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Treating Tuberculosis in North Korea: NGO Humanitarian Aid and US-DPRK Reconciliation

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Dr. Linton was born in Philadelphia in 1950 and grew up in Korea, where his father was a third generation Presbyterian missionary. He is a visiting associate of the Korea Institute, Harvard University, for 2006-07. Linton is currently Chairman of The Eugene Bell Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that provides humanitarian aid to North Korea.

Dr. Linton's talk will focus on the Eugene Bell Foundation and its programs. Named for Rev. Eugene Bell, Lintonn's great-grandfather and a missionary who arrived in Korea in 1895, the Foundation serves as a conduit for a wide spectrum of business, governmental, religious and social organizations as well as individuals who are interested in promoting programs that benefit the sick and suffering of North Korea.

Since 1995, the Foundation strives primarily to bring medical treatment facilities in North Korea together with donors as partners in a combined effort to fight deadly diseases such as tuberculosis (TB). In 2005, the North Korean ministry of Public Health officially asked the Foundation to expand its work to include support programs for local hospitals. The Foundation currently coordinates the delivery of TB medication, diagnostic equipment, and supplies to one third of the North Korean population and approximately forty North Korean treatment facilities (hospitals and care centers).

Dr. Linton's credentials include: thirty years of teaching and research on Korea, twenty years of travel to North Korea (over fifty trips since 1979), and ten years of humanitarian aid work in North Korea. Dr. Linton received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, a Masters of Divinity from Korea Theological Seminary, and a Masters of Philosophy and a Ph.D. in Korean Studies from Columbia University.

This public lecture is part of the conference "Public Diplomacy, Counterpublics, and the Asia Pacific." This conference is co-sponsored by The Asia Society Northern California; The Japan Society of Northern California; Business for Diplomatic Action; Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University; and the Taiwan Democracy Program in the Center on Democracy Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.

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Return to Southeast Asia, Lame Duck President Finding a Quiet Pond

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The 14th Informal APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting concluded on Nov. 19, 2006, and the participants had their photo taken in colorful Vietnamese traditional costumes called ao dai. Still in the shadow of the congressional election failure, President George W. Bush, realizing that a stable Asia is very important for the U.S. geostrategy, took advantage of the occasion to enhance the prestige of the United States. Just as American experts said, the Bush administration has probably become a lame duck now, but even a healthy duck needs to find a quiet pond.

"APEC's uniquely trans-Pacific character is an important political reason for U.S. to strengthen the group," Donald Emmerson, director of the Southeast Asia Forum of Shorenstein APARC at Stanford University, explained. "While APEC has lagged, East Asian regionalism has boomed. That has been good for East Asia. But U.S. and East Asian interests alike could be hurt if the Pacific Ocean ends up being split between rival Chinese and American spheres of influence."

However, the U.S. effort to save the Doha Round of trade talks with the Asia-Pacific Free Trade Agreement has yielded little. The Doha Round aimed to remove trade barriers in the world but was suspended due to some countries' agriculture protection policies. Washington had wanted to model the Doha Round upon the Asia-Pacific Free Trade Agreement. But U.S. officials never expected that there would be so many differences among the Asia-Pacific leaders, and that the economic development of Pacific Rim countries differ in thousands of ways. Despite the fact that the Hanoi Statement reiterated that supporting the Doha Round was APEC's priority, no material progress has been made.

"The U.S. is urging a last ditch effort to restart the talks through APEC," Professor Charles Morrison, president of the East-West Center located in Hawaii, says. "Whether or not APEC can do more than make a rhetorical statement of support is unsure. I feel that the APEC economies should agree to prepare new offers within a short period of time -- three weeks, for example -- to challenge the Europeans, Brazilians, Indians and others."

United States Steps Out to "Please" ASEAN

Seventeen years after its establishment, APEC now plays a decisive role in the international political arena. It has 40 percent of the world's population, 48 percent of the world trade volume and 56 percent of the world GDP. Since 1989, the economy in this region has grown by 26 percent, compared to only 8 percent economic growth rate in the rest of the world. With the double advantage of economic strength and rapid growth, China, being one of APEC's main economies and its "engine," has fully taken the limelight. On the other hand, the United States has been weighed down with countering terrorism in the Middle East.

"China has done very well in enhancing its relations with Southeast Asia in recent years," Sheldon Simon, professor of the Program in Southeast Asian Studies at Arizona State University, points out. "China has not only established a free trade forum for China and ASEAN countries, but also helped and influenced the area with its economy and culture. But I think that the United States has realized the importance of this area and come back to fasten its friendly relationship with the region."

The United States coming back to Southeast Asia and repairing its relations with the ASEAN countries is partly activated by China's increasing influence in the area.

"The naissance and growth of some democratic countries in Southeast Asia has received sympathetic response of democratic values from Washington," said Simon. "With the traditional friendly relations between the area and the United States, these countries value their friendship with the United States sometimes more than the trust in their neighboring countries. Geopolitics is also very important factor. The Asia-Pacific area is a very important to the world economy and the U.S. power structure. Therefore, the United States will not easily give it up."

Another motive for the United States to foster closer relations in the area is the common interest of countering terrorism. There are still some terrorist groups in Indonesia, the Philippines and southern Thailand.

"President Bush has a perfect attendance record at APEC meetings (Clinton missed two of them), which says that he does take APEC seriously and believes Asia is important to U.S. interests," Ralph Cossa, president of the Pacific Forum Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview with the Washington Observer Weekly.

Besides attending the APEC summit meetings annually, Washington has recently activated several plans to "please" the ASEAN countries, including setting up a ministerial dialogue system with them and a platform for maintaining contact at the deputy finance minister level, even increased exchanges at the deputy defense secretary level.

The extent of U.S. efforts to foster cordial relations with Southeast Asian countries can also be seen in the increasingly friendly U.S.-Vietnamese economic and trade relations. The Bush administration is not only supporting Vietnam to enter the WTO, but has even proposed giving Vietnam Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status.

"The reason that Bush failed to bring the gift of PNTR status to the APEC Hanoi summit is that the Congress dominated by the Republicans was lacking efficiency and could not pass the proposal in time," Simon explained. "But I think that it will be passed as soon as possible in the next month or by the Democrats who begin to dominate the Congress from next January."

Simon and Cossa both admit that Burma is an unharmonious element in U.S. relations with ASEAN. The Burmese dictatorial military government is really the most typical negative example of democracy for the United States. But ASEAN countries are reluctant to see Burma "punished" by the United States for ideological reasons. So Burma has become a sensitive issue in U.S.-ASEAN relations.

"This is a good way for him to interact with ASEAN since Myanmar is not there and this issue does not have to be addressed," said Cossa.

Simon, an expert of Southeast Asia affairs, points out ASEAN countries should be happy about the advantage they have with China and the United States vying for their attention. Being able to juggle the two big powers, Southeast Asia has gained many practical interests and financial aid for its economy, trade, security, culture and education.

"In a short period, there will not be any serious interest conflicts in the triangle balance of China, the United States and ASEAN," Simon told the Washington Observer Weekly. "ASEAN countries' only worry, if there is any, is an accidental spark in the U.S.-China military interaction in Southeast Asia such as the confrontation across the Taiwan Straits."

Turning the Asia-Pacific into a "Gigantic Enterprise?"

"The United States wants to demonstrate its continuing interest in the Asia-Pacific region. It is urging for a study of an Asia Pacific free trade area and support for an APEC business card, and both shifts of approach, illustrate its interest in and support for the APEC process," said Morrison.

An important subject for the APEC Hanoi summit is the "active discussion" of establishing an APEC free trade region. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton proposed for the first time in 1993 the setting up of such an economic zone. Before Bush's visit, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Karan Bhatia suggested that establishing an APEC free trade zone would be a subject worth serious discussion. But his proposal did not receive a warm response from the host. The Vietnamese Deputy Foreign Minister Le Cong Phung stressed that establishing a free trade zone is a long-term objective and will not affect progress of negotiations with the WTO or other bilateral trade agreements.

"Regarding the study of the Asia Pacific free trade area, a number of economies were skeptical because it would be such a large undertaking," said Morrison. A similar plan was once axed in an APEC ministerial statement and the leaders attending this summit do not seem to have much interest in it.

Simon explained Bush's thinking on the subject: "Washington reiterated its intention to establish an Asia-Pacific free trade zone in order to save the precarious WTO Doha Round. Breaking the tariff barriers in the Asia-Pacific region will help continue to press relevant countries to concede in granting agricultural tax subsidies and hopefully open the door to the Doha Round."

The five-year Doha Round was suspended in July this year because six major WTO members -- the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil and India -- failed to reach agreement on market access for agricultural and non-agricultural products. Given the situation, the organizer said that the informal APEC economic leaders' meeting would provide a "good opportunity" to help restore the Doha Round talks. However, the Hanoi summit joint declaration just vaguely indicated that APEC will pursue further integration on issues such as energy in 2007. It would be extremely optimistic to expect that APEC will be able to remove all the tariff barriers in the region before 2010. Although the area produces 50 percent of the world's economic value, the styles and stages of economic development, the cultural backgrounds and political systems of the countries in the region vary a great deal, making it very difficult for these Asian countries to eliminate all these discrepancies and become fully integrated.

"Out of different worries, many Southeast Asian countries are actually not interested in the proposal though they do not speak out. Or we may say that it's not time yet now to change the Asia-Pacific region into a gigantic enterprise," Simon told Washington Observer Weekly.

Quite apart from who concedes what in return for what concession over the APEC free trade mechanism, the question arises: What geographical scope should a regional trade arrangement have? Who should be a party to the agreement and who should not?

There would appear to be three different ideas on the table: (a) the APEC-wide free trade area that the United States proposed at the recent summit in Hanoi; (b) the East Asia Summit-wide framework that Japan reportedly favors, which would include ASEAN + 6 (China, Japan, South Korea, India, New Zealand, Australia) but not the United States; and (c) the ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan, South Korea) context that China seems to prefer, in which the exact positions of Tokyo and Beijing are not entirely clear.

"Without discussing the merits or demerits of each of these arrangements, suffice it to note that since ASEAN is common to all of them, the net effect of these alternative ideas is to strengthen the negotiating position of ASEAN," said Emmerson. "Then again, ASEAN will not necessarily be unified as to its preference for the three proposals. It will be interesting to look for the positions to be taken by individual ASEAN countries and for their collective effort to arrive at a single negotiating position, e.g., in the run-up to the ASEAN summit and the second the East Asia Summit in the Philippines next month."

Cossa has hope for 2007. "The U.S. in particular would like to see APEC moving faster, and will look ahead to next year, with Australia in the chair, for some real progress."

American Public Doesn't Share Washington's Interest in Southeast Asia

The prospect of economic and strategic cooperation brought about by APEC made for a lively week in Southeast Asia. But it stirred little response in the United States. According to the interviewed experts of Southeast affairs, the American public is still haunted by the situation in Iraq and the mid-term election. Even the U.S. media framed the event as Bush's first visit to a foreign country since the Republicans were defeated in the mid-term election.

"Because of the Congressional election, President Bush will want to show leadership rather than simply respond to the new Congress. Both Doha and the nuclear proliferation issue are examples," said Morrison.

Cossa holds a different view: "I don't think the elections will have any major impact on what Bush does or how he does it during this trip. Iraq is his legacy. What he does in Asia can make things better or worse at the margins but will likely be overshadowed by Iraq."

Simon echoed the sentiment. "On one hand, the Republican Party's defeat in the election cannot directly influence Bush's trip to Asia. On the other hand, Bush's economic achievements in the Southeast region will not add to his political record. In Asia, only the North Korea issue may sway the public opinion in the United States."

Yan Li, Washington Observer weekly - Issue No. 201, November 22, 2006

Reprinted by Permission February 12, 2007.

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The Authoritarian Dilemma: Explaining Strategies of Electoral Manipulation

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Andreas Schedler is Professor of Political Science and Head of the Department of Political Studies at CIDE in Mexico City. His extensive work on political concepts includes journal articles, edited books and book chapters on politics and antipolitics, political disenchantment, democratic transition and consolidation, public accountability, vote buying, electoral authoritarianism, and democratic support. His current empirical research focuses on processes of democratization by elections worldwide since 1980. His latest (edited) book is Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Elections (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 2006).

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New Contradictions in China's Countryside: Elections and Re-Centralization

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Two contradictory trends are emerging in China's countryside: one is an attempt to increase upper level control over village finances to reduce peasant burdens and curb cadre corruption; the other is a new policy to require the village party secretary to stand for popular election, in addition to the village committee head. Based on recent fieldwork in China's countryside, Jean Oi will describe the fiscal problems that emerged as the reforms cut peasant burdens and how the new "two-ballot system" works for the selection of village leaders. She will then consider whether these two policy trends are creating new and potentially more serious problems for local governance.

Jean Oi is author of Rural China Takes Off: Institutional Foundations of Economic Reform.

This talk is part of the "China's Year of Decision" colloquium series sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies.

Photo by Jesse Warren

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Jean C. Oi

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-26044

(650) 723-2843 (650) 725-9401
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Haas Professor in Chinese Politics
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Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics in the department of political science and a Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the founding director of the Stanford China Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. Professor Oi is also the founding Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University.

A PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, Oi first taught at Lehigh University and later in the Department of Government at Harvard University before joining the Stanford faculty in 1997.

Her work focuses on comparative politics, with special expertise on political economy and the process of reform in transitional systems. Oi has written extensively on China's rural politics and political economy. Her State and Peasant in Contemporary China (University of California Press, 1989) examined the core of rural politics in the Mao period—the struggle over the distribution of the grain harvest—and the clientelistic politics that ensued. Her Rural China Takes Off (University of California Press, 1999 and Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 1999) examines the property rights necessary for growth and coined the term “local state corporatism" to describe local-state-led growth that has been the cornerstone of China’s development model. 

She has edited a number of conference volumes on key issues in China’s reforms. The first was Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China's Transformation (Brookings Institution Press, 2010), co-edited with Scott Rozelle and Xueguang Zhou, which examined the earlier phases of reform. Most recently, she co-edited with Thomas Fingar, Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future (Stanford University Press, 2020). The volume examines the difficult choices and tradeoffs that China leaders face after forty years of reform, when the economy has slowed and the population is aging, and with increasing demand for and costs of education, healthcare, elder care, and other social benefits.

Oi also works on the politics of corporate restructuring, with a focus on the incentives and institutional constraints of state actors. She has published three edited volumes related to this topic: one on China, Going Private in China: The Politics of Corporate Restructuring and System Reform (Shorenstein APARC, 2011); one on Korea, co-edited with Byung-Kook Kim and Eun Mee Kim, Adapt, Fragment, Transform: Corporate Restructuring and System Reform in Korea (Shorenstein APARC, 2012); and a third on Japan, Syncretism: The Politics of Economic Restructuring and System Reform in Japan, co-edited with Kenji E. Kushida and Kay Shimizu (Brookings Institution, 2013). Other more recent articles include “Creating Corporate Groups to Strengthen China’s State-Owned Enterprises,” with Zhang Xiaowen, in Kjeld Erik Brodsgard, ed., Globalization and Public Sector Reform in China (Routledge, 2014) and "Unpacking the Patterns of Corporate Restructuring during China's SOE Reform," co-authored with Xiaojun Li, Economic and Political Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2018.

Oi continues her research on rural finance and local governance in China. She has done collaborative work with scholars in China, including conducting fieldwork on the organization of rural communities, the provision of public goods, and the fiscal pressures of rapid urbanization. This research is brought together in a co-edited volume, Challenges in the Process of China’s Urbanization (Brookings Institution Shorenstein APARC Series, 2017), with Karen Eggleston and Wang Yiming. Included in this volume is her “Institutional Challenges in Providing Affordable Housing in the People’s Republic of China,” with Niny Khor. 

As a member of the research team who began studying in the late 1980s one county in China, Oi with Steven Goldstein provides a window on China’s dramatic change over the decades in Zouping Revisited: Adaptive Governance in a Chinese County (Stanford University Press, 2018). This volume assesses the later phases of reform and asks how this rural county has been able to manage governance with seemingly unchanged political institutions when the economy and society have transformed beyond recognition. The findings reveal a process of adaptive governance and institutional agility in the way that institutions actually operate, even as their outward appearances remain seemingly unchanged.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative

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Fiscal Politics and Central-Local Relations in China

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Structural Change in China

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Lee Shau Kee Director of the Stanford Center at Peking University
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Village Elections, Public Goods Investments and Pork Barrel Politics, Chinese-style

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A key issue in political economy concerns the accountability that governance structures impose on public officials and how elections and representative democracy influences the allocation of public resources. In this paper we exploit a unique survey data set from nearly 2450 randomly selected villages describing China's recent progress in village governance reforms and its relationship to the provision of public goods in rural China between 1998 and 2004. Two sets of questions are investigated using an empirical framework based on a theoretical model in which local governments must decide to allocate fiscal resources between public goods investments and other expenditures. First, we find evidence, both in descriptive and econometric analyses, that when the village leader is elected, ceteris paribus, the provision of public goods rises (compared to the case when the leader is appointed by upper level officials). Thus, in this way it is possible to conclude that democratization, at least at the village level in rural China, appears to increase the quantity of public goods investment. Second, we seek to understand the mechanism that is driving the results. Also based on survey data, we find that when village leaders (who had been elected) are able to implement more public projects during their terms of office, they, as the incumbent, are more likely to be reelected. In this way, we argue that the link between elections and investment may be a rural China version of pork barrel politics.

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Scott Rozelle

Vote of Confidence, A? Voting Protocol and Participation in China's Village Elections

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The goal of our paper is to provide an empirical basis for understanding progress (or stagnation) in the evolution of China's village committee elections. To meet this goal, we pursue three specific objectives. First, we seek to identify patterns (and trends) of voting behavior and develop ways to measure participation in the voting process. Second, we analyze who is voting and who is not (and document the process by which their votes are cast). Finally, we see to understand the correlation between propensity to vote and the quality of village elections.

To meet our objectives, the rest of the paper relies on a unique set of national representative, household- and village-level data collected by one of the authors. Using the data, descriptive analysis and multivariate analysis are used to demonstrate that while voting protocol differs across villages and over time, despite progress and despite high nominal voting rates, there are still gaps in coverage of groups of individuals in rural China. Some of the largest gaps occur in the case of women and migrants and migrant women. In many cases, large shares of individuals in these groups are being systematically excluded from truly participating in the process of voting. Policy-wise, the paper concludes that China's government needs to increase its effort to promote more regular voting procedures to insure that true participation in village committee elections is more widespread and does not systematically exclude groups of individuals.

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CISAC civil war experts influence policy debate on Iraq

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November's mid-term elections, in which Democrats won a majority in both houses of congress, were widely interpreted as a referendum on the administration's prosecution of the Iraq war. As public debate intensified over an anticipated change of course in Iraq, policymakers, commentators, and reporters turned to CISAC civil war experts James D. Fearon and David Laitin for insight into the current violence and possible outcomes. News media drew on Fearon's testimony before a house subcommittee in September, echoing his warning about the likely failure of an attempt to partition the country's land or resources among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Some news organizations announced a new policy to call the fighting in Iraq a civil war, citing the opinions of Fearon and Laitin. Laitin appeared on CNN's Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer to discuss the question of whehter Iraq is engaged in a civil war. Fearon discussed the question on NPR's On Point.
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Health Care for One Billion: Experimenting with Incentives for the Supply of Health Care in Rural China

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Despite successful economic reforms over the past two decades, China's health care system for the nearly one billion people that live and work in rural areas is broken. Having admitted that there is a crisis, the government is now committed to looking for solutions. In this proposal, we have two overall goals to help provide insights on part of the solution. Our first objective is to collect an updated wave of highly informative data in Year 1 to build on an existing set of data already collected by our study team (from 2004) to analyze the effects of key health policies and institutions that have emerged over the past several years, including the government's rural health insurance system, the privatization of rural clinics, and new investments into township hospitals. Our second, more forward-looking goal for Years 2 and 3 is to set up and introduce an initial experiment on incentives to study one of the most serious flaws in China's health system: the practice in which doctors both prescribe and derive significant profit from drugs. The main hypothesis to be tested is whether realigning doctors' financial incentives embedded in the current organization of China's rural health system influence: a) the way doctors treat and manage their patients; b) the time and effort doctors put into patient care; and c) patient satisfaction.

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Elections, Fiscal Reform and Public Goods Provision in Rural China

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Public services provision in the developing world, including China, is crucial for rural development and poverty reduction. Although there has been much effort focused on public goods investment in China in recent years, there are still great differences among villages in the level of public goods investment. This study seeks to explain these differences by focusing on the effect of community governance on public goods provision at the village level, including investment into roads, water control and schools. During the recent past several years, village governance in rural China has undergone a series of fundamental reforms. Arguably, the advent of direct elections for village leaders and the rural Tax for Fee Reforms are two of the most important shifts in the ways that communities manage themselves. Using a nearly nationally representative sample of communities from survey data that includes information from more than 2400 villages in rural China, we find that the direct election of a villages leader leads to increased public goods investment in the village. The paper also demonstrates that the rural Tax for Fee Reforms, ceteris paribus, has a negative effect on public goods, especially on investment by the village itself.

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