A group of writers and academics in China in recent years have come to be known as the "New Left." But the range of views encompassed under this rubric is broad and seemingly contradictory. Many are critical of the inequality that has come from the market reforms; some seem to look fondly back on the Maoist system and even the Cultural Revolution, while others hold very different views, preferring to call themselves "critical intellectuals," who see a "Chinese alternative" to a neoliberal market economy. This panel will explore the range of views within this group loosely termed the "New Left," to understand what exactly the "New Left" is. How are these "New Left" views different from the Old Left? What are the implications of these views for China's political and economic reforms? Discussing these issues are Wang Hui, a central figure in the "New Left" in China, and David Kelly, a leading Western scholar on the subject.

Wang Hui is professor of Chinese language and literature at Tsinghua University and guest professor at Nankai University. In May 2008, he was named one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy magazine. His essays, commentary, and teaching examine the paradoxes of social change in modern and contemporary China. He was editor-in-chief of Dushu, China's leading intellectual journal.

David Kelly is Professor of Chinese Politics at the China Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney. Professor Kelly's work ranges widely across Chinese politics: intellectual history, especially of Marxism and liberalism; political sociology, mainly of intellectuals, urban homeowners and migrant workers; and public policy, focusing on the dilemmas of governance under turbulent current conditions.

Why do community-based education and social persuasion programs for promoting healthy lifestyle and preventing chronic disease sometimes fall short of our expectations? Why are population effects so difficult to engineer and why are they so ephemeral?

This research carried out at USC, the Claremont Graduate University, and collaborating institutions in China integrates across social, behavioral, and neurocognitive sciences to address those questions. We conclude tentatively that the answer to each of the questions may lie in individual and context variability relative to program response, and that in order to more fully address the question of prevention program response variability requires engagement and integration across several levels of science to consider the roles of social groupings, environmental selection and design, social influence processes, and brain biology.

What works in one social, cultural or organizational setting may not be so effective in another. What works for persons with certain genetic and experiential backgrounds may be totally ineffective for persons with different dispositional or personality characteristics. In a series of community/school based prevention trials carried out in markedly different southern California and central China settings, we have uncovered domains of consistent response, and other domains of substantial environment- and disposition-based response variability.

A social influences based smoking prevention program framed in collectivist values and objectives worked to prevent smoking in one cultural setting but not another. And an individualist framed social influences program worked in the setting where the collectivist program did not. But the characteristics of the particular settings, which defined program success or failure, were different from what conventional (e.g., cultural psychology) wisdom would have led us to expect. Furthermore, both within and across cultural settings, the same individual dispositional characteristics moderated or determined program effectiveness, again in ways not predicted by the common cultural and behavioral science wisdom.

In recent studies carried out both in China and the U.S. we have found affective decision deficits, with known neural underpinnings, to account for rapid progression to regular smoking and binge drinking. These deficits are akin to the dispositional characteristics found earlier to moderate prevention program effects. Subsequent brain imaging studies confirm the hypothesized regions of neural involvement. Together these findings hold promise for more effective – situation and phenotype specific – approaches to engendering and sustaining more optimal individual and population health behavior.

Human Resource Management (HRM) is a core element of any organization.  This is especially true in public service organizations whose employees are often their most valuable resource. As an employee in a Japanese local government, Ichinomoto attempts to analyze the current problems in the personnel system that are severely criticized, to find a solution on how to develop more motivated government employees to provide efficient and customer satisfactory public service.

Mari Ichinomoto is a corporate affiliate visiting fellow at Shorenstein APARC for 2007-08 and 2008-09. She is also an official of the Industrial Recruitment and Location Division, Kumamoto Prefectural Government in Japan, with a mission to promote overseas direct investment into the country. Prior to this position, she was sent to Kumamoto trade promotion office in Singapore as a representative of the Kumamoto Prefectural Government dealing with trade promotion between Asia and Kumamoto. She graduated in foreign studies from Kitakyushu University.