Many studies of China’s relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional influence. Yet, scholars and pundits often fail to appreciate the complexity of the contemporary Chinese state and society, and just how fragmented, decentralized, and internationalized China is today. In The Ripple Effect, Enze Han argues that a focus on the Chinese state alone is not sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of China’s influence in Southeast Asia. Instead, we must look beyond the Chinese state, to non-state actors from China, such as private businesses and Chinese migrants. These actors affect people’s perception of China in a variety of ways, and they often have wide-ranging as well as long-lasting effects on bilateral relations. Looking beyond the Chinese state’s intentional influence reveals many situations that result in unanticipated changes in Southeast Asia.

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When World War II ended Chiang Kai-shek seemed at the height of his power-the leader of Nationalist China, one of the victorious Allied Powers in 1945 and with the financial backing of the US. Yet less than four years later, he lost the China’s civil war against the communists. Offering an insightful chronological treatment of the years 1944–1949, Parks Coble addresses why Chiang was unable to win the war and control hyperinflation. Using newly available archival sources, he reveals the critical weakness of Chiang’s style of governing, the fundamental structural flaws in the Nationalist government, bitter personal rivalries and Chiang’s personal lack of interest in finance. This major work of revisionist scholarship will engage all those interested in the shaping of twentieth-century history.

Join the Sigur Center as we discuss this monumental work of scholarship with history Parks M. Coble. RSVP today!

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Parks M. Coble is the James S. Sellers Professor of History, having joined the department in August 1976. He teaches surveys of general East Asian history, covering China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and specialized courses on modern China and Japan.

Parks Coble’s research field is 20th century China with special emphasis on the political history of Republican China (1911-1949), the history of Chinese business in the 20th century, and Sino-Japanese interactions. Recent publications have included a study of Chinese businessmen living in occupied China during World War II, and of the anti-Japanese movement in China in the 1930s. His current project examines the collapse of the Chiang Kai-shek government in China in 1949 by analyzing the tragic consequences of hyperinflation in China during the period from 1944 until 1949. The Japanese conquest of East China had isolated the Chiang stronghold in the interior and left the Chinese government with few financial resources. Chiang chose to simply print money which lead to disastrous consequences. After Japanese surrender there was no “peace dividend” so the erosion of the currency simply accelerated. New archival sources permit an in depth analysis of the decision making process within Chiang’s government.

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About the Speaker:

About the Moderator:

As senior associate dean of academic affairs, Professor Hopkins oversees the Elliott School’s Academic Programs, Graduate Admissions, International Exchanges, and Student Services. Benjamin D. Hopkins is a historian of modern South Asia, specializing in the history of Afghanistan and British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous books on the region, including  The Making of Modern Afghanistan, Fragments of the Afghan Frontier, and Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier. His latest book,  Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern State, which won the Association of Asian Studies Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize (2022), presents a global history of how the limits of today’s state-based political order were organized in the late nineteenth century, with lasting effects to the present day. He is currently working on a manuscript about the American war in Afghanistan provisionally entitled, The War that Destroyed America, as well as A Concise History of Afghanistan for Cambridge University Press.

Writing for the public, Professor Hopkins has been featured in The New York Times, The National Interest, and the BBC. He regularly teaches courses on South Asian history, the geopolitics of South and Central Asia, as well as World history and the legacies of violence and memory in Asia. Professor Hopkins directed the Sigur Center for Asian Studies from 2016 until 2021. During the 2021-22 academic year, he worked in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict Stabilization Operations.

Professor Hopkins has received fellowships from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC, the National University of Singapore, as well as the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. His research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust (UK), the British Academy, the American Institute of Iranian Studies, the Nuffield Foundation (UK), as well as Trinity College, Cambridge.

When the Bush Administration demanded Japanese “boots on the ground” to support its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Prime Minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi responded by deploying a small contingent of the Self-Defense Forces in the first significant display of SDF force abroad.  On the day following the initial deployment, three antiwar protesters distributed flyers at SDF apartment buildings in Tachikawa titled “Let’s Think Together and Raise Our Voices Against the SDF Deployment to Iraq!” They were arrested a month later and detained in police cells for 75 days.  Amnesty International called the three Japanese detainees “Prisoners of Conscience,” the first time it applied the term in Japan.  

 The case presented a severe test for Japan’s criminal justice system.  Who would stand up to support the lonely trio?  Would they find adequate defense counsel?  How would the lawyers be paid?  Would the courts recognize constitutional protection for political speech?  

The author will talk about his new book, Japan’s Prisoners of Conscience — Protest and Law During the Iraq War, (Routledge, 2023), that takes readers into Japan’s courtrooms and delivers rich descriptions of the lawyers and supporters who rallied to defend the three protesters.   

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Lawrence Repeta is a graduate of the University of Washington Law School.  He has served as a lawyer, business executive and law professor in Japan and the United States. The primary focus of his research is Japan’s constitutional law. He is best known in Japan as the plaintiff in a suit that made constitutional history by opening Japan’s courts to free reporting. He has served on the board of directors of Information Clearinghouse Japan, an NGO devoted to promoting open government in Japan and the Japan Civil Liberties Union.  

