* Please note all CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Register in advance for this webinar: https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/8416226562432/WN_WLYcdRa6T5Cs1MMdmM0Mug

About the Event: Is there a place for illegal or nonconsensual evidence in security studies research, such as leaked classified documents? What is at stake, and who bears the responsibility, for determining source legitimacy? Although massive unauthorized disclosures by WikiLeaks and its kindred may excite qualitative scholars with policy revelations, and quantitative researchers with big-data suitability, they are fraught with methodological and ethical dilemmas that the discipline has yet to resolve. I argue that the hazards from this research—from national security harms, to eroding human-subjects protections, to scholarly complicity with rogue actors—generally outweigh the benefits, and that exceptions and justifications need to be articulated much more explicitly and forcefully than is customary in existing work. This paper demonstrates that the use of apparently leaked documents has proliferated over the past decade, and appeared in every leading journal, without being explicitly disclosed and defended in research design and citation practices. The paper critiques incomplete and inconsistent guidance from leading political science and international relations journals and associations; considers how other disciplines from journalism to statistics to paleontology address the origins of their sources; and elaborates a set of normative and evidentiary criteria for researchers and readers to assess documentary source legitimacy and utility. Fundamentally, it contends that the scholarly community (researchers, peer reviewers, editors, thesis advisors, professional associations, and institutions) needs to practice deeper reflection on sources’ provenance, greater humility about whether to access leaked materials and what inferences to draw from them, and more transparency in citation and research strategies.

View Written Draft Paper

About the Speaker: Christopher Darnton is a CISAC affiliate and an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously taught at Reed College and the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. He is the author of Rivalry and Alliance Politics in Cold War Latin America (Johns Hopkins, 2014) and of journal articles on US foreign policy, Latin American security, and qualitative research methods. His International Security article, “Archives and Inference: Documentary Evidence in Case Study Research and the Debate over U.S. Entry into World War II,” won the 2019 APSA International History and Politics Section Outstanding Article Award. He is writing a book on the history of US security cooperation in Latin America, based on declassified military documents.

The Asia-Pacific region has been a key driver of the globalization that has reshaped the world’s economic and political environment over the last decades.  Bi-lateral and multilateral trade arrangements, from GATT to WTO to TPP and RCEP, have been key components underpinning the rise in global trade that have propelled development of so many Asia-Pacific countries into middle-income countries and above.

However, generating enthusiasm in the United States and other wealthier nations for new trade deals and further economic opening has become more challenging.  By contrast, China has become increasingly active in proposing and developing bi-lateral and regional trade agreements with its neighbors.

Do these changes herald a new era for trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific region? If so, how might future trade agreements be different?  How will global challenges like climate change, increasing nativism, digital services, and a changing political landscape affect and influence both the appetite for, and the shape of trade agreements in the region?  

Join Stanford’s China Program for a special conversation between Wendy Cutler, former diplomat and negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), and Gita Wirjawan, former Minister of Trade of the Republic of Indonesia, moderated by Laura Stone, US Department of State and the Inaugural China Policy Fellow at the Asia Pacific Research Center.

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Wendy Cutler  is Vice President at the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) and the managing director of the Washington, D.C. office. In these roles, she focuses on leading initiatives that address challenges related to trade, investment, and innovation, as well as women’s empowerment in Asia. She joined ASPI following an illustrious career of nearly three decades as a diplomat and negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), where she also served as Acting Deputy U.S. Trade Representative. During her USTR career, she worked on a range of bilateral, regional, and multilateral trade negotiations and initiatives, including the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, U.S.-China negotiations, and the WTO Financial Services negotiations. She has published a series of ASPI papers on the Asian trade landscape and serves as a regular media commentator on trade and investment developments in Asia and the world. 

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Gita Wirjawan is an educator and host of the podcast “Endgame.” He is a visiting scholar at the Walter Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University. He is also the founder and chairman of Ancora Group, a partner of Ikhlas Capital, a Southeast Asia focus private equity fund, and advisor to a number of Southeast Asia based venture capital firms. Previously, he served as Minister of Trade and Chairman of Investment Coordinating Board in the Indonesian government from 2009-2014.

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Laura Stone, a member of the US Department of State, is the Inaugural China Policy Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC). She was formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Maldives, the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Mongolia, the Director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs, and the Director of the Economic Policy Office in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. She served in Hanoi, Beijing, Bangkok, Tokyo, the Public Affairs Bureau, the Pentagon Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. While at APARC, she is conducting research with the China Program on contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.

SCCEI Spring Seminar Series 

Wednesday, May 24, 2023 | 11:00 am -12:15 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Winning Hearts, Minds and Taste Buds? Telling the China Story Using Public Diplomacy
 

China is becoming the first country since the USSR that could challenge the US-dominated world order and the state has spent a huge amount on public diplomacy to influence global opinions. A main goal of China’s public diplomacy efforts is to “tell the China story” well. We examine how “telling the China story” does in the Global South by examining the state-sponsored educational programs which enroll students from the Global South in Chinese universities. One aim is to nurture the next generation of political and business elites who would develop positive attitudes toward the Chinese economic and governance models. We detail China’s public diplomacy effort in this area and evaluate its impact on attitudes toward China’s economic and governance models using original surveys, interviews and generative AI language models' outputs. We further identify policy implications against the backdrop of the ongoing US-China competition.

