For several weeks in March and April, university students in Taiwan camped out in the legislative and cabinet offices to protest the Cross-Strait Agreement on Trade in Services between China and Taiwan. Joined by hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese, spilling out to the streets, the demonstrators claim President Ma Ying-jeou negotiated the agreement with China without seeking any public input and bypassing the legislative process entirely. Implications of this historical social movement include the functioning of Taiwan's democratic institutions, which have undergone regime change but democratic consolidation remains in question. Additionally, a potential cross-strait crisis can affect U.S. - China relations in the post-Cold War era. Two important forces are also at play: China's meteoric playing-by-its-own-rules economic rise, and the evolving Taiwanese national identity after its transition to democracy. This talk will center on the national specific consequences of liberal trade and democracy for Taiwan's economic globalization and political development.
Speaker Bio:
Roselyn Hsueh is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University and currently, Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the politics of market reform, comparative capitalism, development, and other areas of international and comparative political economy. (Her publications include China's Regulatory State: A New Strategy for Globalization (Cornell University Press, 2011) and "China and India in the Age of Gloablization: Sectoral Variation in Postliberalization Reregulation," Comparative Political Studies 45 (2012): 32-61. She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley and has served as a Hayward on R. Alker Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California and conducted research as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Roselyn Hsueh
Assistant Professor
Speaker
Department of Political Science, Temple University
Over the past 23 years, Mongolia’s democracy has advanced on many fronts. The initial transition to democracy was peaceful in both economic and political areas. Since embracing democracy in 1990, democratic development in Mongolia has been coupled with rapid economic growth, sustained by a neo-liberal economic policy. Regionally, Mongolia is often seen as a successful case of democratic transition and development. However, in recent years, the fragilities in Mongolian democracy have revealed themselves, especially domestically, in the booming economic climate that is unparalleled in the country's history.
Mongolia, located in north East Asia, locked between China and Russia, has a unique geopolitical situation, unlike any other country in the world. With these two large, powerful and politically changing neighbors, Mongolia pays constant and careful attention to maintaining diplomatic balance. Russia's historical, political, and cultural influence on Mongolia's 20th century cannot be underestimated. China, in complicated and important areas, represents vast economic opportunities. These economic opportunities, and the development that they drive, are viewed with increased suspicion domestically and regionally. However, Mongolia’s rapid economic development and democratic reforms may create additional opportunities and positive political developments in the region.
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616 Serra Street
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zandansh@stanford.edu
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Zandanshatar Gombojav comes to Stanford as a Visiting Scholar at CDDRL, having recently served as the General Secretary of the Mongolian People's Party, Mongolia's largest party by membership. From 2004 until 2012, he was a Member of the Parliament of Mongolia, and from 2009 to 2012, he was Mongolia's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Before his appointment as Foreign Minister, during which he had many foreign policy accomplishments from renewing the country's foreign policy concept to adopting new trade agreements with several partners, he had a successful career in Mongolia's banking sector, working at the Agricultural Bank, Khan Bank, and the Central Bank of Mongolia. He also served as the Deputy Minister of Agriculture, before being elected to Parliament. After graduating from the State Institute of Finance in Russia, he began his career as a Lecturer on Economics and Finance at Mongolia's Institute of Commerce and Industry. His current research interest focuses on issues related to the democratic and political development of Mongolia given its geostrategic situation. At Stanford, he will be working on a larger research project encompassing regional democratic and political development from Mongolia's unique perspective.
He has published extensively on various banking issues and also on topics regarding the international relations process in refereed journals and different conference proceedings. He has been a strong supporter of the reform process, being actively involved in the organisation of youth development.
Visiting Scholar, 2016, 2014-15
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Zandanshatar Gombojav
Visting Scholar 2014, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Speaker
Stanford University
Why do some ruling parties last in power for decades despite facing regular, contested elections? Well-known examples include the PRI in Mexico, the LDP in Japan, the PAP in Singapore, and the ANC in South Africa. The existence of these long-lived “dominant parties” raises normative concerns: can we really call these regimes democratic if there is never, or rarely, ruling party turnover? They also present a theoretical puzzle: if opposition parties are able to contest elections that decide who rules, why do they consistently fail to win? In this talk, I approach these questions by focusing on variation in ruling party duration. Drawing on a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence, I show that “dominant” parties are typically the first to hold office in a new regime, and often have played a central role in founding it. As a consequence, these ruling parties frequently start out with enormous electoral advantages over their competitors in the party system, including a strong party “brand,” a disciplined and well-resourced party organization, and the ability to shape and manipulate the rules of competition. These advantages allow them to endure in power by winning consecutive elections for a generation or more. Only with the erosion of these advantages do elections become more competitive, and the risk of ruling party defeat increases. Once dominant parties are defeated, subsequent partisan competition becomes much more even, and regular rotation in power becomes the norm. Thus, one-party dominance is best thought of as a kind of temporary “adolescence” on the way to fully consolidated democracy.
Speaker Bio:
Kharis Templeman received a BA (2002) from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in political science (2012) from the University of Michigan. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he has lived, worked, and traveled extensively in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. As a graduate student, he worked in Taipei at the Election Study Center, National Cheng Chi University, and later was a dissertation research fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. His dissertation examined the development of Taiwan’s competitive party system from a comparative perspective, including a large study of the origins and decline of dominant party systems around the world over the last 60 years.
Current research interests include democratization, party system development in newly-contested regimes, and political institutions, with a regional focus on the new and transitioning democracies of Pacific Asia. He is currently a regional manager for the Varieties of Democracy project. Other ongoing collaborations include research on constitutional design for divided societies, on the arms-allies tradeoff in client states, and on intra-tribal voting coordination in elections in Jordan.
In a recent blog article in The Huffington Post, Francis Fukuyama compares the triumphs and pitfalls of Chinese and U.S. models of governance, acknowledging the necessity for China to establish a formal legal system with better accountability.
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U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, California, on June 7, 2013.
This presentation traces the origins and evolution of the Republic of China (ROC)’s policies towards its overseas constituents since its founding in 1912, and its transfer to Taiwan in 1949. While discussing the ideological and legal principles underpinning the POC’s policies toward the overseas community, the talk also focuses on how the changing international and domestic political circumstances have affected the degree and nature of involvement of overseas citizens in homeland political and economic decision-making. More essentially, democratization and the rise of Taiwanese-centered identity and consciousness have, since the mid-1990s, driven the ROC government to re-define and re-conceptualize its relations to Taiwan as well as to its overseas citizens, thus resulting in the transformation of the political and legal policies toward the overseas compatriot community. The implications of these changes on the future of Taiwan’s domestic politics and foreign relations will also be examined.
Speaker Bio:
Dean P. Chen received his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. He is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Salameno School of Humanities and Global Studies, Ramapo College of New Jersey. His research and teaching interests are international politics, U.S.-China-Taiwan relations, and governance and institutions in China and Taiwan. His most recent publications include Sustaining the Triangular Balance: The Taiwan Strait Policy of Barack Obama, Xi Jinping, and Ma Ying-jeou (University of Maryland School of Law, 2013), "The Evolution of Taiwan’s Policies toward the Political Participation of Citizens Abroad in Homeland Governance" (with Pei-te Lien) in Tan Chee-Bang, ed. Routledge Handbook of the China Diaspora (Routledge, 2013) and U.S> Taiwan Strait Policy: The Origins of Strategic Ambiguity (Lynne Rienner, 2012).
Philippines Conference Room
Dean P. Chen
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Speaker
Salameno School of Humanities and Global Studies
Here is Gerhard Casper, standing before 7,000 people gathered in Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater to hear him deliver his first speech as the university’s president.
It’s 1992, the second day of October. Stanford is embroiled in a federal lawsuit over indirect research costs. It is struggling with campus-wide budget cuts and saddled with $160 million in damages caused by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. University officials are wrestling with controversies over affirmative action, sex discrimination, free speech and diversity.
“What was I to say at my inauguration,” Casper asks in “The Winds of Freedom: Challenges to the University,” a newly published book of selected speeches and extended commentary about those addresses.
“What was I not to say? What were my tasks?”
Casper spent months wrestling with those questions, writing and rewriting his inaugural address. Rather than focus on the university’s troubles with a promise to make them disappear, he instead emphasized Stanford’s role as an institution devoted to teaching, learning and research. He grounded his remarks in Stanford’s motto – translated from his native German as “the wind of freedom blows” – and charted the freedoms most important to a university.
There are eight, he tells his audience.
Among them: an unrestrained pursuit of knowledge, an ability to challenge long-held beliefs and new ideas, and the “freedom to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point.”
“The research enterprise can easily be smothered by internal and external politics, pressures, and red tape,” he tells the crowd. “The wind of freedom has been a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for making our great universities the envy of the world. Without that freedom, that greatness is imperiled.”
