Asian Biotech:  Ethics and Communities of Fate is the title of a new book that Prof. Ong has co-edited with Nancy N. Chen.  It offers the first overview of Asia’s emerging initiatives in the biosciences.  Its case studies include blood collection in Singapore and China; stem-cell research in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan; genetically modified foods in China; and clinical trials in India.  Such projects vary by country, as do the policies that are associated with them.  Discernible nevertheless is a significant trend toward state entrepreneurialism in Asian biotechnology.  Prof. Ong will also explore how political thinking and ethical reasoning are converging around the biosciences in Asia.  Copies of Asian Biotech will be available for signing and purchase at the talk.

Aihwa Ong studies how the interactions of capitalism, technology, politics, and ethics crystallize global situations, frame spaces of problematization, and generate situated solutions.  With these matters in mind, she has done field research in Southeast Asia, Southern China, and California.  A forthcoming volume is Worlding Cities:  Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global.  Prior publications include Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (2nd ed., 2010); Privatizing China:  Socialism from Afar (co-edited, 2008); Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (co-edited, 2005); Flexible Citizenship:  The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999); Neoliberalism as Exception:  Mutations in Citizenshipand Sovereignty (2006); and Buddha is Hiding:  Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (2003).  Prof. Ong has received many awards and has lectured at universities around the world.  She chairs of the US National Committee for the Pacific Science Association.  Her 1982 PhD is from Columbia University.

Professor Lee will examine why South Korean labor unions have engaged in militant activism since the country's transition to democracy in 1987.  This situation contrasts with Taiwan, to which Korea's economic and political development is otherwise very similar.   Professor Lee will argue that the militant unionism reflects the weakness of Korea's democratic institutions, particularly its political parties.

Professor Lee received her doctoral degree in political science from Duke University and has been teaching at the State University of New York at Binghamton since 2006.  Her research has appeared in Studies in Comparative International Studies, Critical Asian Studies, Asian Survey, Korean Observer, and Asia-Pacific Forum.  Her book, tentatively entitled Democratic Politics and Labor Activism in East Asia, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2011.

A well-known puzzle in the study of Asian democratization is the inverse relationship between the level of democracy and the support for the "D" word. According to the latest Asian Barometer survey, Thailand, China, Vietnam, Mongolia, and Cambodia have a much higher level of overt support for democracy than those well-recognized democracies such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. To unravel this puzzle, the authors develop a new regression method for the two-dimensional typological analysis including the "D" word and the liberal democratic attitude. Four ideal types of democratic orientation are defined and analyzed: Consistent Democrats (high support for democracy, high liberal democratic value), Critical Democrats (low support for democracy, high liberal democratic value), Non-Democrats (low support for democracy, low liberal democratic value), and Superficial Democrats (High support for democracy, low liberal democratic value). Different from most of the regression methods, the dependent variables in typological regression include the radius and the azimuth and therefore transform the categorical nature of the two-by-two typology into distinctive types with a continuous character. The preliminary result indicates the high support rate of the "D" word in those less democratic countries is associated with a phenomenon that the word "democracy" has lost its distinctive semantic meaning and could embrace all desirable political values, covering any variety of political systems in the world.

Professor Min-hua Huang received his Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Michigan, and his B.A. in Business Administration from National Taiwan University. He is currently teaching at the Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University. In this special seminar, he will address the above issues, leading us to reconsider democracy and democratization in Asia.

Abstract
While the Internet can be a profoundly empowering force, it will not fulfill its potential unless we recognize and address a number of "inconvenient truths." Authoritarian regimes are evolving and adapting to the Internet age. China is "exhibit A" in this regard, and has become a model for others to emulate. With the help of multinational companies, some non-democratic and quasi-democratic governments are working to shape the Internet's architecture, coordination, and legal governance in a direction more conducive to their survival. Other even more "inconvenient truths" involve democracies themselves: democratically elected lawmakers in a range of countries are passing laws to address immediate domestic problems of crime, terror, and copyright theft, but are doing so by implementing legal norms and technical standards that both enable and help to justify censorship and surveillance in repressive countries. These "inconvenient truths" lead to complicated questions about the future of authoritarianism, democracy,  and sovereignty in the Internet age which challenge many 20th-century assumptions.

