This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.

 

Policies implemented by the CCP in Xinjiang since c. 2016 have become a central issue in PRC international relations, leading to international determinations that those policies constitute genocide; scrutiny of global supply chains for Xinjiang cotton, textiles and polysilicon; US sanctions on companies and individuals and Congressional inquiries directed at Airbnb and other multinationals operating in Xinjiang; and diplomatic boycotts of the Olympics. The assimilationist policies, if most extreme in Xinjiang, are related to the broader Zhonghua-izing campaign against religion and non-Mandarin language and perhaps even to intensified control over Hong Kong and efforts to intimidate Taiwan—an aggressive intolerance of cultural and political diversity that is emerging as a central feature of Xi Jinping’s tenure. This talk will review the Xinjiang crisis to date and suggest how we should understand these events and trends.

James Millward is Professor of Inter-societal History at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, teaching Chinese, Central Asian and world history. He joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as visiting scholar with the China Program for the 2022 winter quarter. He is also an affiliated professor in the Máster Oficial en Estudios de Asia Oriental at the University of Granada, Spain. His specialties include Qing empire; the silk road; Eurasian lutes and music in history; and historical and contemporary Xinjiang. He follows and comments on current issues regarding the Uyghurs and PRC ethnicity policy. Millward has served on the boards of the Association for Asian Studies (China and Inner Asia Council) and the Central Eurasian Studies Society, and was president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2010. He edits the ''Silk Roads'' series for University of Chicago Press. His publications include The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (2007), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (2004), and Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing Central Asia (1998). His articles and op-eds on contemporary China appear in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books and other media.  

Tuesday, February 15, 2022 | 4:00-5:15 pm Pacific Time

Carbon Trading vs. Direct Allocation:  Theory and Application to China's Carbon Abatement

The Emission Trading System (ETS) and Direct Allocation Scheme (DAS) are two popular schemes to achieve a given target of carbon abatement. We compare their welfare implications under incomplete information and with local externalities of such abatement (e.g., changes in air pollution). We show that the ETS addresses incomplete information but not heterogeneous local externalities; the opposite is true for the DAS. Therefore, the policy choice depends on the relative significance of incomplete information and heterogeneous local externalities. We apply the theoretical results to the Chinese data and discuss why a national ETS can be undesirable.

---

About the Speaker

Guojun He is an economist working on environmental, development, and governance issues. Currently, he is an associate professor in Economics and Management & Strategy at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He holds a concurrent appointment at the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC) and serves as the research director of its China center (EPIC-China). He is a co-editor of Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and China Economic Review. 

His research tries to address some of the most challenging problems faced by developing countries and seeks to produce empirically-grounded estimates for optimal policy design. The majority of his work focuses on understanding the benefits and costs of environmental policies, while he also has a broader research interest in development and governance issues. His work has been published in leading economics journals (like QJE, AER: Insights, AEJ: Applied) and science journals (like PNAS, Nature: Sustainability, Nature Human Behavior, and The BMJ). 

He has won multiple academic awards, including the Best Paper Award from China Health Policy and Management Society, Masahiko Aoki Best Paper Award Nomination, and notably two Gregory Chow Best Paper Awards from the Chinese Economists Society. He was named a Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum.  

He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Agricultural and Resource Economics from U.C. Berkeley and received undergraduate education from School of Economics at Peking University. ​Before joining HKU, he worked at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Harvard University.​

---

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.

---

Register Here

Register once to receive the Zoom meeting link that will be used for all lectures in this series.

This is a virtual event. Please click here to register and generate a link to the talk. 
The link will be unique to you; please save it and do not share with others.

 

China’s rapidly growing local government debt problem has long been recognized by foreign observers as a risk, but inside China, only recently was this problem called out as alarming.  Why has local government debt been allowed to grow with little direct intervention from central authorities?  Based on a forthcoming paper, Oi will show how a “grand bargain” the central authorities entered into with the localities allowed Beijing to take the lion’s share of tax revenues after 1994, but also allowed localities to gain new resources and power as a quid pro quo.  While the bargain provided an expedient and seemingly successful strategy that worked for more than a decade to fuel rapid local state-led growth, it had significant costs that are now becoming increasingly visible.  Because land finance was the core means by which localities raised revenue, Oi also will help explain why the problems with property developers like Evergrande are so important to China’s future economy.   

Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the Department of Political Science and a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She directs the China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and is the Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University. Professor Oi has published extensively on China’s reforms. Recent books include Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future, co-edited with Thomas Fingar (Stanford University Press, 2020); Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County, co-edited with Steven Goldstein (Stanford University Press, 2018); and Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization, co-edited with Karen Eggleston and Yiming Wang (2017). Current research is on fiscal reform and local government debt, continuing SOE reforms, and the Belt and Road Initiative.

 

---

This event is part of the 2022 Winter webinar series, The Future of China's Economy, sponsored by the APARC China Program.

 

Tuesday, February 1, 2022 | 4:00-5:15 pm Pacific Time

The Impacts of Pollution Levies on Chinese Firms

China's rollout of emission fee reform since 2007 provides a quasi-natural experiment to study the effectiveness of pollution levy on firm emissions and economic consequences. Using firm-level financial and pollution data, we find that doubling the levy rate leads to a 6.87% reduction in SO2 emissions. Firms achieve emission abatement through reducing output and coal consumption rather than end-of-the-pipe solutions. 

---

About the Speaker

Junjie Zhang is Associate Professor of Environmental Economics in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Since 2016, he has founded the Environmental Research Center and International Master of Environmental Policy Program at Duke Kunshan University. During 2021-22, he serves as Volkswagen Visiting Chair in Sustainability in the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. Zhang is a co-chair for the Environmental Economics Committee in the Chinese Academy of Environmental Science, an advisory board member for the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and a board member for the Professional Association for China's Environment. He has also served on the editorial board of several academic journals. Before his current position, he was an associate professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Zhang's research centers on empirical policy issues in air pollution, energy transition, and climate change. He has received fundings from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, China National Natural Science Foundation, China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment, China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, Energy Foundation, Packard Foundation, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. He holds a B.S. from Renmin University of China, a B.S. and an M.S. from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.

---

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.

---

Register Here

Register once to receive the Zoom meeting link that will be used for all lectures in this series.