This is a CDDRL's Special Event within our Democracy in Taiwan Program.

Dr. Jaushieh Joseph Wu arrived in Washington, D.C. on April 15, 2007 to assume his responsibilities as Taiwan's chief representative to the United States.

Representative Wu began his government career in 2002 as Deputy Secretary-General to President Chen Shui-bian, a position he held until May 2004. From 2004 to April 2007, Representative Wu was the chairman of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, a ministry-level organization that coordinates and implements Taiwan's policies toward the People's Republic of China.

Prior to his government career, Representative Wu held a number of academic positions at his alma mater, National Chengchi University, including the chairmanship of the First Division of the Institute of International Relations, an adjunct research fellowship at the Election Study Center and an adjunct professorship in the Department of Political Science.

Dr. Wu received his undergraduate education at National Chengchi University in Taipei. He did his graduate work in political science at the University of Missouri in St. Louis in 1982, obtaining a master's degree in Political Science, followed by a Ph. D. in the same field from Ohio State University in 1989. His areas of specialization include Taiwan's political development, cross-strait relations, international relations, and Middle East politics. Among Dr. Wu's academic publications, he has authored Taiwan's Democratization: Forces Behind the New Momentum (Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1995), and edited Divided Nations: The Experience of Germany, Korea, and China (Taipei, Institute of International Relations, 1995) and China Rising: Implications of Economic and Military Growth of the PRC (Taipei, Institute of International Relations, 2001).

Francis Fukuyama is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University, and the director of SAIS' International Development program. He is also chairman of the editorial board of a new magazine, The American Interest.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning political and economic development. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. It made the bestseller lists in the United States, France, Japan, and Chile, and has been awarded the Los Angeles Times' Book Critics Award in the Current Interest category, as well as the Premio Capri for the Italian edition. He is also the author of Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999), Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002, and State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, (2004). His most recent book America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy was published by Yale University Press in March 2006.

Francis Fukuyama was born on October 27, 1952, in Chicago. He received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation from 1979-1980, then again from 1983-89, and from 1995-96. In 1981-82 and in 1989 he was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State, the first time as a regular member specializing in Middle East affairs, and then as Deputy Director for European political-military affairs. In 1981-82 he was also a member of the US delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.

Dr. Fukuyama was a member of the President's Council on Bioethics from 2001-2005. He holds an honorary doctorate from Connecticut College and Doane College, and is a member of advisory boards for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Journal of Democracy, and The New America Foundation, and FINCA. As an NED board member, he is responsible for oversight of the Endowment's Middle East programs. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

This research aims at explaining the apparently higher breakdown rate of presidential democracies over parliamentary ones. It shows that the alleged greater negative effect of presidential regimes on democratic breakdown than parliamentary democracies would disappear, not just when military legacy is considered, but also when the effectiveness or power of legislatures is taken into account.

Speaker Bio

Ming Sing is Associate Professor at the Department of Public and Social Administration, City University of Hong Kong. He is a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego (2006-07).

His current research interests are comparing political culture in Asia and institutional engineering in the world. He joined the Asiabarometer Survey Team in 2006 exploring political culture of all Asian societies in relation to democracy He has been doing research on institutional and non-institutional factors shaping global democratic breakdown longitudinally.

He has published on various aspects of democratization in Hong Kong and is the author and editor of three books: Hong Kong's Tortuous Democratization: a Comparative Analysis (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), and Hong Kong Government & Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). His third book (University of Hong Kong, 2007) focuses on the institutional engineering and governance problems in Hong Kong. He has also published articles in Government & Opposition, Democratization, East Asia, China Information, Chinese Law & Government, Journal of Contemporary Asia, International Journal of Public Administration and elsewhere.

Dmitri Trenin is a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment, the deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and chair of its Foreign and Security Policy Program. He has been with the Center since its inception in 1993.

From 1993-1997, Trenin held posts as a senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome, a visiting professor at the Free University of Brussels and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in Moscow. He served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993, including experience working as a liaison officer in the External Relations Branch of the Group of Soviet Forces Germany and as a staff member of the delegation to the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms talks in Geneva from 1985 to 1991. He also taught at the Defense University in Moscow.

Among the books Trenin authored are Getting Russia Right (2007, forthcoming); Russia's Restless Frontier: The Chechnya Factor in Post-Soviet Russia (2004; with Aleksei V. Malashenko) and The End of Eurasia: Russia on the Border Between Geopolitics and Globalization, (2001). He edited, with Steven Miller, The Russian Military: Power and Policy (2006).

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES).