In this report I provide a summary of the work that I have been doing on China’s vegetable economy over the past year. This work, in part, was supported financially by the Western Growers Association (WGA). The funds provided by the WGA were mostly used to support a survey of vegetable producers and wholesale procurement traders in rural China. It also went to support the procurement of a data set that could aid in the analysis of the productivity of China’s vegetable producers. The work that I summarize here, however, is from far more different sources. I greatly appreciate the support of WGA and look forward to continuing to interact with the management and members in the coming years.

To make the material more accessible, I plan on organizing this report by asking a question and then summarizing the answer. In this way I can cover a lot of ground without getting lost in the details. I am more than willing to try on any given aspect of the final report to expand on the issues.

The project studies the impact of China's current economic transition on its agricultural economy with special reference to the consequences of trade liberalization and of changing trade flows. The project will track impacts on social conditions and on the environment in China's rural areas as well as on markets in the rest of the world, with particular emphasis on the EU. For this, the research considers (a) the dynamic, rapid pace of the transition; (b) the size and geographical diversity of the country; and (c) the effect of the changes on the rest of the world. The research opts for a quantitative approach, supplemented by qualitative investigations, and focuses on three themes: trade, social conditions, and environment. On trade, the research aims to account for the size of China's trade and take a closer look at trade between the EU and China with scenario simulations over the period 2000-2030, by establishing a linkage between (a) the Chinagromodel, a spatially explicit equilibrium model that comprehensively depicts China's farm sector in 2433 counties, while connecting these through trade and transportation flows; (b) the GTAPmodel of world trade; (c) FEA-27, a model of EU-agriculture for 27 members states. The research on social conditions proceeds by linking geo-referenced household surveys to a population census of China and a detailed geographical data set, relying on a suitable adaptation of poverty mapping methodology, so as to trace impacts at household level. Finally, we use agro-ecological assessment tools to quantify the environmental pressures resulting from intensified livestock industry as well as from intensified horticulture production. Findings on the three themes are subsequently integrated to arrive at policy suggestions that account for efficiency, equity and sustainability considerations. Throughout the project, a policy dialogue and dissemination program, conducted in both China and the EU, maintains communication with policy makers.

The supermarket revolution has arrived in China and is spreading as fast as or faster than anywhere in the world. As the demand for vegetables, fruit, nuts and other high valued products have risen, urban retailers are finding new venues from which they can sell to the increasing prosperous city residents. However, the experience of many developing countries suggests that there could be serious distributional impacts of the rising of supermarkets. There is concern among policy makers and academics that poor, small farmers might be excluded from market. The main goal of our paper is to understand what types of farmers have been able to participate in the horticultural revolution, how they interact with markets and how supply chains affect their production decisions. Using a unique set of spatially sampled communities in the Greater Beijing area, in contrast to fears of some researchers, we find small and poor farmers have actively participate in the emergence of China's horticulture economy. Moreover, there has been almost no penetration of modern wholesalers or retailers into rural communities. In the paper we document seven characteristics of China's food economy that we believe account for this set of findings.

The Journal of Korean Studies (JKS) is dedicated to high-quality articles, in all disciplines, on a broad range of topics concerning Korea, both historical and contemporary. The JKS editorial offices are located within the Stanford Korean Studies Program (KSP) at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. The JKS is published and distributed annually by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization