http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/Recent news, events + publications from SCPen-usPublic domainhttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/images/feed-icon-48x48.jpghttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/60http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3290At present, the tobacco industry annually produces some six trillion cigarettes worldwide. A third of all these sticks were produced in China last year. During a Jan. 30 seminar, Matthew Kohrman will introduce the Cigarette Citadels project, an innovative application of participatory GIS, and discuss its implications for public health policy and social theory about the state and the politics of life.]]>Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3290http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3291For the past two decades China has been a poster child of successful globalization. But its integration into the world economy and global trends drive and constrain Beijing's ability to manage growing social, economic and political challenges. In a YaleGlobal Online series article, Thomas Fingar looks at the global implications of China’s development challenges.]]>Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3291http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3284After 10 years of rapid growth, China will undergo a major leadership transition later this year. Two recent Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center edited volumes -- Going Private in China and Growing Pains -- put China’s development into context as the country prepares for the next decade of its future.]]>Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3284http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3234Fractured Rebellion is the first full-length account of the evolution of China's Red Guard Movement in Beijing, the nation's capital, from its beginnings in 1966 to its forcible suppression in 1968. A recent China Beat review praised Andrew G. Walder's 2009 book as "groundbreaking" and as "[bringing] meaning to a whirlwind of events."]]>Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3234http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3123The Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center and the Division of International, Comparative, and Area Studies are excited to offer highly qualified Stanford students an opportunity to extend classroom knowledge of East Asia to real-life working and cultural experiences through the East Asia Internship Program. Internship positions will cover a wide spectrum of business, non-profit, media, educational, medical, technology, and government activities.]]>Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3123http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3053What influence might graphic warning labels have on cigarette sales? Matthew Kohrman is studying that question with experimental methods in Southwest China. Kohrman's research is generating much-needed data in support of the expansion of China's warning label system. Among the countries increasingly adopting graphic labels, the United States will require visual warnings on all cigarette packages by next fall.]]>Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3053http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3030China's Soviet-style political system has not kept pace with the dramatic changes taking place within the country's social and economic systems, suggests Andrew Walder in a recent Boston Review op-ed. Keeping the lessons of the former Soviet Union in mind, he says, China's government has instead utilized a "holding strategy" to maintain its political institutions over the past twenty years.]]>Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3030http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3027Two-hundred million farming households in China are struggling to capitalize on their nation's breathtaking economic development. While city dwellers are enjoying fast-rising living standards, much of rural China remains a hardscrabble landscape where average incomes of about $3,200 a year are less than a third of what they are in urban areas. "No one is going to get rich off farming," said Scott Rozelle, an expert on China's rural economy at Stanford University. "It's not going to happen until farm sizes get bigger. That's why millions of people are moving to the cities."]]>Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/3027http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/2943Middle class appetites and rising affluence are driving up the price of food in China, home to 1.3 billion people. Growers are faced with rising demand for food just as the rural labor supply dwindles. Yet the changes in food and work preferences aren't all bad, as they reflect the human and economic development taking place in China, says Scott Rozelle, food economist and Helen Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI.]]>Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/2943http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/2941Tobacco is the single greatest cause of preventable death in the world today, including in China where cigarette smoking is a popular pastime. "The [tobacco] industry in China is run by the Tobacco Monopoly Administration, a central government administrative body created in the 1980s, also known as China Tobacco Corp.," said Matthew Kohrman in a February 2011 interview with NPR's Morning Edition. China nonetheless issued a nationwide indoor smoking ban on May 1. Speaking with Al Jazeera English on the first day of the ban, Kohrman predicted that Chinese citizens will increasingly comply with the ban even if in fits and starts initially. "It all has to do with implementation," he suggested. "It all has to do with changing the culture of smoking and people’s thinking about it—that takes time."]]>Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/news/2941http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23585Survival: Global Politics and Strategy vol. 54, Jan. 31, 2012
Aaron Friedberg’s thoughtful and thought-provoking A Contest for Supremacy does many things well, but what it does best is to underscore the uncertainties and contingencies that must be factored into any analysis of China’s rise and its implications for the United States and other nations.]]>Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:52:09 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23585http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23551Modern China, September 2011
Focusing on the episodes of the government’s Paved Road to Every Village (PREV) project in an agricultural township in northern China, this article examines two research issues: First, the role of state policies, government bureaucracies, and village cadres in the provision of public goods, especially the unintended consequences that led to huge collective debts and the erosion of the collective basis of governance and second, the role of local institutions and social relations in resource mobilization, problem solving, and response to crises, especially in the aftermath of the PREV project.]]>Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:04:07 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23551http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23550The China Quarterly vol. 208, December 2011
Based on ethnographic research on the autumn harvest in a township in northern China, this study sheds light on distinctive modes of market transactions across produces, and diverse interactions between markets and local institutions involving different co-ordination mechanisms, rhythms and social relationships.]]>Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:57:02 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23550http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23549Chinese Sociological Review vol. 44, No. 1, Fall 2011
The prevailing image in the economic and legal literature portrays property rights as “a bundle of rights” and emphasizes their exclusivity, autonomy, and stability. Building on Zhou (2005), the authors elaborate and illustrate an alternative theoretical model to conceptualize property rights as a relational concept.]]>Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:46:29 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23549http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23268Journal of Asian Studies vol. 70, May 2011
China's protracted regional conflicts of 1967 and 1968 have long been understood as struggles between conservative and radical forces whose opposed interests were so deeply rooted in existing patterns of power and privilege that they defied the imposition of military control. This study of Nanjing, a key provincial capital that experienced prolonged factional conflict, yields a new explanation: the conflicts were prolonged precisely because they could not be characterized as pitting "conservatives" against "radicals," making it difficult for central officials, local military forces, or Mao Zedong to decide how to resolve them. Furthermore, Beijing officials, regional military forces, and local civilian cadres were themselves divided against one another, exacerbating and prolonging local conflicts. In competing for approval from central authorities, local factions adopted opportunistic and rapidly shifting political stances designed to portray their opponents as reactionary conservatives -- charges that had no basis in fact.]]>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:01:18 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23268http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23267Management and Organization Review vol. 7, March 2011
Over the past decade, the ownership and control of China's corporate sector has finally begun to depart fundamentally from patterns typical in the socialist past. Students of corporate governance have watched these changes with an intense curiosity about their impact on firm performance. Students of comparative economic institutions have examined them for hints of a new variety of Asian capitalism and have sought to anticipate China's international competitiveness and impact. But these changes potentially will create a new corporate elite with greater compensation, personal wealth, and independence from government agencies than ever before. This transformation of China's political economy may eventually alter the Chinese state itself, although the extent and nature of this change are still far from clear. The key questions of interest are the social origins of the new elite, the scale of the economic assets they control, and especially their continuing relationships with party and government agencies. The answers will vary decisively by sector, four of which are described here: a state-owned sector, a privatized sector, a transactional sector, and an entrepreneurial sector. The evolving mix of these sectors will determine the future contours of the Chinese corporate economy.]]>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:01:10 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23267http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23266Journal of Comparative Economics vol. 30, June 2002
In the second decade of market reform, rural cadre and entrepreneur households enjoy large net income advantages of roughly equal magnitude. Cadre household incomes are primarily from salaries, and they do not decline with increasing levels of rural industrialization. These cross-sectional findings about income determination are reinforced by an event-history analysis of occupational shifts. With large income advantages based on salary income, at no point in market reform have cadres moved into self-employment or private entrepreneurship at higher rates than ordinary farmers. However, village cadres have become the most important source of collective enterprise managers and collective enterprise managers in turn have become the most important source of new private entrepreneurs. Therefore the thriving collective enterprise sector of the 1980's has served as a breeding ground for private enterprise in the 1990's.]]>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:41:09 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23266http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23265The China Journal vol. 65, January 2011
Mass factions in China during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution have long been understood as interest groups: collections of individuals who shared interests due to common occupations, statuses, or party affiliations. An alternative view, developed primarily with evidence about the distinctive case of Beijing students, emphasizes not the characteristics of participants but histories of political encounters in collapsing bureaucratic hierarchies.]]>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:01:03 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23265http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23238Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation, in One Step Back? Reassessing an Ideal Security State for Asia 2025, 2011
In the chapter "Alternate Trajectories of the Roles and Influence of China and the United States in Northeast Asia and the Implications for Future Power Configurations" (One Step Back? Reassessing an Ideal Security State for Asia 2025, 2011). Fingar examines several key factors and interactions between countries that he predicts are likely to configure the security structure of Northeast Asia between now and 2025.]]>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:13:25 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23238http://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23216Westview Press, January 2011
In the chapter “Transitions from State Socialism: A Property Rights Perspective” (The Sociology of Economic Life, 2011), Walder perceptively examines property rights changes within the context of the transition from state socialism in Hungary, China, and Vietnam.]]>Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:00:09 PSThttp://chinaprogram.stanford.edu/publications/23216