About the Speaker 

Professor Hsieh is the Phyllis and Irwin Winkelreid Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He is an elected member of Taiwan's Academia Sinica, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society. He is also a two times recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang Award of China's Academy of Social Sciences.

The family of Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh donated his personal archive to the Stanford Libraries' Special Collections and endowed the Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture series to honor his legacy and to inspire future generations. Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh (1919-2004) was former Governor of the Central Bank in Taiwan. During his tenure, he was responsible for the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, and was widely recognized for achieving stability and economic growth. In his long and distinguished career as economist and development specialist, he held key positions in multilateral institutions including the Asian Development Bank, where as founding Director, he was instrumental in advancing the green revolution and in the transformation of rural Asia. Read more about Dr. Hsieh.

One Bed, Two Dreams: Why Joint Ventures So Often Fail in China

Please join us for an on-campus lecture and discussion led by author Kenneth Wilcox and moderated by SCCEI Senior Research Fellow Chenggang Xu.

Light refreshments will be served.

Ken Wilcox is the author of “The China Business Conundrum: Ensure that Win-Win Doesn’t Mean Western Companies Lose Twice” (Wiley, November 2024) and “Leading Through Culture” (Waterside, 2020).

Ken was the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) from 2001 to 2011, then the CEO of SVB’s joint venture with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB-SVB) in Shanghai until 2015, followed by four years as its Vice Chairman. He currently serves on the boards of the Asia Society of Northern California, the Asian Art Museum, and UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center, as well as Columbia Lake Partners, a European venture-debt fund. He is on the Board of Advisors of the Fudan University School of Management in Shanghai and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at U.C. Berkeley.

Ken holds a PhD in German from Ohio State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has given numerous speeches in both English and Chinese, published a variety of articles in the banking press, and recently wrote the management book “Leading Through Culture: How Real Leaders Create Cultures That Motivate People to Achieve Great Things” (Waterside Productions, 2020) and its accompanying workbook, “How About You?” (Waterside Productions, 2023). The father of two sons, he lives in San Francisco with his wife, Ruth, and several antique cars.

This event has reached capacity. Registration is now closed.

EVENT UPDATE: Due to overwhelming interest, registration for this event is now on a first-come, first-served basis with no waitlist to ensure fairness and accommodate as many guests as possible. Seating is not guaranteed, so please arrive early. An overflow space will be available. Expect a confirmation email from our event team by January 22.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, our original speaker, Lucy Aharish, is unable to travel to the U.S. at this time. While we hope to have Aharish join us at a later date, we are pleased to instead welcome Judea Pearl, UCLA Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science and Statistics, Director of the UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory, and father of Daniel Pearl.

We have reached capacity for this event, and registration is now closed. For all questions, please email israelstudies@stanford.edu.

Catalyzed by the kidnapping and murder of his son, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, world-renowned computer scientist and philosopher Dr. Judea Pearl has been a relentless advocate for reason and understanding in writings and talks spanning the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Best known for his groundbreaking work on artificial intelligence, Dr. Pearl turned his power of analysis to an anatomy of the hate that took his son's life, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the story of Israel, antisemitism, and other related subjects. In Coexistence and Other Fighting Words, Dr. Pearl collects the best of his work, offering an indispensable guide to some of the most pressing issues of our time.

Judea Pearl (born in Tel-Aviv, 1936) is the Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is known internationally for his contributions to Artificial Intelligence, human reasoning, and philosophy of science. He has received numerous scientific awards, including the 2012 A. M. Turing Award (often described as the "Nobel Prize of computing"). Judea is the father of slain Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. He lectures and writes on Jewish identity, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. His latest book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl, collects his essays written on these topics between 2002 and 2025.

Ambassador Dennis Ross is the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He also teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. For more than twelve years, Amb. Ross played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process, dealing directly with the parties as the U.S. point man on the peace process in both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. He served two and half years as special assistant to President Obama and National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, spending the first 6 months of the Administration as the special advisor on Iran to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. His newest book is Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World (Oxford University Press, March 2025).

Amichai Magen is the founding director of the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Previously, he served as the visiting fellow in Israel Studies at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, head of the MA Program in Diplomacy & Conflict Studies, and director of the Program on Democratic Resilience and Development (PDRD) at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy, Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel. His research and teaching interests address democracy, the rule of law, liberal orders, risk and political violence, as well as Israeli politics and policy.

Magen received the Yitzhak Rabin Fulbright Award (2003), served as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and was the W. Glenn Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution (2008-9). In 2016, he was named a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy, an award that recognizes outstanding thought leaders around the world. Between 2018 and 2022, he served as principal investigator in two European Union Horizon 2020 research consortia, EU-LISTCO and RECONNECT. Amichai Magen served on the Executive Committee of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and is a Board Member of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR) and the International Coalition for Democratic Renewal (ICDR).

Michael McFaul is former director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. Dr. McFaul is also an international affairs analyst for NBC News. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

He has authored several books, most recently Autocrats versus Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder. Earlier books include the New York Times bestseller From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; Transitions To Democracy: A Comparative Perspective (eds. with Kathryn Stoner); Power and Purpose: American Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (with James Goldgeier); and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He teaches courses on great power relations, democratization, comparative foreign policy decision-making, and revolutions.

Dr. McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. In International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. His DPhil thesis was Southern African Liberation and Great Power Intervention: Towards a Theory of Revolution in an International Context.