About the Speaker 
 

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Yue Hou is the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. This year she is a visiting scholar at  Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions (SCCEI). Yue Hou's research centers on the political economy of non-democracies with a regional focus on China. Yue Hou's research interests include how individual actors (e.g., citizens, firms) interact with the state and state agents that are not held accountable by elections, and how these interactions affect outcomes such as economic growth, government service, quality of institutions, and policy changes. 

Seminar Series Moderators
 

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Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Most recently, Rozelle's research focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition in China. In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner.
 

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Hongbin Li is the Co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Garrette Grothe at gtgrothe@stanford.edu

This event is no longer accepting registrations. Thank you for your interest!

Prominent American tech player and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla warns that the United States and China currently face a “20-Year Tech War” —  a struggle shaped by each nation’s political systems and the role played by tech investors. What does he mean by these predictions? What could a “tech war” look like? And what are the implications for broader U.S.-China relations?

Join APARC’s China Program for a special Fireside Chat between Mr. Khosla and APARC’s China Policy Fellow Laura Stone. In this session, we will explore what Mr. Khosla sees happening in the U.S.-China tech space in the near- and long-term, the potential ramifications, what this means for how Chinese and U.S. technology firms operate outside their home markets, and the implications for technology and foreign policies.

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Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor, and technology fan. Mr. Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy systems and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems.  He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, focused on impactful technology investments in software, AI, robotics, 3D printing, healthcare and more. One of Mr. Khosla’s greatest passions is mentoring entrepreneurs, helping them build technology-based businesses. Mr. Khosla is driven by the desire to make a positive impact through technology to reinvent societal infrastructure and multiply resources. He is also passionate about Social Entrepreneurship. Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from IIT, New Delhi, a Master's in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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Laura Stone, a member of the US Department of State, is the Inaugural China Policy Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC).  She was formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Maldives, the Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Mongolia, the Director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs, and the Director of the Economic Policy Office in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs. She served in Beijing, Bangkok, Tokyo, the Public Affairs Bureau, the Pentagon Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. While at APARC, she is conducting research with the China Program on contemporary China affairs and U.S.-China policy.

All APARC events are scheduled on the Pacific Time Zone.

Cross-border Impacts: How China’s College Expansion Contributes to America’s Graduate Programs

Speaker: Yuli Xu, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at UC San Diego

China’s annual college enrollment has experienced a significant surge, increasing over nine fold from 1 million in 1998 to more than 9.6 million in 2020 due to a massive expansion initiated in 1999. This paper studies the impact of this expansion on US graduate programs by combining administrative data on Chinese college admission with the SEVIS database on foreign students. Our identification strategy leverages city-year-major variation driven by China's college expansion guided by a quota system, which allows us to control for city-year and major-year confounders. Our estimates imply that the college expansion in China can explain 30% of the rise in Chinese graduate student flow to the US during 2003-2015.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Performative Propaganda Engagement: How Online Celebrity Fandom Engages with State Propaganda in China

Speaker: Yingdan Lu, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication

Established research on authoritarian information control has extensively examined the top-down dissemination of political propaganda and its impact on public attitudes and behaviors. This research introduces a novel theory, performative propaganda engagement, which focuses on individuals who engage with state propaganda in a performative manner to benefit an individual or a group they align with, rather than genuinely endorsing or promoting the propaganda. Through mixed methods research approaches, this research empirically investigates performative propaganda engagement within the realm of Chinese online celebrity fandom, a rising cultural force on Chinese social media. The findings reveal that celebrity fans in China actively incorporate the promotion of state propaganda into their daily activities, aiming to enhance the visibility and reputation for their beloved celebrities. I theorize that celebrity fans performatively engage with state propaganda through three mechanisms — celebrity mobilization, direct state mobilization, and algorithmic visibility manipulation. By exploring the manifestations of performative propaganda engagement, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the downstream effects of authoritarian information control, the contemporary fandom culture in China, the metrics-driven nature of social media ecosystem, and the authoritarian resilience in the digital age.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

The Double-Edged Effect of Internet Control on Productivity and Innovation: Evidence from China

Speaker: Meicen Sun, Postdoctoral Scholar, Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI)

This paper advances a new theory on the double-edged effect of Internet control, where it benefits domestic data-intensive firms and hurts domestic knowledge-intensive research entities. Exploiting a major Internet control shock in 2014, this paper finds that Chinese data-intensive firms gained from Internet control a 10% increase in revenue over other Chinese firms, and about 1-2% over their U.S. competitors. The same shock incurred an up to 25% reduction in research quality for researchers conditional on the knowledge-intensity of their discipline. While Internet control takes a toll on the country’s long-term capacity for innovation, it lends a short-term benefit to the country’s data-intensive sectors. Conventional wisdom on the inherent limit to cross-border information control by autocracies overlooks this crucial protectionist benefit that enhances autocratic resilience in the digital age.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present.