Stanford Health Policy's Paul Wise held a conversation with Dr. Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group about improving the health of the poorest communities around the world. The two old friends talked about their work and the keys to accomplishing big goals during the Conversation in Global Health event. Wise is a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy and the Center for Innovation in Global Health, as well as a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Populist leaders around the world often fight against corruption in an effort to win public support. Conventional wisdom holds that this strategy works because leaders can signal their benevolent intentions by removing corrupt officials. We argue that fighting against corruption can produce unintended consequences. By revealing scandals of corrupt officials, anti-corruption campaigns can alter citizens’ beliefs about public officials and lead to disenchantment about political institutions. We test this argument by examining how China’s current anti-corruption campaign has changed citizens’ public support for the government and the Communist Party. We analyze the results of two surveys conducted before and during the campaign, and employ a difference-in-differences strategy to show that corruption investigations decrease respondents’ support for the central government and party. We also examine our respondents’ prior and posterior beliefs, and the results support our updating mechanism.
SPEAKER:
Image
Yuhua Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Peking University and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Yuhua's research has focused on the emergence of state institutions, with a regional focus on China. Yuhua is the author of Tying the Autocrat’s Hands: The Rise of the Rule of Law in China (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is currently working on a book-length project to examine long-term state development in China.
Singapore’s government is widely seen as competent, honest, and meritocratic—an exceptional case of post-colonial governance. Nor can any elected incumbent party anywhere match Singapore’s People’s Action Party’s 59-year record of uninterrupted rule. But recent events have cast doubt on the PAP government’s reputation for performance and stability. Despite acknowledging its need for new leaders, the government has been unable to select a clear successor to the current prime minister, even as his talented and popular deputy is sidelined, apparently due to his ethnic-minority background. When the government tried to ascertain public opinion on legislation against “deliberate online falsehoods,” the exercise descended into name-calling and threats against witnesses. Resentments have meanwhile risen over socioeconomic inequality and the mismanagement of public transport, housing, and health care.
How did this happen? In his talk, Dr. Thum will explore the historical forces that have shaped Singapore's politics and governance; explain the political economy of decision-making there; and recount his own experience with the turmoil affecting the country's government. He will argue that Singapore's post-colonial independence and governance are an evolution of—not from—British colonial rule. The government is responsive and accountable to international capital. But the PAP needs the approval of voting citizens to legitimize its continuation in power. The party’s leaders embody this dilemma in their struggles to reconcile two such different and competing sets of interests.
Image
Thum Ping Tjin (“PJ”) is a historian. He founded and serves as managing director of New Naratif (www.newnaratif.com), a Southeast Asian platform for research, journalism, art, and community organization that supports democracy and human rights. He is also a founding director of Project Southeast Asia, an interdisciplinary research cluster on the region at the University of Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar, Olympic athlete, and the only Singaporean to have swum the English Channel, his scholarship centers on the history of Southeast Asian governance and politics. In March 2018 he was questioned for six hours by Singapore’s minister for law and home affairs for his criticism of statements and actions undertaken by PAP politicians acting under internal security laws in Singapore during the Cold War.
Rachel Hirshman, BS ’18, MS ’19, spent the summer in Hawaii helping plan and execute military exercises via an internship with the United States Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) sponsored by APARC’s U.S.-Asia Security Initiative. Stanford News spoke with Hirshman about U.S. military operations in Hawaii and her work with INDOPACOM.
The digital transition of the world economy is now entering a phase of broad and deep societal impact. While there is one overall transition, there are many different sectoral transformations, from health and legal services to tax reports and taxi rides, as well as a rising number of transversal trends and policy issues, from widespread precarious employment and privacy concerns to market monopoly and cybercrime. This Research Handbook offers a rich and interdisciplinary synthesis of some of the recent research on the digital transformations currently under way.
This comprehensive study contains chapters covering sectoral and transversal analyses, all of which are specially commissioned and include cutting-edge research. The contributions featured are global, spanning four continents and seven different countries, as well as interdisciplinary, including experts in economics, sociology, law, finance, urban planning and innovation management. The digital transformations discussed are fertile ground for researchers, as established laws and regulations, organizational structures, business models, value networks and workflow routines are contested and displaced by newer alternatives.
This book will be equally pertinent to three constituencies: academic researchers and graduate students, practitioners in various industrial and service sectors and policy makers.
Chapter 17 of this book, The Impact of Digital Technologies on Innovation Policy, was written by Shorenstein APARC Research Scholar Kenji Kushida.
Highly readable yet deeply researched, this book serves as an essential guide to the many ways in which Japan has risen to become one of the world's most creative and innovative societies.
• Challenges conventional views of Japan as mired in two unproductive "lost decades" by documenting the myriad ways in which the nation has embraced creativity and innovation
• Describes the ways in which Japan has transformed our lives and explains the guiding principles of one of the world's least understood, most vibrantly creative societies
• Explains how Japan, as the world's first non-Western developed nation, can inspire other nations at a time when America's economic and social models are being challenged as never before
• Argues that, in a world that seems to have lost its direction in the face of threats ranging from terrorism to angry populism, Japan can assume greater leadership in preserving global peace and prosperity
Chapter 4 of this book, Departing from Silicon Valley: Japan's New Startup Ecosystem, was written by Shorenstein APARC Research Scholar Kenji Kushida.
Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) is pleased to announce that The Washington Post’s Beijing Bureau Chief Anna Fifield is the 2018 recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award. The award, given annually by APARC, is conferred upon a journalist who has produced outstanding reporting on critical issues affecting Asia and has contributed significantly to greater understanding of the region.
