Professor Yu Keping will systematically survey the dominant processes and key issues of China’s governance changes over the last 30 years since reform. His talk will summarize the major achievements and the ongoing problems of this 30 year long process. It will offer a brief analysis of the underlying reasons for these reforms and the main characteristics of China’s governance model. After enumerating an array of factual evidence, Yu will show that the drive behind China’s governance reforms stems from unitary governance to pluralist governance, centralization to decentralization, rule of man to rule of law, regulatory government to service oriented government, and from internal party democracy to the people’s democracy.

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Dr. YU Keping is the Deputy President of the Central Compilation & Translation Bureau (CCTB), and the founding Director of the China Center for Global Governance and Development (CCGGD). He also serves as Prof. and Director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovations at Peking University, and Prof. and Director of the Institute of Political Development at Tsinghua University. He was a visiting professor or senior fellow at many top universities, including Harvard University, Duke University in the US and Free University in Berlin. His fields of expertise include political philosophy, comparative politics, globalization, civil society, governance and politics in China. Among his many books are Governance and Rule of Law in China (ed., Brill, 2012) and Democracy Is A Good Thing (Brookings, 2010).  As a leading intellectual in China, Professor Yu was selected as one of the “30 most influential figures in the past 30 years since the reform in China” in 2008 and ranked 19 in “2011 Global Top 100 Thinkers” by Foreign Policy in the US.

Abstract:

The seminar session will present findings from a new study on the entrepreneurship ecosystem in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia. The discussion will focus on the challenges facing entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs in these countries and the MENA region, and will highlight the importance of reform of the legal and regulatory environment.

Speakers bio:

Lina Khatib is the co-founding Head of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. She joined Stanford University in 2010 from the University of London where she was an Associate Professor. Her research is firmly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersections of politics, media, and social factors in relation to the politics of the Middle East. She is also a consultant on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, US public diplomacy towards the Middle East, and political media and conflict in the Arab world, as well as on the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She has an active interest in the link between track two dialogue and democratization policy. She is also a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and, from 2010-2012, was a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

Amr Adly has a Ph.D. from the European University Institute-Florence, Department of political and social sciences (Date of completion: September 2010). His thesis topic was "The political economy of trade and industrialization in the post-liberalization period: Cases of Turkey and Egypt". The thesis was published by Routledge in December 2012 under the title of State Reform and Development in the Middle East: The Cases of Turkey and Egypt.

He has several other academic publications that have appeared in the Journal of Business and Politics, Turkish Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, in addition to articles in several other periodicals and newspapers in English and Arabic.

Before joining Stanford, he worked as a senior researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, heading the unit of social and economic rights, and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a diplomat.

At Stanford, he is leading a research project on reforming the regulatory environment governing entrepreneurship after the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, which will result in policy papers as well as conferences in the two countries. 

Greg Simpson is Deputy Regional Director of the Middle East and North Africa division at the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), where in addition to co-managing the division with the regional director, he also directly oversees CIPE’s sizeable Egypt portfolio. A veteran of the nongovernmental sector with eighteen years of experience in strengthening democratic institutions, Simpson came to CIPE from the U.S. online political firm New Media Communications, where he focused on developing and managing the company’s international initiatives. Prior to New Media, Simpson worked at the International Republican Institute (IRI), where he held three successive country director posts in the Balkans. There he directed assistance programs in political party development, political communications, local governance, grassroots organization and mobilization, civil society development, public opinion research, and election observation. During this time, Simpson advised and trained hundreds of political activists and elected officials, and directly advised two of the region’s presidents. Before joining IRI, Simpson held positions at the American Council of Young Political Leaders (ACYPL) and the Center for Civil Society in Southeastern Europe. He holds a B.A. in International Studies from American University in Washington, DC. Simpson currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and two children. 

One of the four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy and an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) is a U.S. non-profit organization with the mission of strengthening democracy around the globe through private enterprise and market-oriented reform. CIPE has supported more than 1,300 initiatives in over 100 developing countries, involving the private sector in policy advocacy and institutional reform, improving governance, and building understanding of market-based democratic systems. CIPE provides management assistance, practical experience, and financial support to local organizations to strengthen their capacity to implement democratic and economic reforms.

John Sloan was appointed Canada’s ambassador to the Russian Federation, Armenia and Uzbekistan in August 2010.

From September 2006 until August 2010 he was Director General for Economic Policy in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. In this capacity he was responsible for the coordination and delivery of Canadian objectives in the G8, G20 and APEC Summits, the OECD, for development policy and institutions and for the Department’s economic capacity building. He was Canada’s Senior Official (SOM) to the APEC process and Canada’s representative to the OECD Executive Committee in Special Session (ECSS). He was also Chair of the G8 Accountability Working Group which produced the G8 Accountability Report for the 2010 Muskoka Summit.

From July 2000 until September 2006 John Sloan worked at the Financial Services Authority in London, UK, the UK financial services regulator, where he was Special Advisor/Manager, Global Team. He was particularly involved in the work of the Financial Stability Forum and the Joint Forum and chaired the Joint Forum working group which produced the High-level Principles for Business Continuity for regulators and market participants, which were formally published in September 2006.

He has served as Canada’s Finance Counsellor in Tokyo and London. Other foreign postings include Geneva, Beijing and a first assignment in Tokyo, including two years at the FSI Japanese language school. Ottawa assignments include Senior Departmental Assistant to the Minister of International Trade and a secondment to the Department of Finance where he coordinated Canada’s Paris Club strategy.

John Sloan has a BA from Stanford University in Chinese Studies, and M.Sc. from the London School of Economics in International Relations and an MBA from Business School Lausanne. In 2000 he taught a course on contemporary Canada at Keio University, Tokyo.

John Sloan is the author of The Surprising Wines of Switzerland, published by Bergli Books, Basel. He also co-editedLa nouvelle Europe de l'Est, du plan au marché, published by Editions Bruylant, Brussels. An article he co-authored, The Structure of International Market Regulation, appeared in Financial Markets and Exchanges Law, published by Oxford University Press in March 2007.

Speaker bio:

Jonathan Rodden is a professor in the political science department at Stanford who works on the comparative political economy of institutions. He has written several articles and a pair of books on federalism and fiscal decentralization. His most recent book, Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism, was the recipient of the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics in 2007. He frequently works with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on issues related to fiscal decentralization.

He has also written papers on the geographic distribution of political preferences within countries, legislative bargaining, the distribution of budgetary transfers across regions, and the historical origins of political institutions. He is currently writing a series of articles and a book on political geography and the drawing of electoral districts around the world.

Rodden received his PhD from Yale University and his BA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright student at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, he was the Ford Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Speaker bio:

Martin Carnoy is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University School of Education. Prior to coming to Stanford, he was a Research Associate in Economics, Foreign Policy Division, at the Brookings Institution. He is also a consultant to the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, UNESCO, IEA, OECD, UNICEF, International Labour Office.

Dr. Carnoy is a labor economist with a special interest in the relation between the economy and the educational system. To this end, he studies the US labor market, including the role in that relation of race, ethnicity, and gender, the US educational system, and systems in many other countries. He uses comparative analysis to understand how education influences productivity and economic growth, and, in turn, how and why educational systems change over time, and why some countries educational systems are marked by better student performance than others'. He has studied extensively the impact of vouchers and charter schools on educational quality, and has recently focused on differences in teacher preparation and teacher salaries across countries as well as larger issues of the impact of economic inequality on educational quality.

Currently, Dr. Carnoy is launching new comparative projects on the quality of education in Latin America and Southern Africa, which include assessing teacher knowledge in mathematics, filming classroomsm and assessing student performance. He is also launching major new project to study changes in university financing and the quality of engineering and science tertiary education in China, India, and Russia.

Dr. Carnoy received his BA in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology, MA and PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago.