From July 25 through 28, 2022, 21 educators from across the United States and China gathered online for the 2022 East Asia Summer Institute for Middle School Teachers, a teacher professional development seminar offered by SPICE in partnership with the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. NCTA is made possible by the Freeman Foundation. Over four days of rich content lectures, discussion, and experiential learning, institute participants deepened their background knowledge on Asia and the Asian American experience and began to rethink and revamp their curriculum plans for the 2022–23 school year.

This year’s participants were from many U.S. states, including Alabama, California, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Washington. For the first time, three teachers from China—from Jiangsu and Guangzhou provinces—also took part in the institute. The teachers represented a wide range of teaching subjects, from history, social studies, language arts, and literature, but all sought to strengthen their teaching through a clearer, more nuanced understanding of key episodes in the history of East Asia and the Asian American experience.

The institute’s guest speakers also came from diverse backgrounds, being university professors, curriculum specialists, and school educators with expertise on a specific aspect of Asia or the Asian American experience and/or pedagogy. Interwoven between the captivating content lectures were classroom-focused lesson demonstrations and pedagogy-focused discussions facilitated by SPICE curriculum designers. “We make sure we balance subject-matter content with pedagogical discussions in all of our teacher professional development seminars,” noted Jonas Edman, who managed the middle school institute. “We want to help middle school teachers integrate the knowledge gained from the scholars directly into the classroom.” To that end, summer institute participants each received complimentary literature and SPICE curriculum units to help them bring Asia and the Asian American experience alive for their students. The institute’s key topics and speakers were:

July 25: The Silk Road
Clayton Dube, Director, USC U.S.-China Institute, University of Southern California, “Silk Road—Goods, Ideas, and People on the Move”
Rylan Sekiguchi, SPICE, “Along the Silk Road” curriculum demonstration

July 26: Religions and Philosophies of East Asia
John Kieschnick, the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Buddhist Studies, Stanford University, “Buddhism: Ancestor Worship, Karma, and Vegetarianism”
Jonas Edman, SPICE, “Religions and Philosophies of China” curriculum demonstration

July 27: Tokugawa Japan
Uldis Kruze, Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, University of San Francisco, “Edo Japan 1600–1868”
Karen Tiegel, The Nueva School, “Japanese Art in the Edo Period” curriculum demonstration

July 28: Asian Voices and Asian American Experiences
Takami Nieda, English Department, Seattle Central College, “The Color of the Sky is the Shape of the Heart in the Classroom”
Gary Mukai, SPICE, “Early Japanese American History”
Jonas Edman, SPICE, “Angel Island,” “Chinese American Voices,” “What Does It Mean to Be an American?” curriculum demonstrations

The Big Data China website features regular multimedia analysis with high-quality data that explores important trends in China’s economy and society. In the newest video release, Scott Rozelle, SCCEI Co-Director, and Scott Kennedy, CSIS Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics, sit down to discuss why the Big Data China collaboration is needed now, more than ever. As Scott Rozelle puts it, "we just don’t understand China — if we understood China better, we could make better policy decisions." This collaboration aims to reduce the current gap between academia and Washington by identifying and highlighting the policy implications of cutting-edge scholarly work on China and presenting it directly to the policy community. 

Watch the video and visit the website for more from Big Data China!

After the end of World War II, more than 45,000 young Japanese women married American GIs and came to the United States to embark upon new lives among strangers. The mother of Kathryn Tolbert, a former long-time journalist with The Washington Post, was one of them.

Kathryn noted, “I knew there was a story in my mother’s journey from war-time Japan to an upstate New York poultry farm. In order to tell it, I teamed up with journalists Lucy Craft and Karen Kasmauski, whose mothers were also Japanese war brides, to make a short documentary film through a mother-daughter lens. Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides was released in August 2015 and premiered on BBC World Television. To show the experiences of many more women like our mothers, I spent a year traveling the country to record interviews, funded by a Time Out grant from Vassar College, my alma mater.”

The Japanese War Brides Oral History Archive is the result of her interviews. The Oral History Archive documents an important chapter of U.S. immigration history that is largely unknown and usually left out of the broader Japanese American experience. In these oral histories, Japanese immigrant women reflect on their lives in postwar Japan, their journeys across the Pacific, and their experiences living in the United States.

SPICE developed five lessons for the Japanese War Brides Oral History Archive that suggest ways for teachers to engage their students with the broad themes that emerge from the individual experiences of Japanese war brides. The lessons are: (1) Setting the Context; (2) Japanese Immigration to the United States; (3) The Transmission of Culture; (4) Notions of Identity; and (5) Conflict and Its Analysis. SPICE also developed a teacher’s guide for the film, Fall Seven Times, Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides, that helps teachers set the context for the film and provides guided viewing activities and debriefing activities. The lessons and teacher’s guide can be found at the webpage below.

When the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council announces it plan next week for overhauling how the agency combats the spread of disinformation online, its focus will be on “how to achieve greater transparency across our disinformation related work” and how to “increase trust with the public,” according to council meeting minutes released Monday.

Read more at Cyberscoop.com

Stanford e-China has been an incredible academic experience from day one.

My journey with the program started with the interview, which was an enjoyable and memorable experience. I was greeted by a warm smile the moment I entered the Zoom room, and Ms. Carey Moncaster showed genuine interest in learning about me as a person. Rather than focusing on my experiences or achievements, she wanted to know more about my personality, interests, and dreams. Ms. Moncaster and the director of SPICE, Dr. Gary Mukai, have remained passionate advisors and generous mentors to many students even after the course, including me. Over the last year and a half, they were always there when I needed advice on how to proceed with a project or wisdom on dealing with a difficult situation.

The sense of community permeated the course itself, which was designed to be highly interactive. The expert speakers gave insightful lectures, followed by long sessions of Q&A. I can still remember my excitement at being able to ask Mr. Roy Ng, our fintech speaker, three questions after his seminar, where he explained how blockchain could help us reach the unbanked. In fact, my current obsession almost perfectly mirrors that topic—exploring how Central Bank Digital Currencies can help facilitate financial inclusion to mitigate inequality. That session made me realize that social entrepreneurship and tech-based solutions will be key players in upholding justice.

The Q&A was also a chance for my cohort to learn from each other. We bonded over our productive, collaborative, and enthusiastic discussions, and many of us stayed in touch after the course. Over the last year and a half, I have grown to be close friends with my fellow honoree, Jason Li. After meeting in person when he visited Shanghai, we decided to co-found a platform to connect students across the globe. Inspired by the diverse community of brilliant students we saw at Stanford e-China, we developed SPOT. The acronym stands for Student Projects Organized Together, and we hope to bring together an international network of passionate youth. We believe that together, we undertake global initiatives that make tangible impacts. Our website is www.spotaproject.com.

Last but not least, e-China has helped me with my work in social justice. Design Thinking has not only aided in my endeavors with SPOT but also in my other initiatives, including the Law Association for Crimes Across History (LACAH) mock trial, where we put perpetrators of atrocities on the stand (lacah.net). Dora Gan from my e-China cohort is actually a member of our Youth Council! Design Thinking’s methodical approach helped us scale up rapidly, and we were recently honored by the EARCOS Global Citizen Grant.

Throughout high school, I have learned a lot from a wide range of outstanding programs. I have also met many other fabulous peers through them. However, it is not every day that a course leaves such a significant impact, continuing to play a role in my life long after its conclusion. Stanford e-China is truly an exceptional experience. I am very thankful to have been a part of the first cohort.

An edited version of this opinion piece first appeared in the 14 July 2022 issue of The Jakarta Post.

---

How preoccupied is America with its own domestic problems? To the point of impairing the ability of President Biden’s administration to give Indonesia and Southeast Asia the foreign-policy attention they deserve?

The Group of Twenty’s meetings are now at or near the top of the Indonesian foreign ministry’s list of things to do. Foreign minister Retno Marsudi has worried, amid talk of boycotts, that Moscow-Washington animosity over Ukraine could ruin the G20 summit in Bali this November, to the embarrassment of its Indonesian host and chair. Presumably to her relief, Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Indonesia to attend in person the preparatory G20 foreign ministers meeting that she hosted and chaired in Bali on 7-8 July 2022, and he did so despite the participation of his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.  In addition to holding a one-on-one session with Marsudi, Blinken also met with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi for a discussion of US-China relations that reportedly lasted five hours. Indonesia can take pride in having made that lengthy interaction possible. 

The foreign ministers’ meeting was not without drama. Twice, in response to criticism of Russia, Lavrov walked out of the room, and he left the conference altogether before it ended. Perhaps he forgot that in democracies, praise is not required.  But things in Bali could have gotten much worse, and in that sense America’s presence throughout the event helped save Indonesia’s face.

Biden’s administration has not neglected Indonesia or Southeast Asia, as recent diplomacy shows. In May he accommodated the priority on economic development favored by Indonesia and other Asian states by traveling to Japan to announce the formation of an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). Its 14 founding partners, including Indonesia and six other ASEAN members, account for 40 percent of global GDP. Earlier in May, in Washington, DC, Biden hosted a special summit with Indonesia and other ASEAN states. Their Joint Vision Statement with the US, as in IPEF, emphasized economic cooperation.

None of this diplomacy, however, could temper the strident political polarization that continues to disrupt America. Understandably, that frenzy of distrust and dissension has led some Indonesians to wonder how reliable a partner the US will turn out to be in years to come.    

The splitting of many Americans into rival partisan camps is in part structural. For example, compared with better-educated urban and suburban dwellers, less well-educated rural and small-town Americans are more likely to hold right-wing Republican views. The reasons why those views have become more extreme include the popularity of Donald Trump and his anti-democratic if not proto-fascistic campaign to re-install himself in the White House after losing the free and fair election of 2020.  His effort, Republican complicity in it, and the backlash against it have widened the separation of often coastal or near-coastal Democratic states from Republican ones more or less clustered in middle and southern America. Political scientist and statistician Simon Jackman goes so far as to argue that the US has not been this divided politically since the Great Depression of the 1930s—or possibly even since the 1860s Civil War.

The Vanderbilt University Project on Unity and American Democracy chooses the longer timeline. “Not since the Civil War,” it concludes, “have so many Americans held such radically opposed views not just of politics but of reality itself.” The project’s own findings, however, undermine the caricature of a country fatally hobbled by national schizophrenia and group delusions. 

The Vanderbilt Unity Index combines quarterly data from 1981 to 2021 on five variables—presidential disapproval, congressional polarization, ideological extremism, social mistrust, and civil unrest—to calculate changes in American national unity across those four decades on a 0-to-100 scale, from least to most unified. Over that period of time, the index has fluctuated in a close to middling zone between 50 and 70 on that 100-point scale. 

The index shows deep plunges in unity only twice since 1981, and both of those dives were linked to the uniquely calamitous presidency of President Trump. In contrast, the average score during the first five quarters of the Biden administration has been 58, a sharp improvement from the average of 51 under Trump. Heartened by that betterment, two of the Vanderbilt scholars surmise that America’s “disharmony may be dissipating.”

That could be an overoptimistic guess. Unity is one thing, victory another. Legislative elections will be held on 8 November this year. As of the end of June, prominent forecaster Nate Silver gave the still largely Trump-beholden Republican Party an 87 percent chance — a near-certainty — of replacing Biden’s Democrats as the majority party in the House of Representatives. The race for a majority in the Senate was too close to call. But even if Republicans control only the House, they will likely use that platform to undermine Biden’s administration during his final two years in office.      

As if likely losses of legislative power were not enough for Biden to worry about, maneuvers by Republicans to stack the Supreme Court with right-wing partisans have tilted that juridical balance steeply in their favor. The court’s new reactionary 6-to-3 majority has already made two shocking decisions. They have, in effect, denied women their long-standing right to abortion and made it easier to carry a concealed gun in public. Republicans claim to support individual rights. But they and their court appointees have deleted the long-standing constitutional right of a pregnant woman to decide whether to give birth or not, thereby depriving her of assured responsibility over her physical body and personal future. 

Regarding gun violence, in barely five months from 1 January through 5 June of this year, America has experienced 246 mass shootings — incidents that kill or wound four or more people. That puts the US on track in 2022 to match or exceed its record of 692 mass shootings in 2021, more than in any year since the Gun Violence Archive began counting them. The Republican-majority court’s unconscionable impulses seem to be to make women make more babies, wanted or not, and to make murders more likely as well.

There is good news. First, a massive popular backlash against these Republican decisions has either begun or is likely. Second, a nationally televised Congressional investigation of the violent attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 has displayed the complicity of Trump, and by association the Trump-infected Republican Party, in an insurrection that killed at least seven people and injured roughly 150 more. Third, although Trump may not end up where he belongs, namely, in jail, at least he faces Republican rivals for the party’s nomination to run for president in 2024. Conceivably those rivals could come to include a candidate who is politically more moderate and personally less criminal, corrupt, and narcissistic than he. 

President Joko Widodo will host the G20 leaders in Indonesia merely one week after the 8 November 2022 midterm legislative election takes place in the US. Will Biden go again to Bali? Not if at that time right-wing fanatics claiming election fraud are destabilizing America. For long-term interactions between Jakarta and Washington relations, however, what will matter is not who will attend the 2022 G20 summit in Bali. It will be the names and plans of the Indonesians and Americans who will run and win in the national elections to be held in their respective countries in 2024.

---

Donald K. Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Program at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. His recent publications include an edited volume, The Deer and the Dragon: Southeast Asia and China in the 21^st Century.

Applications opened recently for the Fall 2022 session of the Stanford University Scholars Program for Japanese High School Students (also known as “Stanford e-Japan”), which will run from the end of September 2022 through the end of February 2023. The deadline to apply is August 12, 2022.

Stanford e-Japan
Fall 2022 session (September 2022 to February 2023)
Application period: July 1 to August 12, 2022

All applications must be submitted at https://spicestanford.smapply.io/prog/stanford_e-japan/ via the SurveyMonkey Apply platform. Applicants and recommenders will need to create a SurveyMonkey Apply account to proceed. Students who are interested in applying to the online course are encouraged to begin their applications early.

Accepted applicants will engage in an intensive study of U.S. society and culture and U.S.–Japan relations. Government officials, top scholars, and experts from Stanford University and throughout the United States provide web-based lectures and engage students in live discussion sessions.

Stanford e-Japan is offered by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), Stanford University. Stanford e-Japan is generously supported by the Yanai Tadashi Foundation, Tokyo, Japan.

For more information about Stanford e-Japan, please visit stanfordejapan.org.

To stay informed of news about Stanford e-Japan and SPICE’s other student programs, join our email list or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

SPICE offers separate courses for U.S. high school students. For more information, please visit the Reischauer Scholars Program (online course about Japan), the Sejong Korea Scholars Program (online course about Korea), and the China Scholars Program (online course about China).

This article originally appeared in The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.

Interested in this article? Subscribe to APARC newsletters to receive our experts' analysis.

---

The numbers tell part of the story. While US merchandise trade with the Southeast Asian region grew by a respectable 62.4% from 2010 to 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), China’s trade increased by an impressive 115% during the same period, according to the statistics of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Over a longer period, the US share of the region’s total merchandise trade fell from 16.1% in 2000 to 11.6% in 2020, while China’s share rose from 4.3% to 19.4%. Although infrastructure investment numbers are harder to come by, there is no question that China is playing a much more significant role in Southeast Asian infrastructure development than the US.

Some of the relative decline in the US economic role in the region is the inevitable result of China’s dramatic economic growth and the resulting increased trade and investment. That trend, however, only partly explains the US predicament. Over the past 10–20 years, Beijing has been much more aggressive in its economic statecraft than Washington. Beijing signed a Free Trade Agreement with ASEAN, then joined a new multilateral trade agreement—the Regional Cooperation and Economic Partnership (RCEP)—and more recently asked to join the high-standard Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) free trade accord. On infrastructure, China established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the high-profile Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to funnel billions of dollars into infrastructure projects in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

The BRI initiative generally has been welcomed in the region for one simple reason: Southeast Asia has huge and urgent infrastructure needs—estimated by the Asian Development Bank to be $210 billion per year through 2030—that it cannot meet by mobilizing domestic resources. Through BRI, Beijing is offering to meet a portion of those needs with greater speed and fewer conditions than other would-be partners. Southeast Asian governments have lined up for BRI projects, with outgoing Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, and former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razaq having signed on for more than $20 billion of BRI-funded infrastructure projects in the 2015–2018 period. Although the BRI has been the subject of substantial criticism for overpromising, project delays, quality problems, employing Chinese rather than local labor, and raising the host government’s debt obligations, the initiative still dominates the discussion of infrastructure in the region.

The US, meanwhile, has underperformed in terms of its economic diplomacy. Most importantly, in 2017 it summarily withdrew from its primary economic initiative in the region, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement. President Trump’s decision to pull out of that accord was a severe geostrategic and economic blunder, as TPP would have bound the US into the broader region for a generation or more, as well as facilitated greater US trade with a number of fast-growing economies. With the US out of the TPP and China joining RCEP, the prospects are for a growing percentage of ASEAN trade to be with China (and other RCEP partners) and for the US and American businesses to lose further ground.

 

The US also has struggled to compete on infrastructure. The US is not going to match China, particularly in areas such as road, rail, and port development, but it could do more. The Trump administration launched several initiatives—including the Blue Dot Network, Clean EDGE Asia, and the establishment of the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), a larger, more ambitious version of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a federal entity that helps insure US ventures abroad—all of which sought to leverage private sector funding to offer high-quality projects. The Biden administration has followed up with the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, announced in June in coordination with G-7 partners, and promised via the Quad $50 billion in infrastructure funding. To date, however, these initiatives generally have not significantly changed the overall infrastructure picture in the region.

The US failure to engage in the region’s burgeoning free trade networks—combined with the big splash that China’s BRI initiative is making and the lack of a countervailing American initiative—is fueling the perception in the region that the US is a declining economic player. In an ASEAN 2021 survey of regional opinion leaders, 76% believed China was the most influential economic partner in the region, compared to less than 10% who felt that way about the US. Even more telling, I recall asking a senior Myanmar economic minister in 2017 why he had led private-sector roadshows to China, Japan, and South Korea but not the US, and he replied: “We didn’t even think of the US.”

Thus, the US faces a problem of both reality and perception. To address this, the US does not need to match Chinese numbers. It does, however, need to find a way to re-energize its trade engagement and to become a more significant player in Southeast Asian infrastructure, and to do so in ways that change the narrative in the region.

Recognizing this reality, the Biden administration recently launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), which is expected to result in negotiations on trade, supply chains, clean energy, and decarbonization, as well as on tax and corruption issues. The administration touted this initiative as reflecting the needs and realities of the 21st-century global economy. The good news is that seven of the ten ASEAN member nations signed onto IPEF, presumably reflecting their interest in greater US economic engagement and their hope that IPEF can produce just that. Skeptics say the initiative does not offer the promise of greater access to the US market via tariff reductions, which normally would be the carrot to entice other governments into adopting the high standards Washington wants. Also, as Matthew Goodman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has pointed out, the fact that the administration is unwilling to take any negotiated agreement to Congress for ratification is likely to raise doubts in the minds of Asian partners about the IPEF’s durability, since a future administration can easily toss it aside.

Despite or maybe because of these doubts, the US needs to do all it can to turn the IPEF into something that is economically meaningful. Can it produce a digital trade agreement, real substance on strengthening supply chains, or can it possibly even use trade facilitation tools to enhance market access as former senior US trade official Wendy Cutler has suggested in a recent podcast hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies? It is too early to say, but the bottom line is that many in the region—and indeed even in the US—will remain privately doubtful until and unless the IPEF shows that it can result in tangible business and economic benefits.

The White House put the IPEF forward because it believes it lacks the political support either to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership or to launch another significant trade initiative. The domestic politics of trade might be tough right now, but that is not an excuse that is going to go very far in Southeast Asia. The region is not going to say “no problem, we understand.” Instead, it will go ahead without the US. If Washington wants to maintain influence, it needs to find a way to make the domestic politics on trade work. That almost certainly will entail appealing to bipartisan concern about Chinese geostrategic dominance, as trade alone probably will not sell.

On infrastructure, the various US initiatives to date have disappointed to some extent, although the Development Finance Corporation has been a step in the right direction. They do little other than offer the prospect of quality to give the US a competitive edge over Chinese-funded projects. The Chinese offer relatively speedy approval processes, low or zero conditionality deals, and complete project packages, including financing. Chinese state companies often are willing to undertake projects that do not appear to be commercially viable. Plus, Chinese political leaders weigh in personally to push the projects forward. I have seen this on the ground, in Indonesia and Myanmar, countless times. The Chinese pull out all of the stops, with intensive lobbying and full financing, and they often win.

Economic officials in the region complain that the multilateral development banks and Japan, which also offer substantial infrastructure deals, move much more slowly and laboriously than China. The design, discussion, and approval process often takes many years. With the US, it is almost always the private sector taking the lead, and private American companies have a hard time finding well-developed, “bankable” infrastructure projects in the region. Plus, US companies often come to the table without full financing or even all the pieces of the project. Government lobbying and financing usually lags, if it is there at all.

If the US is going to compete effectively for infrastructure projects in the region, it is going to have to change the way it does business. To begin with, the US will have to make it easier for Southeast Asian governments to say “yes” to deals. That means offering the full project package, including financing, and accelerating the project preparation and approval timeline to come closer to matching that of the Chinese. It also means more government funding for project development along with heavy US government lobbying, including by the president when appropriate, for major projects. The US is not going to engage in bribery or support projects that destroy communities or the environment, nor should it. But it needs to use just about all the other available tools to compete.

The US should consider establishing an overseas infrastructure czar in Washington who can lead and oversee government-business teams that identify potential projects where the US can compete, put together a full project package, including private and public financing, and then aggressively lobby the host government for approval. I often hear that the US does not work that way on overseas business. Perhaps, but if Washington wants to win some victories—and more significant projects—it needs to be willing to adopt new thinking.

Re-engaging on trade and winning more infrastructure deals are essential, but there is one more thing the US needs to do to reverse the perception that it is a declining economic player in Southeast Asia. It needs to do a much better job of telling its economic story. For example, the US remains the largest foreign investor in Southeast Asia, but I am willing to bet few people in the region know that. Similarly, America remains a huge market for Southeast Asian exports, just slightly smaller than China, but again that is not well known or much talked about in the region. The US should devote more resources and time to telling this story and to reminding the region of the incredible power of American private sector innovation and the US commitment to quality investment. Better communications alone will not solve the problem, but combined with trade and infrastructure initiatives it can help the US persuade the governments and people of Southeast Asia that it remains a major economic partner.

Just days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Dmitri Medvedev, the former president and prime minister of Russia, took to social media to post a chilling message. He raged against Western sanctions on his country and suggested darkly that Russia could rip up some of its most important agreements with the West. He mentioned the New START treaty, the nuclear arms reduction agreement signed with the United States over a decade ago, but the threat was broader still: the sundering of all diplomatic ties with Western countries. “It’s time to hang huge padlocks on the embassies,” he wrote.

Read the rest at Foreign Affairs