Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies

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China's Economy Faces Domestic and External Challenges, with David Dollar Apr 15, 2021

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Speaker: David Dollar, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Global Economy and Development, John L. Thornton China Center, Brookings Institution China has gotten COVID-19 under control and is poised to bounce back strongly with 8% growth in 2021. But in the medium term, it faces daunting domestic and external challenges. On the domestic side, demographic shifts will result in a declining labor force and put a premium on geographic mobility, especially rural-urban migration. Also, over-reliance on investment has led to an alarming rise in debt to GDP, risking a financial crisis. To grow well while managing these issues of labor and investment will require more innovation as a source of growth. On the external side, the trade war with the U.S. is not likely to be resolved quickly with the new Biden administration. China’s recent agreements with Asian partners and Europe, however, provide new opportunities that complement domestic reforms. David Dollar is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and host of the Brookings trade podcast, Dollar&Sense. He is a leading expert on China’s economy and U.S.-China economic relations. From 2009 to 2013, Dollar was the U.S. Treasury’s economic and financial emissary to China, based in Beijing, facilitating the macroeconomic and financial policy dialogue between the United States and China. Prior to joining Treasury, Dollar worked 20 years for the World Bank, serving as country director for China and Mongolia, based in Beijing (2004-2009). His other World Bank assignments focused on Asian economies, including South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh, and India. Dollar also worked in the World Bank’s research department. His publications focus on economic reform in China, globalization, and economic growth. He also taught economics at University of California Los Angeles, during which time he spent a semester in Beijing at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1986. He has a doctorate in economics from New York University and a bachelor’s in Chinese history and language from Dartmouth College.

Special Deals from Special Investors, with Chang-Tai Hsieh Apr 15, 2021

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Speaker: Chang-Tai Hsieh, Phyllis and Irwin Winkelried Professor of Economics and PCL Faculty Scholar, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business We use administrative registration records with information on the owners of all Chinese firms to document the importance of “connected” investors, defined as state-owned firms or private owners with equity ties with state-owned firms, in the businesses of private owners. We document a hierarchy of private owners: the largest private owners have direct investments from state-owned firms, the next largest private owners have equity investments from private owners that themselves have equity ties with state owners, and the smallest private owners do not have any ties with state owners. The network of connected private owners has expanded over the last two decades. The share of registered capital of connected private owners increased by almost 20 percentage points between 2000 and 2019, driven by two trends. First, state-owned firms have increased their investments in joint ventures with private owners. Second, private owners with equity ties to state owners also increasingly invest in joint ventures with other (smaller) private owners. The expansion in the “span” of connected owners from these investments with private owners may have increased the aggregate output of the private sector by 4.2% a year between 2000 and 2019. Chang-Tai Hsieh conducts research on growth and development. His published papers include “The Life-Cycle of Plants in India and Mexico,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China and India,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Relative Prices and Relative Prosperity,” in the American Economic Review; “Can Free Entry be Inefficient? Fixed Commissions and Social Waste in the Real Estate Industry,” in the Journal of Political Economy; “What Explains the Industrial Revolution in East Asia? Evidence from the Factor Markets,” in the American Economic Review; “The Allocation of Talent and US Economic Growth,” in Econometrica; “How Destructive is Innovation?” in Econometrica; and “Special Deals with Chinese Characteristics,” in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual. Hsieh has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis, as well as the World Bank’s Development Economics Group and the Economic Planning Agency in Japan. He is a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Fellow at the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, and a member of the Steering Group of the International Growth Center in London. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an Elected Member of Academia Sinica, and the recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang award for research on the Chinese economy.

