Fall 2020 Seminar Series on China's Development and Transition

This event will take place on Zoom. Registration is required: 

 

Wednesday Lectures at 4pm PT Registration Link: http://bit.ly/FallSeminars2020

Register once to receive the Zoom meeting link that will be used for all five Wednesday lectures.

Friday 10/30 Book Launch Event at 1pm PT Registration Link: http://bit.ly/InvisibleChinaOct30

You will need to register seperately to attend the Invisible China book launch webinar on Friday, October 30. 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please join us for our fall seminar series of six lectures given by Stanford faculty who are leading experts on China's development and economic transition. These lectures will cover discussion topics ranging from China's carbon dioxide emissions-control system to China's bureaucracy and will be moderated by Professor Scott Rozelle, faculty director of the Rural Education Action Program at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor Hongbin Li, faculty director of the China Program at the King Center on Global Development at SIEPR.

Seminar Series Moderators:

Scott Rozelle holds the Helen Farnsworth Endowed Professorship at Stanford University and is Senior Fellow in the Food Security and Environment Program and the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) for International Studies. For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In recent years Rozelle spends most of his time co-directing the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner. 

 

 

Hongbin Li is the James Liang Director of the China Program at the Stanford King Center on Global Development, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

 

Lectures and Topics

 

Seminar 1: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 | 4:00 - 5:00 pm Pacific Time

Understanding Policy Preferences of the Chinese Public: Configuration, Stability, and Intensity

 

Understanding the nature of societal preferences has important implications for the emergence of party systems, the dynamics of political conflict, and the direction of political development. However, policy preferences of the Chinese public have received relatively little scholarly attention. Using a series of surveys and experiments administrated online, we study the configuration, stability, and intensity of policy preferences in China.

We find that, first, policy preferences of the Chinese public are highly multi-dimensional. For example, preferences for dovish foreign policy, for policies that ensure more political freedom, and for market-oriented reforms are correlated, but the levels of correlations are low. Second, using longitudinal surveys, we find that a large proportion of the Chinese respondents hold relatively stable policy preferences in most issue domains, which makes measuring policy preferences a meaningful endeavor. Third, using a conjoint design with an embedded experiment, we show that respondents exhibit different levels of preference intensity over different issue domains; moreover, respondents on average are willing to trade preferred policies for tighter institutional constraints on government officials.

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Dr. Yiqing Xu is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His primary research covers political methodology, Chinese politics, and their intersection. He received a PhD in Political Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2016), an MA in Economics from China Center for Economic Research at Peking University (2010) and a BA in Economics (2007) from Fudan University.

His work has appeared in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Political Science Research and Methods, among other peer-reviewed journals. He has won several professional awards, including the best article award from American Journal of Political Science in 2016 and the Miller Prize for the best work appearing in Political Analysis in 2017 and 2019.

 

Seminar 2: Wednesday, October 21, 2020 | 4:00 - 5:00 pm Pacific Time

China's Unconventional Nationwide Carbon Dioxide Emissions-Control System

 

Professor Goulder will present his research focused on China’s new efforts to address climate change through a nationwide and market-based carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions trading program.  He will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of China’s novel approach and present estimated impacts of China’s new program during its first phase, when it covers the power sector.  He will display numerical simulation results indicating potential impacts of the program on CO2 emissions and on electricity outputs, production costs, prices and profits, both in the aggregate and in particular regions and provinces.

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Lawrence H. Goulder is the Shuzo Nishihara Professor in Environmental and Resource Economics at Stanford and Director of the Stanford Environmental and Energy Policy Analysis Center.  His research examines the environmental and economic impacts of environmental policies in the U.S. and China, with a focus on policies to deal with climate change and air pollution.  His work also has explored the sustainability of natural resources and well-being in several countries.  Dr. Goulder has conducted analyses for several government agencies, business groups, and environmental organizations, and has served on advisory committees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board.  Results from his work have been published in academic journal articles as well as in the book, Confronting the Climate Challenge:  Options for US Policy, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2017.  Dr. Goulder graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in philosophy and received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford.

 

Seminar 3: Friday, October 30, 2020 | 1:00 - 2:00 pm Pacific Time

Book Launch Event with Scott Rozelle: Invisible China: How the Urban Rural-Divide Threatens China's Rise 

As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as FSI Senior Fellow Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in their new book Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern.

Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. The low levels of basic education of such a large share of workers may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere.

In this book talk event, Rozelle, who is also the director of FSI’s Rural Education Action Program, will be joined by Hongbin Li, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and director of the China Program at the Stanford King Center on Global Development, who will moderate a discussion about the major themes of the book. A question and answer session with the audience will follow the discussion.

 

Seminar 4: Wednesday, November 4, 2020 | 4:00 - 5:15 pm Pacific Time

Pandemics, Global Supply Chains, and Local Labor Demand: Evidence from 100 Million Posted Jobs in China

 

Professor Li will discuss his new research on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected labor demand in China using data collected from over 100 million posted jobs online. His data show that the number of newly posted jobs within the first 13 weeks after the Wuhan lockdown on January 23, 2020 was about one third lower than that of previous years. He will also explore how trade intermediaries outperformed other firms at the beginning of the pandemic but underperformed during the recovery as the virus spread throughout the world, suggesting economic decoupling from the rest of the world will likely cause job losses in China in a similar manner, except that the magnitude of such a shock will likely be that much greater.

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Hongbin Li is the James Liang Director of the China Program at the Stanford King Center on Global Development, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he was one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

 

Seminar 5: This lecture has been postponed and will be rescheduled soon

Controlling the Narrative: The Coordination and Disciplining Role of the People's Daily in China

 

This seminar provides an overview of corporate news reporting in China, with a focus on understanding the political and market-based incentives behind Chinese newspapers' biased coverage of China's listed companies. And, given these prevailing incentives, we will explore how politicians in China use the Party's flagship newspaper, the People’s Daily, to coordinate the reporting of corporate news in China.

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Joseph Piotroski is the Robert K. Jaedicke Professor of Accounting at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and a Senior Fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER). Professor Piotroski earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999, an MBA from Indiana University in 1994, a BS in Accounting from the University of Illinois in 1989, and worked as a tax consultant for Coopers and Lybrand in Chicago. His research focuses on corporate transparency, governance, and regulation in a global context. His current research examines the impact of legal, political, and regulatory forces on capital market behavior and corporate decision-making, most notably in China and other emerging economies. His research has been published in scholarly journals in the areas of accounting, finance, and economics, and his research on value investing has been frequently cited in the popular press and is widely used in practice. 

 

Seminar 6: Wednesday, December 2, 2020 | 2:45 – 4:00 pm Pacific Time

Fragmented Authoritarianism Revisited: Chinese Bureaucracy as a Loosely-Coupled System

 

Professor Zhou will discuss his study on the prevailing image of fragmented authoritarianism in China in the theoretical framework of “loose coupling” in organizational analysis. He will define the “loose coupling” model in contrast to the rational model of organizations and identify the institutional mechanisms that cultivate and reproduce the loose-coupling phenomena in the Chinese bureaucracy, despite the tremendous efforts of the Leninist party organization to reshape it into a tightly-coupled system. Empirical evidence from patterns of personnel flow in the large Chinese bureaucracy and fieldwork observations are used to illustrate this line of arguments and to make sense of the observed bureaucratic behaviors.

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Xueguang Zhou is a professor of sociology, the Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development, and a senior fellow at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. In the past decade, he conducted fieldwork to understand interactions among state policies, local officials and citizens at the grassroots level. This line of research was summarized in his book The Institutional Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach (in Chinese, Sanlian Press, 2017).   Professor Zhou currently works with a research team to examine patterns of personnel flow among government offices in the Chinese bureaucracy. He also works on a research project that explores the historical origins of the bureaucratic state in China.