Fifield has been selected in recognition of her exceptional work over a long career reporting on the Koreas, as well as on Japan and periodically other parts of Asia. She will receive the award at a special ceremony at Stanford on November 14, 2018. On that day, she will also headline an APARC-hosted panel discussion focusing on how North Korea is, and isn’t, changing under Kim Jong Un.
"We are delighted to honor Anna Fifield with the Shorenstein journalism award," says Gi-Wook Shin, Shorenstein APARC director. "Drawing on her knowledge of Asian societies and her remarkable ability to communicate insights to audiences all around the world, Anna exemplifies how crucial it is to get the complexities of Asia right and the profound role of journalism in shaping public and decision maker approaches to our counterparts in the region. Walter Shorenstein, APARC's benefactor and a champion of Asian-American relations, understood clearly that role. We are committed to upholding Walter's legacy with this award."
As the Post's Tokyo bureau chief from 2014 to 2018, Fifield’s journalism focused primarily on Japan and the Koreas. During this period, she particularly concentrated on North Korea, working to shed light on the lives of ordinary people there and on how the regime managed to stay in power.
Fifield started as a journalist in her home country of New Zealand, then for 13 years was a correspondent for the Financial Times , covering nearly 20 countries and reporting from, among other places, Sydney, Seoul, Pyongyang, Tehran, Beirut, and finally Washington D.C., where she was White House correspondent and covered the 2012 President election campaign. Prior to joining The Washington Post, Fifield was a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where she studied how change happens in closed societies.
“For many years, Anna Fifield has been the premier Western reporter on Korea, setting the standard for coverage of a story that occupies our front pages," notes Daniel Sneider, a member of the jury for the Shorenstein Award and a long-time foreign correspondent. "But she has also broadened her Asian expertise, as the Tokyo bureau chief for the Post and now in Beijing. She moves easily across the digital as well as the print space and is a crusader for diversity in sourcing. Anna Fifield, in short, is the very definition of a journalist in our modern era.”
Sixteen journalists have previously received the Shorenstein award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000. Among the award’s recent recipients are Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire and former editor of the The Hindu; Ian Johnson, a veteran journalist with a focus on Chinese society, religion, and history; and Yoichi Funabashi, former editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun.
RSVPs for the Shorenstein award panel discussion are requested.
About the 2018 Shorenstein Journalism Award Panel Discussion and Award Ceremony
Shorenstein Journalism Award winner Anna Fifield will deliver a keynote speech and join a panel discussion focusing on how North Korea is, and isn’t, changing under Kim Jong Un. The panel includes Andray Abrahamian, the 2018-19 Koret Fellow in the Korea Program at Shorenstein APARC, and Barbara Demick, New York correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, former head of the bureaus in Beijing and Seoul, and the 2012 recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award. The panel will be chaired by Yong Suk Lee, SK Center Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Deputy Director of the Korea Program at APARC.
November 14, 2018, 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. (PDT)
Fisher Conference Center at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, 326 Galvez St, Stanford, CA 94305
The panel discussion is open to the public. The award ceremony will take place in the evening for a private audience.
The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way in which that work has helped audiences around the world to understand the complexities of Asia. The award, established in 2002, was named after Walter H. Shorenstein, the philanthropist, activist, and businessman who endowed two institutions that are focused respectively on Asia and on the press: the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2010, Shorenstein APARC expanded the scope of the award that since then has recognized Asian journalists who, in addition to their professional excellence and contribution to knowledge of Asia, have helped defend and build a free media in their home countries.
Media contact: Noa Ronkin, Associate Director for Communications and External Relations noa.ronkin@stanford.edu (650) 724-5667
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming one of the underlying drivers of the next wave of industrial transformations. There is every reason to believe that we are on the cusp of a sea change in how human activities and decision-making are transformed by abundant computing power. This research note will provide the basis for understanding the conceptual building blocks and paradigmatic examples of how the development of AI is accelerating, and how its deployment will be transformative.
How do universities in China and Singapore experiment with new types of learning in their quest to promote innovation and entrepreneurship? Is there a need to transform the traditional university into an “entrepreneurial university”? “What are the recent developments in and outstanding challenges to financing innovation in China and Japan? And what is the government’s role in promoting innovative entrepreneurship (as opposed to small- and medium-size enterprises) under the shadow of big business in South Korea?
These are some of the questions discussed at the second annual conference of APARC’s Stanford Asia-Pacific Innovation research project. The two-day conference, co-hosted jointly with Tsinghua University and titled “Analyzing Public Policies for Entrepreneurship and Innovation in East Asia,” was held on September 9-10, 2018 at the Beijing-based D&C Think Tank. It brought together scholars from the United States and Asia to explore education policies and financial policies conducive to accelerating innovation and developing a more entrepreneurial workforce in East Asia. Participants focused on entrepreneurship education in universities and on policy interventions to promote innovation financing. The conference papers will be published in an edited volume that will serve as a valuable reference for scholars and policymakers working to develop human capital for innovation in Asia.
The Stanford Asia-Pacific Innovation project is a multi-year, Center-wide effort to produce academic and policy research from comparative, regional perspectives into how Asian nations are responding to the imperative to develop the skills, competencies, long-term health, and systems that make up a platform for innovation in the twenty-first century.
The project’s lead researchers—Karen Eggleston, Takeo Hoshi, Yong Suk Lee, and Gi-Wook Shin—are preparing for publication the findings from the project’s first annual conference that was held at Stanford last year and focused on the organization of business and innovation clusters in East Asia. In 2019, the project will turn to examining the intersection of aging, technology, and innovation, with a third conference to be held in South Korea next summer.
Following are several photos that capture scenes from the conference (with Karen Eggleston and Gi-Wook Shin; Takeo Hoshi; Dinsha Mistree and Yong Suk Lee; and several other conference participants).
