APARC is pleased to announce that two young scholars, Jeffrey Weng and Nhu Truong, have been selected as our 2020-21 Shorenstein postdoctoral fellows on contemporary Asia. They will begin their appointments at Stanford in autumn 2020.

The Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship on Contemporary Asia is open to recent doctoral graduates dedicated to research and writing on contemporary Asia, primarily in the areas of political, economic, or social change in the Asia-Pacific, or international relations in the region.

Fellows develop their dissertations and other projects for publication, present their research, and participate in the intellectual life of APARC and Stanford at large. Our postdoctoral fellows often continue their careers at top universities and research organizations around the world and remain involved with research and publication activities at APARC.

Meet our new postdoctoral scholars:

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Jeffrey Weng
Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia

Research focus: How does society shape language, and how does language shape society?

Jeffrey Weng is completing his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a BA in political science from Yale University, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies and Theory and Society. His research focuses on the evolution of language, ethnicity, and nationalism in China.

Jeffrey's dissertation examines language in the context of Chinese nation-building. Mandarin Chinese was artificially created about a century ago and initially had few speakers. Now, it is the world’s most-spoken language. How did this transition happen? Weng's research shows how the codification of Mandarin was done with the intention to match existing practices closely, but not exactly. Top-down efforts by the state to spread the new language faced enormous difficulties, and ultimately its wide-spread adoption may have been catalyzed more by economic growth and urban migration. By investigating how these monumental social and political changes occurred, Weng’s work deepens the understanding of societal shifts, past and present, in one of the world’s predominant nations, while also contributing more broadly to scholarship on class, the educational reproduction of privilege, and the construction and reconstruction of race, ethnicity, and nation.

At Shorenstein APARC, Weng will continue to publish papers based on his doctoral research while reworking his dissertation into a book manuscript.

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Nhu Truong
Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia

Research focus: Why are some authoritarian regimes more responsive than others?

Nhu Truong is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, with an area focus on China, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia. She received an MPA in International Policy and Management from the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, an MA in Asian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in International Studies from Kenyon College. Prior to embarking on her doctoral study, she worked in international development in Vietnam and Cambodia, and with policy research on China.

Her research focuses on authoritarian politics and the nature of communist and post-communist regimes, particularly as it pertains to regime repressive-responsiveness, the dynamics of social resistance, repertoires of social contention, and political legitimation.
 
Nhu Truong’s dissertation explains how and why the communist, authoritarian regimes of China and Vietnam differ in their responsiveness to mounting unrest caused by government land seizures. Drawing on theory and empirical findings from 16 months of fieldwork and in-depth comparative historical analysis of China and Vietnam, Truong uses these two regimes as case studies to explore the nature of responsiveness to social pressures under communist and authoritarian rule and the divergent institutional pathways that responsiveness can take. She posits that authoritarian regimes manage social unrest by relying on raw coercive power and by demonstrating responsiveness to social demands. But not all authoritarian regimes are equally responsive to social pressures. Despite their many similarities, the Vietnamese communist regime has exhibited greater institutionalized responsiveness, whereas China has been relatively more reactive.
 
As a Shorenstein Fellow, Truong will develop her dissertation into a book manuscript. She plans to continue exploring the variable outcomes and knock-on effects of authoritarian responsiveness in places like Cambodia, which will further support her comparative research on China and Vietnam and lay the groundwork for her next project.

Last fall, SPICE provided me an opportunity to design and organize its first post-collegiate online course. The Stanford-Hiroshima Collaborative Program on Entrepreneurship (SHCPE’s Japanese-friendly pronunciation, “shu-ppe”) was conducted in collaboration with the Hiroshima Business and Management School (HBMS) at the Prefectural University of Hiroshima (PUH). HBMS offers the only Master of Business Administration (MBA) program in Japan’s western region of Chugoku and Shikoku. Interacting with amazing individuals on both sides of the Pacific, this unique experience brought me priceless moments.

