This seminar is jointly hosted by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) and Greater China Business Club (GCBC) at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

About the seminar

There is often much discussion about the current Chinese economic environment and how it impacts global economic growth. However, to gauge the true impact of China on the world economy, one should look at what will happen over the long term as the country gets closer to the United States in economic strength and maturity. This talk looked at the current trends in the Chinese political and economic arena, the long-term prospects for Chinese economic growth, and how these trends would impact the global economic order. Examples from the technology and internet industry were used to demonstrate this effect and how China would shape global industries.

About the speaker

Chris joined McKinsey & Company’s Asia leadership team in 2011 as a senior advisor in
technology. He leads engagements for clients in the technology, telecommunications and
semiconductor industries and is taking a leadership role in advanced technology areas both in Asia and globally. Previous to McKinsey, Chris was the General Manager of Intel China,
directly responsible for the overall region’s multi-billion dollar P&L. Chris managed Intel
China’s business operations, its technical and development operations, its strategic programs with enterprise, Internet & government customers, and owned the mobile, server, phone, embedded and consumer electronics product lines. Chris also managed Intel’s Olympics Program. During his 3-year tenure ending in 2010, overall revenue increased by over 80%.

Formerly, Chris was Chief of Staff to Intel Executive Vice President Sean Maloney, assisting
Mr. Maloney in leading Intel’s $15 billion mobile PC business as well as its $45 billion global
Sales & Marketing Group. Chris led Intel’s wireless business unit as well as various business
development, sales, marketing and product management teams at Intel. Chris was previously a private equity investor at The Blackstone Group in New York City. He served as a consultant for Bain & Company in South Africa and led the Board of Directors for Decortech, a privatelyheld technology company.

During a six months sabbatical in 2010, Chris led a major charity program in China and was a visiting professor of strategy at the MIT-Fudan University MBA program in Shanghai. Chris’s academic and policy works have been published by Stanford University; in Opportunity ’08 by the Brookings Institution; and in the Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation textbook by Clayton Christensen and Robert Burgelman. Chris has served as a senior fellow at Tsinghua University and was the author of the ‘Asia Diary’ column for Forbes Online. Chris is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and an Advisory Board Member for the Seva Foundation.

Chris received an MBA from Stanford Business School (2001), where he was an Arjay Miller
scholar; a Masters of Arts in Political Science from Stanford University (2001); and a Bachelors of Science in Economics, summa cum laude, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1996).

Chris was born in Washington, D.C., spent his entire childhood in rural Colorado, lived as an
expatriate in France and South Africa, and currently lives with his wife Xiaomin in China.

Italy is the 8th biggest national economy in the world and the 3rd biggest in the Euro zone after Germany and France. Although it holds the third-largest gold reserves in the world, enjoys a high living standard with comparatively low private debts and is technologically innovative, as for example the recent takeover of parts of the U.S. car industry during the financial crisis 2008-11 underscored, it is currently considered to be the most vulnerable national economy threatened by the European debt crisis because of its huge public debt which reached 118% of the GDP in 2011. Although Italy is considered as "too big to fail" because it could hardly be saved by the European rescue funding programme with a GDP of more than 2.1 trillion Euro, there are fears that a further loss of trust by the international money markets could trigger an unprecedented crisis. Interest rates payed for Italian public debt rose to record numbers in fall 2011 due to the downgrading by leading rating agencies since summer 2011. The seminar gives a concise overview over the current state of affairs in Italy, including its debt and economic crises, and discusses their potential interweavement with the social crisis the country is undergoing in the view of international observers. In the age of media democracy, contextual political factors like social and cultural psychology, public appearances and symbolic events are increasingly impacting Italian politics and economics in ambivalent ways.

A podcast of this talk will soon be made available.

Recognizing the political consequences for Europe of Muslim immigration, and relying on a novel identification strategy, this paper investigates why Muslim assimilation into French cultural norms is incomplete, and provides experimental and survey evidence that reveals the low expected payoffs that Muslim immigrants in France receive for full assimilation. While the data show that rooted French people initially distrust Muslims (compared to a matched set of Christians)  in part due to their unwillingness to fully assimilate, the real source of Muslim reluctance to fully assimilate is their perception that in anonymous transactions (i.e., through French institutions) they will always be perceived as foreign and face discrimination.

Workshop paper is available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to khaley@stanford.edu

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative politics, nation-state formation, ethnic conflict, and religion. Among his publications are Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998), and Nations, States and Violence (2007). Prof. Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Event Summary

Professor Laitin opens the seminar by providing background on the research project that motivated the paper. This examined: whether Muslim immigrants in France faced unique social and economic barriers; the source of the barriers; and whether French republicanism exacerbated or lessened the barriers. He provides a brief summary of studies examining the first and third points, but the focus of his talk was on the second point: if there are higher barriers for Muslims, who is building them?