Humor and heft
Academic freedom was a recurring theme during his eight years at the helm of Stanford. It was a time in which he navigated the university through turmoil and debates not only faced by Stanford and other American universities, but by the entire country.
With “The Winds of Freedom,” Casper presents seven speeches from his presidency, along with a commencement address he delivered at Yale in 2003. They delve into free expression, campus diversity and affirmative action. They cover the university’s role as a place of research and its relationship to the politics of the day.
The big, weighty ideas often come wrapped in a sense of humor – sometimes self-deprecating – that was the hallmark of a popular and seemingly very accessible president who surely never spoke to the same audience twice.
Casper has done more than merely dust off and repackage his favorite or most important speeches into a book. These are addresses tied together by those notions of academic freedom. And in detailed commentary following the text of each speech, Casper explains what was on his mind when he was writing them.
“I put a lot of effort into my speeches,” Casper says during a conversation in his office at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he is a senior fellow and served as director from 2012 to 2013. “But if you take the speeches in isolation, you often end up with an abstract notion of what was happening at time. I wanted to use these speeches as an example of the complexity of issues and questions that I had to deal with as president.”
Diversity, identity and valid arguments
So here is Casper welcoming an incoming class in 1993, one year after delivering his inaugural address. It includes white and black and American Indian students. Some are the American children and grandchildren of Mexican and Asian immigrants. Only 5 percent are foreign students, but they hail from 37 countries.
The president is talking about diversity. He shares his own story about coming to America, telling the students about growing up in Germany in the wake of the Nazi regime and moving to California as a 26-year-old in 1964. He pokes fun at the accent he never lost, but reminds the students that “I have acquired an American `cultural identity.’”
He tells them they will all develop their own sense of cultural identity, adding that diversity makes the university a richer place.
“If we at the university were not committed to interactive pluralism, education would become impossible,” he tells the newcomers.
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“No university can thrive unless each member is accepted as an individual and can speak and will be listened to without regard to labels and stereotypes,” he says.
Read out of context today, passages of the speech tuck into the timeless tropes of America as both a mosaic and a melting pot. It’s OK to assimilate, he tells us. We can still maintain our own identities.
But In Casper’s rearview mirror, the speech becomes a history lesson, a reminder of the American landscape 20 years ago.
“The early 1990s was probably the decade during which multiculturalism and identity politics were most prominent in the United States in general and on American campuses in particular,” he writes in his new book. “When I came to Stanford in 1992, I was ill equipped to deal with some of these issues.”
He goes on to trace the steps Stanford took to address diversity and he shares his thoughts – some scholarly, some personal – on the issues of social and cultural identity. He parses the differences between multiculturalism and diversity.
He discusses the adoption of a new policy on sexual harassment, moves made to increase the number of women on the faculty, and the tensions arising from the university’s struggle to support on-campus ethnic community centers. He revisits the political and ethnically charged student protests that unfolded in the early 1990s.
While he was dealing with the daily fallout of those matters in the president’s office, he was also searching for opportunities to convey his positions and address the issues in his public speeches.
Welcoming the Class of 1997 gave him one of those chances.
“In a university nobody has the right to deny another person’s right to speak his or her mind, to speak plainly, without concealment and to the point,” he tells the incoming students. “In a university discussion your first question in response to an argument must never be `Does she belong to the right group?’ Instead, the only criterion is `Does she have a valid argument?’”
The lines echo those he used in his inaugural address, and they do so intentionally.
“If you have something you believe in strongly, you must repeat it and repeat it and repeat it,” he says now. “I do that. I plagiarize myself – not because I ran out of things to say, but because it was important to re-emphasize points over and over again.”
Defining academic freedom
So here is Casper in 1998, speaking at Peking University during the school’s centennial celebration. The Chinese government used the occasion to bolster PKU’s standing as a key institution that would lead the country into the 21st Century, and Casper focused his remarks on the role of research-intensive universities and the integrity they must maintain.
“Academic freedom is the sine qua non of the university,” he tells the audience. “Academic freedom means, above all, freedom from politics.” It also means “freedom from pressures to conform within the university,” he says.
Reflecting on that speech in “The Winds of Freedom,” Casper shares an unsettling irony: as he delivered his remarks, he was unaware that a Stanford research associate from China was being held in a Beijing prison under dubious charges of betraying state secrets.
He learned about the matter several months after the event, and writes now about the university’s unsuccessful appeals for the researcher’s release to then-President Jiang Zemin and his subsequent decision not to pursue a plan for Stanford to open a program at PKU at that time.
“I did not think that it was appropriate for me to enter into an agreement with one of China’s most prominent institutions – continue, as it were, as if nothing had happened – while a Stanford researcher was being held in prison without any explanation,” he writes. “I certainly did not take the step to suspend our discussions lightly, since throughout my life, throughout the many years of the Cold War, I had always favored engagement rather than iron curtains.”
“Germans don’t give funny speeches”
Casper gave his first public address at Stanford when he was 53. But he had already spent a lifetime as a speechmaker.
“I had been viewed in high school to have the ability to talk well and address a large audience,” he says. “And clearly, I liked to do it.”
He was elected president of the student council. His principal and history teacher, Erna Stahl, would call him the school’s festredner, or keynote speaker. He was tapped as valedictorian of the Class of 1957.
He discusses his valedictory address – focused on the dearth of German role models – in the preface to “The Winds of Freedom.” He writes about his relationship with Stahl, how he was impressed by her stories of confronting the Gestapo, and the impact that growing up in post-Nazi Germany had on him.
“We hadn’t done any intensive study of the Third Reich by eleventh grade,” Casper says. “That was due to the fact that the Erna Stahl believed very strongly that going into the politics of the moment – the aftermath of the Nazi period – would not be the best method to teach us the values she wanted us to have. It would have become too quickly biographical and personal and she was very insistent that there needed to be positive values instilled in us to balance against what the Nazis had perpetrated.”
The preface is as close as the book comes to reading like a memoir, and Casper condenses his childhood, education, academic career and personal acknowledgments into 15 pages.
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Photo Credit: L.A. Cicero
While there are only a few lines devoted to his 26 years at the University of Chicago as a law professor, dean and provost, it was in that city where Casper’s innate ability to connect with an audience meshed with his public persona.
“Germans don’t give funny speeches,” he says. “In Germany, jokes undercut your credibility. My speaking style – the self-deprecation, the humor – that was really honed in Chicago. My friends and colleagues had these characteristics, and those elements were brought into my life.”
He learned that a joke does more than solicit a laugh. It can disarm a critic, humanize a speaker and lighten up an otherwise serious speech.
“After all, you want the audience to keep paying attention if you really do have something important to tell them,” he says.
An era begins
So here again is Casper, new to Stanford on that second day of October in 1992 and about to take on the promises and problems of the university.
He opens with a light touch, addressing “fellow members of the first-year class and fellow transfer students.” He suggests with deadpan delivery that he was hired as Stanford’s president because he could properly pronounce the university’s motto as it appears in German on the president’s seal: Die Luft der Freiheit weht.
“Alas, I have bad news for the board of trustees,” he says, turning to look at the board members seated on the stage behind him. The phrase, he says, was originally written in Latin. Not German.
“If, under these circumstances, the trustees would feel it appropriate to renounce their contract with me, I would understand perfectly,” he says, cracking a wide smile for the first time.
“All I ask for is the opportunity to finish this speech.”
And with his first formal words as Stanford’s ninth president, Casper casts himself as a newcomer – an outsider here to lead, learn and speak his mind.
After long being viewed as potential flashpoint, relations across the Taiwan Strait have stabilized tremendously in recent years, reflecting moderation in the approaches both Beijing and Taipei have taken with regard to the cross-Strait sovereignty dispute. In my presentation, I consider whether this new-found stability in the Taiwan Strait is likely to persist. In particular, I consider how fundamental trends in cross-Strait relations—such as rapidly growing Chinese military power and deepening cross-Strait economic exchange—are affecting the likelihood that the conflict scenarios which worried analysts prior to the current détente will re-emerge as future concerns. My analysis suggests that the relationship across the Taiwan Strait is likely to be more stable in the years ahead than was the case in the years preceding 2008; this conclusion holds even if there is a change in ruling party in Taiwan. But I also emphasize that the cross-Strait relationship has not been fundamentally transformed, and that the potential for serious conflict remains.
Speaker Bio:
Scott L. Kastner is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park. Kastner’s research interests include China’s foreign relations, the international politics of East Asia, and international political economy. His book, Political Conflict and Economic Interdependence across the Taiwan Strait and Beyond, was published in the Studies in Asian Security series by Stanford University Press (2009). His work has also appeared in journals such as International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Security Studies, and Journal of Peace Research. Kastner received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego.
