerful nations surrounding the Korean peninsula. During her research period at Shorenstein APARC, Kim will study this subject with a view as a journalist.

Kim received a BA in Aesthetics with minor in International Relations from the Seoul National University.

2017-18 Visiting Scholar

Jerry Kaplan

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Adjunct Lecturer, Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Adjunct Lecturer, Department of Computer Science
Former Research Affiliate
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Jerry Kaplan is widely known as an Artificial Intelligence expert, serial entrepreneur, technical innovator, educator, bestselling author, and futurist. He invented several ground-breaking technologies including handheld tablet computers, online auctions, and electronic keyboard musical instruments.

A renowned Silicon Valley veteran, Jerry Kaplan founded several storied technology companies over his 35-year career, two of which became public companies. Kaplan may be best known for his key role in defining the tablet computer industry as the founding CEO of GO Corporation in 1987. Prior to GO, Kaplan co-founded Teknowledge, Inc., one of the first Artificial Intelligence companies to commercialize Expert Systems, which went public in 1986. In 1994, Kaplan co-founded Onsale, Inc., the world's first Internet auction website, which went public in 1997. In 2004, he pioneered the emerging market for social games by starting Winster.com, where he served as CEO for eight years.

Jerry Kaplan is an Adjunct Lecturer in Computer Science and the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy program at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His research and teaching focusses on the social and economic Impact of Artificial Intelligence. He is an inventor on more than a dozen patents, and has published over twenty refereed papers in academic journals and conference proceedings. Kaplan holds a PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Chicago.

Kaplan is the author of four books, including the best-selling classic "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" (Houghton-Mifflin).  Selected by Business Week as one of the top ten business books of 1995, Startup was optioned to Sony Pictures.  "Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (Yale University Press) was honored by The Economist as one of the top ten science and technology books of 2015. His books "Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford University Press, 2016) and “Generative Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University Press, 2024) were both Amazon new release #1 best sellers in Artificial Intelligence.

He is a frequent public speaker and commentary contributor to major newspapers and magazines. His opinion pieces have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, among other publications. He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Red Herring, and Upside. He received the 1998 Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Northern California; served on the Governor's Electronic Commerce Advisory Council Member under Pete Wilson, Governor of California (1999); and received an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from California International Business University, San Diego, California (2004). 

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Sergey Parkhomenko

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA  94305

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Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, 2016-2017
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Sergey Parkhomenko is Russian journalist, publisher, and founder of several projects aimed at developing civic activism and promoting liberal values in Russia.

Parkhomenko is a former political reporter, commentator and editorialist at popular daily newspapers; founder and first editor-in-chief (1995-2001) of 'Itogi', Russia's first current affairs weekly, published in cooperation with Newsweek; editor-in-chief of several publishing houses producing translated fiction and non-fiction literature; editor-in-chief of 'Vokrug Sveta', Russia's oldest monthly magazine.

Since August 2003 Parkhomenko has been presenting 'Sut' Sobytyi' ('Crux of the Matter') on Radio Echo of Moscow, a weekly programme making sense of the events of the past week.

Parkhomenko was instrumental in organizing mass rallies in Moscow in Winter 2011 – Spring 2012. He organized the 'Vse v sud!' ('Go to court!') a civic campaign helping people to file lawsuits against widespread election rigging. He is one of the founders of 'Dissernet' ('DissertationWeb'), a network community dedicated to exposure of dissertation plagiarism, and 'Posledny Adres' ('Last Address') civil campaign helping people to create a collective memorial dedicated to the victims of political repression in the Soviet Union and Russia. He is also one of the founders of 'Redkollegia' program, an independent award supporting free professional journalism in Russia.

Parkhomenko is a Public Policy fellow with the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, DC), since September 2016 and a Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center of Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies since March 2017.

Indian historian: Freedom of expression key to vibrant democracy

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Protecting freedom of expression is essential to vibrant democracies and to meet the needs of people now and into the future, Indian historian Ramachandra Guha said at a Stanford event seeking to draw people together for policy-relevant discussions about India’s growth following 25 years of reforms.

Guha’s remarks were part of a colloquium titled “Eight Threats to Freedom of Expression in India,” and one in a series, co-hosted by the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and Center for South Asia.

The colloquia, which continue this spring, are motivated by an opportunity to garner reflections and expertise from Kathleen Stephens, the William J. Perry Fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute, who served as chargé d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy New Delhi in 2014.

“As I was preparing to go to India, I read Ram’s extraordinary book India after Gandhi, which provided much-needed historical, cultural and political context,” Stephens said. “When I visited Bangalore, we met and instantly clicked as we talked about U.S.-India relations. It’s a pleasure to welcome him back to Stanford.”

Guha, a renowned author and scholar, has written numerous critically acclaimed books about India’s history and culture as well as social ecology, and is a frequent commentary contributor to publications such as The Telegraph and Hindustan Times. In 2000, Guha was a visiting professor at Stanford, where he taught courses on the politics and culture of South Asia and cross-cultural perspectives on the global environmental debate.

India is often referred to as the world’s largest democracy for its population size of 1.3 billion and system of governance since partition and independence in 1947. Guha said that, while India is “solidly and certifiably democratic,” there are serious flaws, including growing threats to freedom of expression of Indian artists, filmmakers and writers.

Indian society, Guha said, has become too sensitive to criticism, wherein “somebody will take objection” to any message. This kind of environment has encouraged newspaper editors to self-censor, for example, and led public figures to, at times, neglect to protect artists, filmmakers and writers.

In total, Guha detailed eight threats to freedom of expression in contemporary India: 1) archaic colonial laws affecting the first amendment, 2) imperfections in the judicial system, 3) rising importance of identity politics, 4) complicity of the police force, 5) pusillanimity of politicians, 6) dependence of media on government-sponsored advertisements, 7) dependence of media on commercially-sponsored advertisements and 8) ideologically–driven writers.

Would an absence of those threats imply freedom of expression? Responding to the question from the audience, Guha lamented that the answer wasn’t simple. His task was to offer a diagnosis of the challenges, he said, and not provide instruction on how to solve them, but in general, focused efforts bear change.

“Building democracies is about quiet persistent work,” Guha said of next steps in the process to extinguish threats to freedom of expression. “I think quiet persistent work in repairing our institutions, modernizing our laws and improving civil society institutions can still mitigate some of the threats.”

Guha expressed optimism about India’s civil society, noting an expansion in the supply of non-governmental organizations working on social issues and private philanthropists funding projects in that sector. But he tempered: “we could do more.”

Stephens ended the event by thanking Guha for leading the discussion, and referenced America’s first president George Washington, who at the end of his term in office, called upon citizens to be “‘anxious, jealous guardians of our democracy.’”

“And, I see that today in Ram and in the many people here – very jealous, anxious and passionate guardians of our democracy – who we can learn a lot from,” she said.

Listen to an audio recording of the colloquium.

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Indian historian Ramachandra Guha speaks to an audience of nearly 100 faculty, students and community members about freedom of expression in contemporary India, Oksenberg Conference Room, April 5, 2017.
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