What are Southeast Asia’s prospects?  How well equipped and prepared are its people to cope with current and future shocks from inside and outside their region?  With significant exceptions including the wars in Indochina after 1945 and the 1965-66 bloodshed in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s modern history since World War II has been relatively peaceful.  In recent times the region has had its share of turbulence.  Nevertheless, the multidimensional 2022 Global Peace Index ranks nine of the ten Southeast Asian states as more peaceful than the United States.  On the 2021 Democracy Index, four of the Southeast Asian ten are outright “authoritarian,” while the other six join the US in being “flawed democracies.”  What do these and related trends imply?  In addition to politics and geopolitics, visiting scholar Gita Wirjawan’s view of Southeast Asia’s future will touch upon socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental aspects as well.

Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur and philanthropist and a 2022-23 visiting scholar at APARC.  Having established a successful investment business in Indonesia, the Ancora Group, he created the Ancora Foundation.  The foundation has endowed scholarships for Indonesians to attend Stanford and other high-ranked universities around the world and has funded the training of teachers at hundreds of Indonesian kindergartens serving underprivileged children.  Wirjawan’s public service has included positions as Indonesia’s minister of trade, chairman of its Investment Coordinating Board, and chair of a 159-nation WTO ministerial conference in 2012 that focused on easing global trade barriers.  He led his country’s national badminton association in 2012-16 when Indonesia won four gold medals in the sport at world championships including the Olympics.  He advises Indonesia’s School of Government and Public Policy (SGPP) and Yale’s School of Management, among other institutions.  At SGPP he hosts a public-policy podcast called endgame, to which an estimated 471 thousand people subscribe.  His degrees are from the Harvard Kennedy School (MPA), Baylor University (MBA), and the University of Texas at Austin (BSc).

SCCEI Fall Seminar Series 

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

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

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Inequality by Design: China’s Distinctive Political Economy

With modest income differences and virtually no private wealth four decades ago, China’s inequalities of income and wealth are now almost as extreme as in the United States and Russia. This development is more puzzling than commonly recognized, and analyses of the determinants of household income do not address its institutional origins. Widening inequality is a byproduct of China’s highly distinctive political economy, which is designed to preserve communist party control and enforce the priorities of the central state. These include an enduringly large capital-intensive state sector supported by a financial system unusually reliant on state-owned banks; a tax base highly dependent on business volume rather than profits; a distorted fiscal system that drives local governments into property development; and political constraints on documenting and taxing private assets. These structures create large concentrations of capital and favor those with access to it, transferring incomes from households to corporations while crippling the state’s capacity to remediate resulting inequalities.

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About the Speaker 
 

Andrew Walder is the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor at Stanford University, where he is also a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute. Previously, he served as chair of the department of sociology, and as director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and of the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies.

A political sociologist, Walder has long specialized on the sources of conflict, stability, and change in communist regimes and their successor states. His publications on China have ranged from the political and economic organization of the Mao era to changing patterns of stratification, social mobility, and political conflict in the post-Mao era. His current research focuses on popular political mobilization in late-1960s China and the subsequent collapse and rebuilding of the Chinese party-state. He holds an AB from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Michigan.

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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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