Oksenberg Conference Room
Scott L. Kastner
Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Speaker
Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park
Karl Eikenberry is the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a faculty member of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law, and researcher with The Europe Center.
Prior to his arrival at Stanford, he served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011, where he led the civilian surge directed by President Obama to reverse insurgent momentum and set the conditions for transition to full Afghan sovereignty.
Before appointment as Chief of Mission in Kabul, Ambassador Eikenberry had a thirty-five year career in the United States Army, retiring in April 2009 with the rank of Lieutenant General. His military operational posts included commander and staff officer with mechanized, light, airborne, and ranger infantry units in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan as the Commander of the American-led Coalition forces from 2005-2007.
He has served in various policy and political-military positions, including Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; U.S. Security Coordinator and Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, Afghanistan; Assistant Army and later Defense Attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, China; Senior Country Director for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and Deputy Director for Strategy, Plans, and Policy on the Army Staff.
He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, has master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Ambassador Eikenberry earned an Interpreter’s Certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign Commonwealth Office while studying at the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense Chinese Language School in Hong Kong and has an Advanced Degree in Chinese History from Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China.
His military awards include the Defense Distinguished and Superior Service Medals, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Ranger Tab, Combat and Expert Infantryman badges, and master parachutist wings. He has received the Department of State Distinguished, Superior, and Meritorious Honor Awards, Director of Central Intelligence Award, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award. He is also the recipient of the George F. Kennan Award for Distinguished Public Service and Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal. His foreign and international decorations include the Canadian Meritorious Service Cross, French Legion of Honor, Afghanistan’s Ghazi Amir Amanullah Khan and Akbar Khan Medals, and the NATO Meritorious Service Medal.
Ambassador Eikenberry serves as a Trustee for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Asia Foundation, and the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the Council of American Ambassadors, and was previously the President of the Foreign Area Officers Association. His articles and essays on U.S. and international security issues have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and The Financial Times. He has a commercial pilot’s license and instrument rating, and also enjoys sailing and scuba diving.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Karl Eikenberry
William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, CDDRL, TEC, and Shorenstein APARC Distinguished Fellow; and Former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and Retired U.S. Army Lt. General
Speaker
FSI
Taiwan's system of neighborhood-level governance has origins in institutions of local control employed by both the Republican-era Kuomintang and the Japanese colonizers. In more recent times, the neighborhood wardens (lizhang, 里長) have come to play a complex set of roles, including state agent, political party operative, and community representative. Wardens of a new generation, with more women in their ranks than ever before, have adopted new practices and built different relationships with their communities, parties, and city governments compared to those of the older, often clan-based bosses.
Focusing on Taipei with glances at other locales, this paper draws on ethnographic research, interviews, surveys, public records, and other sources. It explores the particular kind of political and civic engagement that the neighborhood governance system elicits. It is statist; though independent in many respects, wardens have government-mandated duties and work closely with city and district officials. Community development associations (shequ fazhan xiehui), as well as other neighborhood groups and wardens themselves, compete for and receive government funding. Warden elections are also deeply democratic in ways that, in global perspective, are unusual for such ultra-local urban offices. Over the past 25 years, elections have become hotly contested, voter turnout has risen to remarkably high rates, and KMT dominance has partially given way to political pluralization. Citizens’ participation in this setting, like others, often shows deep divisions along partisan lines, with wardens and local associations split by party loyalties. Finally, civic engagement with the neighborhood system shows an inverted class bias. Residents with less education, for example, are more likely to know their wardens and vote in warden elections. Politics in Taiwan’s li thus has evolved substantially over time, and also contrasts in multiple ways with Western images of neighborhood politics.
Speaker Bio:
Benjamin L. Read is an Associate Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. His book, Roots of the State: Neighborhood Organization and Social Networks in Beijing and Taipei (Stanford University Press, 2012) uses surveys, interviews, and participant observation to compare the ways in which constituents perceive and interact with the urban administrative structures found in China, Taiwan, and elsewhere in the region. He edited Local Organizations and Urban Governance in East and Southeast Asia: Straddling State and Society (Routledge, 2009), also on the role of state-sponsored organizations, and has published research on civil society groups as well, particularly China's nascent homeowner associations. Read's next book, Field Research in Political Science: Practices and Principles, co-authored with Diana Kapiszewski and Lauren Morris MacLean, will be published in 2014 by Cambridge University Press. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Comparative Political Studies, the China Journal, the China Quarterly, the Washington Quarterly, and several edited books. He earned his Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University in 2003.