China's Approach to National Security Under Xi Jinping, with Sheena Greitens Apr 15, 2021

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Speaker: Sheena Greitens, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs Sheena Chestnut Greitens is an associate professor at the LBJ School, as well as a faculty fellow with the Clements Center for National Security and a distinguished scholar with the Strauss Center for International Security and Law. Her work focuses on East Asia, American national security, authoritarian politics, and foreign policy. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an adjunct fellow with the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and a member of the Digital Freedom Forum at the Center for a New American Security. She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

China's Military Strategy in the New Era, with M. Taylor Fravel Apr 02, 2021

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Speaker: M. Taylor Fravel, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Moderator: Andrew S. Erickson, Professor of Strategy, U.S. Naval War College China Maritime Studies Institute M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taylor studies international relations, with a focus on international security, China, and East Asia. His books include Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes, (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Active Defense: China’s Military Strategy Since 1949 (Princeton University Press, 2019). His other publications have appeared in International Security, Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, International Studies Review, The China Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly, Journal of Strategic Studies, Armed Forces & Society, Current History, Asian Survey, Asian Security, China Leadership Monitor, and Contemporary Southeast Asia. Taylor is a graduate of Middlebury College and Stanford University, where he received his PhD. He also has graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2016, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation. Taylor is a member of the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and serves as the Principal Investigator for the Maritime Awareness Project.

Presenting the Panda, with E. Elena Songster Apr 02, 2021

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Speaker: E. Elena Songster, Professor of History, History Department, Saint Mary’s College of California The giant panda stumbled into ambassador work. Profoundly successful, its diplomatic roles multiplied and evolved, but its persistent existence as an animal repeatedly reframed its role as a diplomat and beyond. Songster discusses findings from her book, Panda Nation: The Construction and Conservation of China’s Modern Icon (Oxford UP), examining the history of the emergence of the giant panda as a national icon and the impact it has had on foreign policy and the natural environment. Elena Songster’s research focuses on the environmental history of modern China. She is currently researching medicinals found in nature through an historical lens. Other research projects include the history of snow leopard conservation and forestry history. Elena Songster teaches classes on Chinese History, Japanese History, Asian History, and World History. She has also taught in the Collegiate Seminar Program, and JanTerm and serves on the Advisory Board for the Global and Regional Studies Program.

Magic Weapons, with Anne-Marie Brady Apr 01, 2021

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Speaker: Anne-Marie Brady, Professor, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Professor Brady is a specialist of Chinese politics (domestic politics and foreign policy), polar politics, Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal (Taylor and Francis Publishers). She has published ten books and over fifty scholarly papers. She has written op eds for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Financial Times. Her research has a strong policy focus. In 2017, Professor Brady put her conference paper “Magic Weapons: CCP Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping” online, as the topic was of public interest. The paper has been downloaded more 160, 000 times and has helped spark a debate in New Zealand, as well as internationally, that resulted in a Parliamentary Inquiry into Foreign Interference in New Zealand. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/magic-weapons-chinas-political-influence-activities-under-xi-jinping Professor Brady is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington DC. In 2014 she was appointed to a two-year term on the World Economic Forum’s Global Action Council on the Arctic. Her recent books include: Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), China’s Thought Management (Routledge, 2012), The Emerging Politics of Antarctica (Routledge, 2013), China as a Polar Great Power (Cambridge University Press and Wilson Press, 2017), and Small States and the Changing Global Order: New Zealand Faces the Future (Springer, 2019).

The Political Genesis of Local Government Debt in China, with Jean Oi Apr 01, 2021

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Speaker: Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics, Department of Political Science; Director, Stanford China Program, Stanford University China’s rapidly growing local government debt (LGD) is now branded a “grey rhino,” a known threat that has received little attention. Why did Beijing let LGD get so out of hand? What are the sources of LGD? There is evidence to suggest that no matter how honest and law-abiding local cadres might be, localities are likely to have local government debt. Prof. Oi will argue that LGD stems from a grand bargain between the center and the localities that were made to secure support for the 1994 fiscals reforms. This series of policy decisions institutionalized backdoor financing, creating a “win-win” solution that recentralized tax revenues to Beijing while countering the downsides of fiscal recentralization for the localities. The cost, however, was that China’s economic growth model was increasingly undergirded by mounting LGD, with little transparency and control by the center. Jean C. Oi is the William Haas Professor on 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 also is 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 China’s political economy and institutions in the process of reform. Fiscal politics and central-local relations in China are at the center of Oi’s research. Recent work delves inside local-level institutions to sheds new light on China’s authoritarian resilience by exploring how county governments through adaptive governance have been able to cope as the economy has grown exponentially and demands and needs from an increasingly complex society put more strains on resources and the political system. Most recently, she co-edited a volume that highlights the challenges China now faces after reaping record-breaking growth in the last 40 years by only tweaking the institutions that it inherited from the Mao period. Current leaders continue to kick the can down the road rather than tackle the most politically difficult part of the reform process. Instead, leaders seem to be “going back to the future,” relying on a playbook not seen since the Mao period. Current projects focus on growing local government debt in China and why there is so much when the law prohibits localities from borrowing and budget deficits. Moving beyond her earlier work, Oi also has begun a project to empirically assess the impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Oi takes an institutional and micro-level approach to identify the key players and their interests.

Social Policy and Decentralization in China, with Kerry Ratigan Apr 01, 2021

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Speaker: Kerry Ratigan, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Amherst College China is widely known for its strong central government, but the center needs the provinces to implement policies using their knowledge of local conditions. However, provincial priorities sometimes conflict with those of the center. Drawing on research conducted for her forthcoming book, Let Some Get Healthy First: How Local Politics Shaped Social Policy in China, Ratigan shows how local politics have impacted social policy implementation in China. While some provinces tend to closely follow central directives, others resist central policy, sometimes subverting the goals of the central government. Although decentralization in contemporary China peaked in the early 2000s, the impact of local government is still salient despite recent efforts to reign in local actors. Dr. Kerry Ratigan is an assistant professor of Political Science at Amherst College where she currently teaches courses on Chinese politics and social movements. Her research has focused on Chinese politics, social policy, and state-society relations, including extensive work on health policy adoption and implementation in rural China. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a Master’s Degree from the London School of Economics, and a BA in Political Science and Spanish from Haverford College.

Northern Europe's Response to China's Belt and Road Initiative Mar 29, 2021

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Speakers: Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Head, China Studies Centre, Riga Stradins University; Head, New Silk Road Program, Latvian Institute of International Affairs Björn Jerdén, Director, Knowledge Centre on China , Swedish Institute of International Affairs Luke Patey, Senior Researcher, Foreign Policy and Diplomacy, Danish Institute for International Studies Moderators: Nargis Kassenova, Senior Fellow, Program on Central Asia, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies James Gethyn Evans, Communications Officer, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Harvard University Nordic and Baltic countries have struggled to develop well-calibrated approaches to cooperation with China and its flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Economic incentives or disincentives, human rights, the EU dynamics, security arrangements, and global governance consideration have pulled the agendas of Northern European states in different directions. This panel will discuss the current state of affairs and the prospect of a coordinated Nordic-Baltic policy with regard to the BRI. Co-sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University.

A Sense of Purpose? 2021 Annual Reischauer Lecture with Rana Mitter, Part 3 Mar 29, 2021

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Some states have always maintained a sense that they have a mission in the world well beyond the maintenance of domestic order, the United States, France and Britain among them. Japan, China and the Koreas also inherited a strong sense of purpose in the modern era, from Meiji modernization to Mao’s “Three Worlds” and the Belt and Road Initiative, ideas drawing on the longer past – yet the definition of that purpose has been in constant flux. What defines East Asia’s sense of purpose today, can we speak of it in regional terms, and how does it relate to its long history of aspiration to be an intellectual and moral exemplar? Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, and a Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. He is the author of several books, including China’s War with Japan: The Struggle for Survival, 1937-1945 (Penguin, 2013), [US title: Forgotten Ally] which won the 2014 RUSI/Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature, and was named a Book of the Year in the Financial Times and Economist. His latest book is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020). His recent documentary on contemporary Chinese politics “Meanwhile in Beijing” is available on BBC Sounds. He is co-author, with Sophia Gaston, of the report “Conceptualizing a UK-China Engagement Strategy” (British Foreign Policy Group, 2020). He won the 2020 Medlicott Medal for Service to History, awarded by the Historical Association. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. The Annual Reischauer Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Korea Institute, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and Harvard University Asia Center.

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