Innovation in Itself

SHCPE, a course to help nurture entrepreneurial thinking, was an innovation in itself. The program was born out of Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki’s vision to design and implement a social challenge to help accelerate Hiroshima’s regional growth. Harnessing the resources of Stanford and Silicon Valley, the new online class was launched to empower the students and to revitalize the business sector in Hiroshima. SPICE created the curricular content and HBMS provided the learning environment designed to maximize the academic experience for the students. As the course’s curriculum designer, I leveraged the expertise of my fellow SPICE online instructors and applied design thinking, a method developed by Stanford faculty, practiced widely in Silicon Valley, and popularized globally to understand the end-user, challenge our assumptions, and reconstruct alternative perspectives to generate innovative ideas.

Bridging Silicon Valley and Hiroshima

SHCPE’s 18 MBA students in Hiroshima met every Saturday morning for three hours from September 28 to November 16, 2019 to connect online with Japanese entrepreneurs, professionals, and scholars in Silicon Valley. The first virtual class focused on discussing the mindset expected for the course as well as the conceptual framework. In the following six weeks, we welcomed guest speakers who shared their diverse experiences. What were their prior experiences, expertise, and insights? What resources did they have to achieve their goals? What were the major promoters and impediments to their journeys? Through active exploration of these questions, the students were exposed to real-life case studies to analyze Silicon Valley’s ecosystem and think critically about entrepreneurial competence and qualification. The course was conducted entirely in Japanese.

The guest speakers engaged and energized the HBMS students. Akira Onozato spoke about the evolution of Silicon Valley over the past three decades. His diverse experiences as a serial entrepreneur painted a rich picture of the San Francisco Bay Area’s growth cycle. Akira’s story provided a great segue to Rika Nakazawa’s lecture on the mindset and culture surrounding startups. Rika highlighted grit, tolerance of failure, and branding as important assets of successful entrepreneurs. Dr. Fumiaki Ikeno spoke on the landscape and trends in the medical device industry. He pointed to Japan’s declining productivity and economic competitiveness and discussed the persistent fear of failure as a major impediment to promoting entrepreneurship. As an active venture capitalist on both sides of Pacific, Seiji Miyasaka explained the funding schemes and financial cycles surrounding the investment climate of startups. Using case studies, he highlighted the role of investors who act as coaches to aspiring entrepreneurs. Tatsuki Tomita’s definition of a startup was shaped by his own experiences of starting multiple companies. His discussion of the pivot pyramid provided a visual guideline for how startups can experiment with ideas and find their product-market fit. Tasha Yorozu shared her expertise as a legal counsel, walking through the steps of starting a business in Silicon Valley. Along with Jumpei Ishii, a visiting legal counsel from Japan, Tasha further discussed their observations of successful startup practices and common pitfalls. The diversity of SHCPE guests represented the vibrant Silicon Valley community. 

Active Learning and Knowledge Construction

While these professionals provided informative accounts of their expertise, SHCPE’s ultimate goal was to help each HBMS student to develop a mindset of an active learner. The MBA students were constantly challenged to think critically about the weekly theme, and work in pairs or teams to discuss assigned topics. The experience offered a dynamic and interactive learning environment for the Japanese students in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who had been accustomed to traditional lecture-style formats. SHCPE’s curriculum based on design thinking adopted an inquiry-based learning pedagogy, which engaged every student through weekly assignments and in-class discussions. During the first class, the students were informed that SHCPE would not teach them entrepreneurship. Instead, this course would provide them with the opportunity to reconstruct their knowledge of entrepreneurship and innovation based on what they observe, hear, and feel during the class. In addition, the students were required to provide feedback after each class, which was utilized to redesign the lesson plans for the following week.

This active and experiential mindset was envisioned by Dr. Gary Mukai, Director of SPICE and a renowned Japan–U.S. educator. “At SPICE, we provide students an opportunity to own their learning experience. Education is about empowering the students,” Dr. Mukai asserts. This tradition comes from the American philosopher and education reformist John Dewey, who said, “I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.” SHCPE’s inaugural curriculum aimed to implement this philosophy through direct, real-life interaction with founders and movers in Silicon Valley, and through the iterative process to deconstruct and reconstruct their knowledge on entrepreneurship.

Innovation Through Education

What SHCPE aimed to achieve was innovation through education. The weekly three-hour online class was roughly divided into three parts: guest lecture, class discussion, and interview. Prior to the interview session, a pre-assigned team of three students met with me in a separate online room and brainstormed their interview questions. For the majority of the students, it was their very first time to formally interview a person, and the experience brought a novel learning opportunity to think critically about entrepreneurial competence. Many commented on the challenge and the excitement of getting to know strangers by engaging them in a thoughtful conversation. The weekly interview highlighted the philosophy, aspiration, and raw sentiments of the guest speakers, evoking passion, energy, and empathy among the students.

Through observations and discussions, the SHCPE participants built their own knowledge and understanding of what constitutes entrepreneurship. To conclude the eight-week course, I had the chance to visit Hiroshima to offer the last SHCPE class in person, and to observe first-hand their reaction to the curriculum design. Meeting the students as well as the HBMS faculty and staff who supported SHCPE, was an incredibly rewarding experience. My class focused on education and empowerment. The students discussed in teams how they might develop a curriculum to promote entrepreneurship in Hiroshima. Much to everyone’s delight, one of the students expressed his hope to apply what he learned in this course and serve as an angel investor to support local startups. The class culminated with a closing ceremony during which each student was presented an official Certificate of Completion. My trip to Hiroshima also provided a valuable opportunity to visit Governor Yuzaki as well as PUH President Ken-ichi Nakamura, who emphasized the importance of adding a real-life, global perspective to the HBMS curriculum. Programs such as SCHPE were made possible through these leaders’ foresight and support.

SHCPE strived to adopt the pedagogy of active learning and the toolsets of design thinking to implement Governor Yuzaki’s vision of “learning innovation.” The course appears to have succeeded in helping to realize his vision as one student reflected upon his experience:

This class does not intend to offer answers [to the question what entrepreneurship is]. Instead, it urges the students to constantly think on their own and engage themselves in learning. This is very different from the Japanese traditional pedagogy, which relies on rote memorization and mechanical process of practice problems. This class highlighted the fundamental difference in the philosophy of how we look at education, and I enjoyed this eye-opening experience.

SHCPE ’19 concluded with much enthusiasm. SPICE looks forward to continuing its partnership with HBMS to build upon the invaluable lessons learned from the inaugural program. With Stanford e-Hiroshima, an online course for high school students managed and taught by my colleague Rylan Sekiguchi, SPICE will continue its efforts to empower the people in Hiroshima.

Acknowledgement

I am greatly indebted to Dr. Gary Mukai for providing me this invaluable opportunity. Special thanks go to Carey Moncaster, Dr. HyoJung Jang, Jonas Edman, Meiko Kotani, Naomi Funahashi, Rylan Sekiguchi, Sabrina Ishimaru, Dr. Tanya Lee, and Waka Takahashi Brown for their valuable comments on the preliminary curriculum. I thank all of my colleagues at SPICE for their support and encouragement throughout the process.

My special gratitude goes to Akira Onozato, Dr. Fumiaki Ikeno, Jumpei Ishii, Rika Nakazawa, Seiji Miyasaka, Tatsuki Tomita, and Tasha Yorozu who took the time out of their busy Friday evening to participate in the virtual classroom. Their contagious enthusiasm energized the students.

Last but not least, I would like to express my deep appreciation to my collaborators at HBMS. I thank Professor Katsue Edo for his hard work and commitment to implement the program, Professor Yasuo Tsuchimoto for his technical expertise and dedication to administer the distance-learning, Professor Narumi Yoshikawa for supporting in-class discussions, and Kazue Hiura, Yoshihiko Oishi, and Kenji Okano for their capable assistance and thoughtful arrangements. Last but not least, my heartfelt congratulation goes to the 18 MBA students who successfully completed SHCPE ’19. The inaugural class will always have a special place in my heart.

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Related article:

• Stanford Alumni Weekend (October 24–27, 2019) Feature: Hiroshima Governor Hidehiko Yuzaki & SPICE’s Dr. Mariko Yoshihara Yang and a New Online Course for MBA Students in Japan

 

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University is pleased to announce that Oriana Skylar Mastro has been appointed an FSI Center Fellow. She will begin at FSI on August 1, 2020, working primarily within the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), and in the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) as well. 

Mastro is currently an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where her research addresses questions at the intersection of interstate conflict, great power relations, and the challenges of rising powers – with a focus on China and East Asian security. Mastro’s work focuses on how perceptions of power impact the process and precursors to conflict, such as military competition and coercion.

Mastro serves as an officer in the United States Air Force Reserve, currently as a Senior China Analyst at the Pentagon.  Her latest book, “The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime,” was published in 2019. Mastro is also a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where she is working on a book about China's challenge to U.S. primacy. 

“At a time of growing U.S.-China tensions, Stanford is fantastically fortunate to have hired Professor Mastro, one of the leading experts of her generation in the world on all security issues regarding China and Asia more broadly,” said FSI Director Michael McFaul. “I am very excited  that Oriana will be joining us this fall.” 

Gi-Wook Shin, the director of APARC, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea, and senior fellow at FSI, added, “We are thrilled to welcome Oriana back to Stanford. Over the course of her academic and military career, Oriana has distinguished herself as a security expert who not only advances nuanced understanding of Chinese and U.S. policies and strategies in the Asia-Pacific region, but also urges us to probe the notion of great-power competition and to question our ways of thinking about China in the global order. She is a terrific addition to our community of scholars and practitioners.”

At Stanford, Mastro will teach and mentor students in the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program and the CISAC Honors program. She will also direct independent reading and research projects, serve as a guest lecturer, and advise undergraduate honors theses and graduate student projects and theses.

“The rise of China and the implications that its rise has for the reemergence of great-power competition ranks among the greatest international challenges of our day,” said Colin Kahl, Co-director of CISAC. “Few people have deeper expertise on China, its military, and the geopolitical implications of the U.S.-China rivalry than Oriana Mastro. She is a world-class scholar and we are very fortunate to have her join the FSI family.”

For her contributions to U.S. strategy in Asia, Mastro won the Individual Reservist of the Year Award in 2016. She has published widely, including in Foreign Affairs, International Security, the Economist, International Studies Review, Journal of Strategic Studies, The Washington Quarterly, Survival, and Asian Security among others. She earned a B.A. in East Asian studies at Stanford with honors in international security and an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics at Princeton University

“With its community of multidisciplinary experts combined with its focus on scholarship and policy impact, there is no better place for me than FSI,” said Mastro. “I am thrilled to have the opportunity to expand my research on China security and military issues at the institute. I’m particularly excited about teaching courses on international security, a topic I first discovered as a CISAC honors student.”  

A Q&A with Professor Stephen Stedman, who serves as the Secretary General of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.

Stephen Stedman, a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford, is the director of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age, an initiative of the Kofi Annan Foundation. The Commission is focused on studying the effects of social media on electoral integrity and the measures needed to safeguard the democratic process.  

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Commission which includes FSI’s Nathaniel Persily, Alex Stamos, and Toomas Ilves, launched a new report, Protecting Electoral Integrity in the Digital Age. The report takes an in-depth look at the challenges faced by democracy today and makes a number of recommendations as to how best to tackle the threats posed by social media to free and fair elections. On Tuesday, February 25, professors Stedman and Persily will discuss the report’s findings and recommendations during a lunch seminar from 12-1:15 PM. To learn more and to RSVP, visit the event page.

Q: What are some of the major findings of the report? Are digital technologies a threat to democracy?

Steve Stedman: Our report suggests that social media and the Internet pose an acute threat to democracy, but probably not in the way that most people assume. Many people believe that the problem is a diffuse one based on excess disinformation and a decline in the ability of citizens to agree on facts. We too would like the quality of deliberation in our democracy to improve and we worry about how social media might degrade democratic debate, but if we are talking about existential threats to democracy the problem is that digital technologies can be weaponized to undermine the integrity of elections.

When we started our work, we were struck by how many pathologies of democracy are said to be caused by social media: political polarization; distrust in fellow citizens, government institutions and traditional media; the decline in political parties; democratic deliberation, and on and on. Social media is said to lessen the quality of democracy because it encourages echo chambers and filter bubbles where we only interact with those who share our political beliefs. Some platforms are said to encourage extremism through their algorithms.

What we found, instead, is a much more complex problem. Many of the pathologies that social media are said to create – for instance, polarization, distrust, and political sorting begin their trendlines before the invention of the Internet, let alone the smart phone. Some of the most prominent claims are unsupported by evidence, or are confounded by conflicting evidence. In fact, we say that some assertions simply cannot be judged without access to data held by the tech platforms.

Instead, we rely on the work of scholars like Yochai Benkler and Edda Humphries to argue that not all democracies are equally vulnerable to network propaganda and disinformation. It is precisely where you have high pre-existing affective polarization, low trust, and hyperpartisan media, that digital technologies can intensify and amplify polarization.

Elections and toxic polarization are a volatile mix. Weaponized disinformation and hate speech can wreak havoc on elections, even if they don’t alter the vote tallies. This is because democracies require a system of mutual security. In established democracies political candidates and followers take it for granted that if they lose an election, they will be free to organize and contest future elections. They are confident that the winners will not use their power to eliminate them or disenfranchise them. Winners have the expectation that they hold power temporarily, and accept that they cannot change the rules of competition to stay in power forever. In short, mutual security is a set of beliefs and norms that turn elections from being a one-shot game into a repeated game with a long shadow of the future.

In a situation already marred by toxic polarization, we fear that weaponized disinformation and hate speech can cause parties and followers to believe that the other side doesn’t believe in the rules of mutual security. The stakes become higher. Followers begin to believe that losing an election means losing forever. The temptation to cheat and use violence increases dramatically. 

Q: As far as political advertising, the report encourages platforms to provide more transparency about who is funding that advertising. But it also asks that platforms require candidates to make a pledge that they will avoid deceptive campaign practices when purchasing ads. It also goes as far as to recommend financial penalties for a platform if, for example, a bot spreading information is not labelled as such. Some platforms might argue that this puts an unfair onus on them. How might platforms be encouraged to participate in this effort?

SS: The platforms have a choice: they can contribute to toxic levels of political polarization and the degradation of democratic deliberation, or they can protect electoral integrity and democracy. There are a lot of employees of the platforms who are alarmed at the state of polarization in this country and don’t want their products to be conduits of weaponized disinformation and hate speech. You saw this in the letter signed by Facebook employees objecting to the decision by Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook would treat political advertising as largely exempt from their community standards. If ever there were a moment in this country that we should demand that our political parties and candidates live up to a higher ethical standard it is now. Instead Facebook decided to allow political candidates to pay to run ads even if the ads use disinformation, tell bald-faced lies, engage in hate speech, and use doctored video and audio. Their rationale is that this is all part of “the rough and tumble of politics.” In doing so, Facebook is in the contradictory position that it has hundreds of employees working to stop disinformation and hate speech in elections in Brazil and India, but is going to allow politicians and parties in the United States to buy ads that can use disinformation and hate speech.

Our recommendation gives Facebook an option that allows political advertisement in a way that need not enflame polarization and destroy mutual security among candidates and followers: 1.) Require that candidates, groups or parties who want to pay for political advertising on Facebook sign a pledge of ethical digital practices; 2.) Then use the standards to determine if an ad meets the pledge or not. If an ad uses deep fakes, if an ad grotesquely distorts the facts, if an ad out and out lies about what an opponent said or did, then Facebook would not accept the ad. Facebook can either help us raise our electoral politics out of the sewer or it can ensure that our politics drowns in it.

It’s worth pointing out that the platforms are only one actor in a many-sided problem. Weaponized disinformation is actively spread by unscrupulous politicians and parties; it is used by foreign countries to undermine electoral integrity; and it is often spread and amplified by irresponsible partisan traditional media. Fox News, for example, ran the crazy conspiracy story about Hilary Clinton running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor in DC. Individuals around the president, including the son of the first National Security Adviser tweeted the story. 

Q: While many of the recommendations focus on the role of platforms and governments, the report also proposes that public authorities promote digital and media literacy in schools as well as public interest programming for the general population. What might that look like? And how would that type of literacy help protect democracy? 

SS: Our report recommends digital literacy programs as a means to help build democratic resilience against weaponized disinformation. Having said that however, the details matter tremendously. Sam Wineburg at Stanford, who we cite, has extremely insightful ideas for how to teach citizens to evaluate the information they see on the Internet, but even he puts forward warnings: if done poorly digital literacy could simply increase citizen distrust of all media, good and bad; digital literacy in a highly polarized context begs the question of who will decide what is good and bad media. We say in passing that in addition to digital literacy we need to train citizens to understand biased assimilation of information. Digital literacy trains citizens to understand who is behind a piece of information and who benefits from it. But we also need to teach citizens to stand back and ask, “why am I predisposed to want to believe this piece of information?”

Q: Obviously access to data is critical for researchers and commissioners to do their work, analysis and reporting. One of the recommendations asks that public authorities compel major internet platforms to share meaningful data with academic institutions. Why is it so important for platforms and academia to share information?

SS: Some of the most important claims about the effects of social media can’t be evaluated without access to the data. One example we cite in the report is the controversy about whether YouTube’s algorithms radicalize individuals and send them down a rabbit hole of racist, nationalist content. This is a common claim and has appeared on the front pages of the New York Times. The research supporting the claim, however, is extremely thin, and other research disputes it. What we say is that we can’t adjudicate this argument unless YouTube were to share its data, so that researchers can see what the algorithm is doing. There are similar debates concerning the effects of Facebook. One of our commissioners, Nate Persily, has been at the forefront of working with Facebook to provide certified researchers with privacy protected data – Social Science One. Progress has been so slow that the researchers have lost patience. We hope that governments can step in and compel the platforms to share the data.

Q: This is one of the first reports to look at this problem in the Global South. Is the problem more or less critical there?

SS: Kofi Annan was very concerned that the debate about digital technologies and democracy was far too focused on Europe and the United States. Before Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in the United States and Brexit elections of 2016, its predecessor company had manipulated elections in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. There is now a transnational industry in election manipulation.

What we found does not bode well for democracies in the rest of the world. The factors that make democracies vulnerable to network propaganda and weaponized disinformation are often present in the Global South: pre-existing polarization, low trust, and hyperpartisan traditional media. Many of these democracies already have a repertoire of electoral violence. 

On the other hand, we did find innovative partnerships in Indonesia and Mexico where Election Management Bodies, civil society organizations, and traditional media cooperated to fight disinformation during elections, often with success. An important recommendation of the report is that greater attention and resources are needed for such efforts to protect electoral integrity in the Global South. 

About the Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

 As one of his last major initiatives, in 2018 Kofi Annan convened the Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age. The Commission includes members from civil society and government, the technology sector, academia and media; across the year 2019 they examined and reviewed the opportunities and challenges for electoral integrity created by technological innovations. Assisted by a small secretariat at Stanford University and the Kofi Annan Foundation, the Commission has undertaken extensive consultations and issue recommendations as to how new technologies, social media platforms and communication tools can be harnessed to engage, empower and educate voters, and to strengthen the integrity of elections. Visit  the Kofi Annan Foundation and the Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age for more on their work.