Professor Laitin then describes the study his research team carried out on a Senegalese population in France for 15 years, drawing on equal-sized groups of Muslims and Christians from similar social and economic conditions. Through a series of games and surveys, the team observed that within Senegalese Muslims in France, certain groups assimilate more than others, and those that assimilate less are treated worse by French individuals and institutions. Many of the Muslims expected to be treated less generously by French individuals, and reported more experiences of discrimination from French institutions, which Professor Laitin's team found was more difficult to overcome than individual discrimination. This group also exhibited stronger financial ties (measured by investments and remittances sent to Senegal from France) and emotional ties (measured by desire to be buried in Senegal rather than France after death). The results of the study are used to provide a series of decision rules and reward matrixes for incoming Senegalese Muslims, including the likelihood of penalties and rewards for assimilation, such as giving children French names.

During a discussion period following the presentation, such questions were raised as: Do the results of the study have more to do with the respondents being Muslim, or simply not being French - or, do other ethnic or religious groups have the same problems assimilating into French Catholic society? Is the example of preferences for burial locations more about ties to Senegal than lack of ties to France? How much of the effect is due to being black rather than Muslim? Will the results of the study change as the Muslim population in France increases? What has been the reception in France to the prohibition of collecting ethnographic data? Why is "incomplete assimilation" framed as a "response" to the discrimination - is it a choice or is it just the way things are? Where does the fault lie in the discrimination reported in the survey?

Workshop papers are available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to khaley@stanford.edu.

Abstract: This paper examines the contemporary Islamic revival in France, focusing on the emergence of a distinctive Muslim French identity and concomitant political imagination. Asserting their right to be piously and visibly Muslim in the public sphere, Muslim French revivalists reconfigure the relationship between Frenchness and Muslimness. In so doing, they imagine new ways of organizing the national polity, envisioning a novel relationship between minority ‘difference’ and citizenship that refuses to constrain Muslimness to the space of alterity.

Mayanthi Fernando is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. She received her B.A. from Harvard University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her research interests include anthropology of Islam, politics and secularism, modernity and difference, postcolonial Britain and France, anthropology of freedom, anthropology of Western Europe, and multiculturalism. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled On The Muslim Question: Anxieties of the Secular Republic, which analyzes the forms of subjectivity, religiosity, and political community constituted by Muslim French revivalists, the legal, political, and institutional practices that comprise laïcité, and the ways in which these practices constrain pious Muslims, who are often caught in the structural and discursive tensions endemic to laïcité. Among her publications are “Reconfiguring Freedom: Muslim Piety and the Limits of Secular Law and Public Discourse in France” (2010), “Exceptional Citizens: Secular Muslim Women and the Politics of Difference in France” (2009), and “The Republic’s ‘Second Religion’: Recognizing Islam in France” (2005).

Co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies

What are the limits of literary freedom? Writers' claims for autonomy have encountered legal restrictions to their freedom of speech.  As suggested by Foucault, censorship has shaped the very notion of authorship. This talk will confront the diverging conceptions of the author’s responsibility in France and the beliefs in the power of writing that underlie them through the debates surrounding literary trials, including the cases of Béranger, Courier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the naturalists, and the purge trials after World War II. In reaction to these conceptions, writers developed their own code of ethics, which contributed to the emergence of an autonomous literary field and to the construction of the figure of the public  intellectual, embodied by Zola and by Sartre.

Gisèle Sapiro is Research director at the CNRS and Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. She is also head of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris, and been a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg and at NYU, among other places. Her interests include the sociology of intellectuals, literature, publishing and translation. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (Fayard, 1999; forthcoming in English translation with Duke University Press), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France (19e-20e siècles) (Seuil, 2011), and of numerous articles published in journals of sociology, history, political science, aesthetics and literature, cultural studies and French studies. She is also editor or co-editor of Pour une histoire des sciences sociales (Fayard, 2004), Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (Fayard, 2004), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (CNRS Editions, 2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Nouveau Monde, 2009), and L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte, 2009).

Co-sponsored by:  The Europe Center, Department of French and Italian, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Center for the Study of the Novel, Department of Sociology, DLCL Research Unit on Literature and Ethics, Hebrew Literature Workshop, and the French Culture Workshop

Event Summary

Sapiro describes how writers during the inter-war period were targeted for social and political subversion, and even accused of being responsible for the French military defeat. The belief in the power of the written word, a legacy from the French Revolution, along with the Catholic fear of the dangers of reading, contributed to the perception of the printed word as a vehicle for inciting crime. Censorship was prevalent, with many prosecutions for writing and publishing carried out during the 19th century.

Sapiro traces how this repression led to the development of two competing ideas of professional ethics around writing: the idea of art for art's sake, and the political commitment of public intellectuals. She also describes the application of objective and subjective responsibility theories, ideas about criminality, and the absence of a professional ethics in writing, to the laws of free press during this period. Sapiro outlines several specific cases of prosecution against prominent authors in France, and the variety of arguments used in the defense - sometimes unsuccessfully.

A discussion session following the talk raised such questions as: How does the identity of the author relate to concepts of citizenship? Could the trials of authors be considered a form of censorship? Were there structural similarities between the trials and the public debate? Was there any reaction in the literary realm? Was there ever any criticism about the legal mechanism as the appropriate arena for discussing this moral debate? Why wasn't the debate held within the government?