Rebecca MacKinnon is a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy where she is working on a book about China, the Internet, and the future of freedom in the Internet age.

MacKinnon is cofounder of Global Voices Online, an award-winning global citizen media network that amplifies online citizen voices from around the world. She is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder initiative to advance principles of freedom of expression and privacy among Internet and telecommunications companies. She is also on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon has lived in China on and off since childhood. She worked for CNN in Beijing for nine years, serving as CNN's Beijing Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 1998-2001 and then as CNN's Tokyo Bureau Chief and Correspondent from 2001-03.

MacKinnon spent 2004-2006 as a Research Fellow at Harvard: first at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, and then at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

In 2007 and 2008 she was Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, teaching online journalism and conducting research on the Internet, China, censorship, and the role of technology companies promoting or preventing free expression. While there she launched Creative Commons Hong Kong. In 2009 she carried out research and writing on China, the Internet and freedom of expression as an Open Society Fellow, supported by a grant from the Open Society Institute.

MacKinnon graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. Her blog can be found at: http://rconversation.blogs.com

In the four years since a State Council think tank, the Development Research Center, bluntly declared the failure of three decades of healthcare reform, China has placed a high political priority on designing, building and financing a modern, equitable health delivery system that serves every last one of its 1.3 billion people. As publisher of practice-building trade magazines for medical specialists in China and India, Jeffrey Parker has developed unique and valuable perspectives on what's wrong with China's healthcare system -- and how Indian practitioners are able to deliver results despite a per-capita GDP that is roughly half of China's. Through an unprecedented China-India training exchange, Mr. Parker has begun testing whether Indian models of self-financed grassroots medical startup practices can help doctors shake free of China’s Stalinist paralysis without having to wait for sweeping programmatic reforms that are always on the horizon, but seem never to come. What's more, would such grassroots empowerment models not create unprecedented opportunities for participation by international investors who up to now have been largely marginalized in China's healthcare development?

In this lunchtime colloquium, Mr. Parker reviews his experiences in China and India over the past six years and looks at several exciting recent developments in China. These include:

• An ambitious rural reimbursement scheme that already has begun to complete a nationwide healthcare safety net. The program is creating a vast pool of funds to finance rural medical services, but how will Beijing populate the countryside with sustainable grassroots practices?
• The first domestic healthcare IPO, by which Aier Ophthalmology raised some $50 million as one of 28 debut listings in the Shenzhen's new "ChiNext" Growth Enterprise Market. New wind in the sails of healthcare privatization?
• Licensing reforms that have begun delinking doctors' certification from their "work unit" hospitals under trials in Beijing and Yunnan, removing a vexing obstacle to hands-on surgical training of young practitioners. Will the breaking of senior doctors' "skills monopoly" create opportunities for private-sector training programs that will shake up China's Soviet-style residency programs?

Jeffrey Parker has lived in Greater China since 1990, first as a journalist and since 2003 as a publisher. His transition from chronicler of China's historic rise to active proponent of its economic development gives him a unique perspective on the opportunities still opening up in China -- and the challenges facing anyone keen to participate. With a twin B.A. in Asian Studies and Geography from U.C. Santa Barbara and Masters training in Journalism from Columbia University, Parker trimmed his sails for a China career from an early age. After early editorial jobs in New York and Washington, D.C., he was dispatched to Beijing by United Press International as senior correspondent in 1990. During the next 10 years with UPI and then Reuters, he covered a wide range of political, economic and social stories from postings in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Peoples Republic. In his final two years at Reuters, Parker got his first taste of media development, launching local-language multimedia news and video feeds in China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia. Since 2003, Parker has built up a family of world-class doctors' magazines serving more than 50,000 specialists in China and India from the Shanghai base of ILX Media Group, where he is editorial director, chief operating officer, a corporate director and investor. Among his objectives is to help foster a badly needed transformation of medical practice across China by inspiring grassroots doctors to deliver high-quality, cost-effective services in rural and less-developed communities left behind by government health care.