SCCEI Fall Seminar Series 

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Tuesday, October 18, 2022      11:00 am -12:15 pm Pacific Time

Goldman Room E401, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way | Zoom Meeting 

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Sovereign-Biopolitics and Tobacco’s Annihilation of China's Male State

This talk takes up a historical and theoretical puzzle: how has it come to be that nation states, which are run by men, are reputedly biopolitical in design yet facilitate their male citizens' exposure to the greatest cause of preventable death today. The analytical answer offered centers around a phenomenon long ago dubbed the pharmakon, something that simultaneously heals and poisons. The story told here is a smoky one, wafting across territorial boundaries, epochs, big business plays, and an uncanny cast of characters. 

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About the Speaker

 Matthew Kohrman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and a SCCEI Faculty Affiliate. His research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.

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Seminar Series Moderators

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. 

 

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.

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A NOTE ON LOCATION

This seminar is a hybrid event. Please join us in person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing, or join remotely via Zoom.

Questions? Contact Heather Rahimi at hrahimi@stanford.edu

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How is India posturing to manage strategic competition in the Indian Ocean? Thus far US-China security competition has been most acute in the western Pacific, but Chinese capability growth and strategic policies suggest that it also seeks a leading role in the northern Indian Ocean, in the not-too-distant future. India has traditionally considered itself the natural dominant power in the Indian Ocean region, but it has never faced the scale and types of competition that China will present. Does India have the wherewithal to maintain its leadership in the region? How will India work with the United States, bilaterally and through groupings such as the Quad, as they seek to maintain the status quo in the face of Chinese challenges? Is the Indian Ocean bound for militarized competition, or can India, the US, and China find a pathway to strategic coexistence?

Panelist

Dr. Sinderpal Singh is Senior Fellow and Assistant Director, Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, and concurrently Coordinator of the South Asia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In the fall of 2022, he has been appointed as the McCain Fulbright Scholar in Residence at the United States Naval Academy. His research interests include the international relations of South Asia with a special focus on Indian foreign policy, the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean Region, and India-Southeast Asia relations. He is currently writing a book on India’s role in the Indian Ocean since 1992 and is the author of India in South Asia: Domestic Identity Politics and Foreign Policy from Nehru to the BJP (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, his MA from the Australian National University, and his BA from the National University of Singapore.

Moderator

Dr. Arzan Tarapore is the South Asia research scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, where he leads the newly-restarted South Asia Initiative. His research focuses on military strategy, Indian defense policy, and contemporary Indo-Pacific security issues. Prior to his scholarly career, he served as an analyst in the Australian Defence Department. Arzan holds a Ph.D. in war studies from King’s College London.

This webinar is co-sponsored by the Center for South Asia

2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award Recipient Emily Feng, NPR's Beijing Correspondent, to Headline Award Panel Discussion

Journalists expelled, local staff harassed, reporting trips heavily surveilled, and a country locked down by Covid controls: all this means correspondents have far less access to information in China, at the very moment understanding China has become so crucial to our economy and geopolitics. Fewer correspondents are left in China — and fewer want to go. Reporting on China will have to change — leveraging remote reporting, digital journalism, and multimedia — but such changes may also distort how we view China.

Join APARC as we honor journalist Emily Feng, NPR’s Beijing Correspondent and winner of the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award. In her award keynote address, Feng will address the challenges reporting from and on China and how international media can respond to them.

The keynote will be followed by a conversation with Feng and two experts: Louisa Lim, an award-winning journalist, Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne teaching audio journalism and podcasting, and a member of the selection committee for the Shorenstein Journalism Award, and Jennifer Pan, professor of communication and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

The event will conclude with an audience Q&A session moderated by Stanford sociologist and China expert Xueguang Zhou.

Follow us on Twitter and use the hashtag #SJA22 to join the conversation.

Questions about this event? Contact Sallie Lin.

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Speakers

Emily Feng is NPR's Beijing correspondent. Feng joined NPR in 2019. She roves around China, through its big cities and small villages, reporting on social trends as well as economic and political news coming out of Beijing. Feng contributes to NPR's news magazines, newscasts, podcasts, and digital platforms.

Previously, Feng served as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. Based in Beijing, she covered a broad range of topics, including human rights and technology. She also began extensively reporting on the region of Xinjiang during this period, becoming the first foreign reporter to uncover that China was separating Uyghur children from their parents and sending them to state-run orphanages, and discovering that China was introducing forced labor in Xinjiang's detention camps.

Feng's reporting has also let her nerd out over semiconductors and drones, travel to environmental wastelands, and write about girl bands and art. She's filed stories from the bottom of a coal mine; the top of a mosque in Qinghai; and from inside a cave Chairman Mao once lived in. Prior to her recognition by the 2022 Shorenstein Journalism Award, her human rights coverage was shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018 and won two Human Rights Press awards. Her radio coverage of    the coronavirus epidemic in China was recognized by the National Headliners Award. She spearheaded coverage that has won two Gracie Awards. She was also named a Livingston Award finalist in 2021.

Feng graduated cum laude from Duke University with a dual B.A. degree from Duke's Sanford School in Asian and Middle Eastern studies and in public policy.

Louisa Lim is an award-winning journalist who reported from China for a decade for NPR and the BBC. Her first book, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism. She co-hosts The Little Red Podcast, an award-winning podcast on China. She works as a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, teaching audio journalism and podcasting, and has a PhD in journalism studies. Her latest book, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong, was released in April 2022 from Penguin Random House. 

Jennifer Pan is a professor of communication and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Her research focuses on political communication and authoritarian politics. Pan uses experimental and computational methods with large-scale datasets on political activity in China and other authoritarian regimes to answer questions about how autocrats perpetuate their rule, how political censorship, propaganda, and information manipulation work in the digital age, and how preferences and behaviors are shaped as a result.

Her book, Welfare for Autocrats: How Social Assistance in China Cares for its Rulers (Oxford, 2020) shows how China's pursuit of political order transformed the country’s main social assistance program, Dibao, for repressive purposes. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Science. 

She graduated from Princeton University, summa cum laude, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University’s Department of Government.

Moderator

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Xueguang Zhou is the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, a professor of sociology, and a Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies senior fellow. His main area of research is on institutional changes in contemporary Chinese society, focusing on Chinese organizations and management, social inequality, and state-society relationships. 

One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He works with students and colleagues to conduct participatory observations of government behaviors in the areas of environmental regulation enforcement, in policy implementation, in bureaucratic bargaining, and in incentive designs. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Zhou’s new book, The Logic of Governance in China (Cambridge University Press, 2022) develops a unified theoretical framework to explain how China's centralized political system maintains governance and how this process produces recognizable policy cycles that are obstacles to bureaucratic rationalization, professionalism, and rule of law. 

Before joining Stanford in 2006, Zhou taught at Cornell University, Duke University, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a guest professor at Peking University, Tsinghua University, and the People's University of China. Zhou received his Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University in 1991.