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How can we explain the causes and effects of global migration from the perspective of sending states and migrants themselves? The Migration and Development Regime introduces a novel analytical framework to help answer this question in India, the world’s largest emigrant exporter and the world’s largest remittance-receiving country.  Drawing on an archival analysis of Indian government documents, a new database of Indian migrants’ transnational organizations, and unique interviews with poor and elite Indian emigrants, recruiters, and government officials, this book exposes the vital role the Indian state, as well as its poor and elite emigrants, have long played in forging and legitimizing class inequalities within India through their management of international emigration.  Since the 1800s, the Indian state has differentially used poor and elite emigrants to accelerate domestic economic growth at the cost of class inequalities, while still retaining political legitimacy. At times, the Indian state has forbidden emigration, at other times it has promoted it.  At times, Indian emigrants have brought substantial material inflows, at other times, they have brought new ideas to support new development agendas within India.  But throughout, Indian emigration practices have deepened class inequalities by imposing different regulations, acquiring different benefits from different classes of emigrants, and making new class pacts–all while remaining invisible in political and academic discussions on Indian development.  On the flip side, since the early 1900s, poor and elite emigrants have resisted and re-shaped Indian development in response to state migration practices.  By taking this long and class-based view, this book recasts contemporary migration not simply as a problematic function of “neoliberalism” or as a development panacea for sending countries, but as a long and dynamic historical process that sending states and migrants have long tried to manage.  In doing so, it re-defines the primary problems of migration, exposes the material and ideological impact that migration has on sending state development, and isolates what is truly novel about contemporary migration.

Copies of the book can be purchased from Oxford University Press.

Registration is free and open to the public.

This event will be recorded and will be available on the Sigur Center YouTube channel after the event.

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Rina Agarwala is a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. Agarwala publishes and lectures on international development, labor, migration, gender, social movements, and Indian politics. Agarwala is the author of Informal Labor, Formal Politics and Dignified Discontent in India (Cambridge, 2013) and The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration (Oxford, 2022), as well as the co-editor of Whatever Happened to Class? Reflections from South Asia (Routledge, 2008, 2016). Agarwala has worked at the United Nations Development Program in China, the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India, and Women’s World Banking in New York. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Government from Cornell University, an MPP in Political and Economic Development from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from Princeton University.

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Emmanuel Teitelbaum is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. Professor Teitelbaum serves as a managing editor for the Journal of Development Studies. His writings examine class politics and political violence. His academic articles have appeared in leading journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, Politics and Society, and the Journal of Development Studies. His book, Managing Dissent: Democracy and Industrial Conflict in Post-Reform South Asia (Cornell University Press), explores the dynamics of state-labor relations and industrial conflict following the implementation of neoliberal economic reforms in India and Sri Lanka. Professor Teitelbaum’s research has received support from the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. He was the recipient of the 2007 Gabriel Almond Award for Best Dissertation in Comparative Politics. He holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University and a B.A. from John Carroll University.

As China and the U.S. increasingly compete for power in key areas of U.S. influence, great power conflict looms. Yet few studies have looked to the Middle East and Africa, regions of major political, economic, and military importance for both China and the U.S., to theorize how China competes in a changing world system.

China’s Rise in the Global South examines China’s behavior as a rising power in two key Global South regions, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. Dawn C. Murphy, drawing on extensive fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, compares and analyzes thirty years of China’s interactions with these regions across a range of functional areas: political, economic, foreign aid, and military. From the Belt and Road initiative to the founding of new cooperation forums and special envoys, China’s Rise in the Global South offers an in-depth look at China’s foreign policy approach to the countries it considers its partners in South-South cooperation.

Intervening in the emerging debate between liberals and realists about China’s future as a great power, Murphy contends that China is constructing an alternate international order to interact with these regions, and this book provides policymakers and scholars of international relations with the tools to analyze it.

Copies of the book can be purchased from Stanford University Press.

Registration is free and open to the public.

This event will be recorded and will be available on the Sigur Center YouTube channel after the event.

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Dr. Dawn Murphy joined the National War College as an Associate Professor of National Security Strategy in 2022. Prior to joining NWC, her academic appointments included Associate Professor of International Security Studies at Air War College, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Princeton (Columbia)-Harvard China and the World Program at Princeton University.

Murphy specializes in Chinese foreign policy and domestic politics, US-China relations, and international relations. Her research analyzes China’s interests and behavior as a rising global power towards the existing international order. She examines China’s relations with the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa in her book China’s Rise in the Global South: The Middle East, Africa, and Beijing’s Alternative World Order (Stanford University Press, 2022). It analyzes China’s foreign policy approach towards the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa regionally (e.g., political, economic, military, and foreign aid) and through detailed case studies of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF), the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), the China-Middle East Issues Special Envoy, the China-Africa Issues Special Envoy, China’s Special Envoy for Syria, China’s naval base in Djibouti, and China’s Belt and Road initiative.

Dr. Murphy holds a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University, Master of International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and Ph.D. in Political Science from George Washington University.

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David Shambaugh is an internationally recognized authority and award-winning author on contemporary China and the international relations of Asia. He is the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science & International Affairs, and the founding Director of the China Policy Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He previously served in the Department of State and on the National Security Council staff during the Carter administration (1977-1979). From 1996-2016 he was also a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at The Brookings Institution. Professor Shambaugh was previously Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Reader in Chinese Politics at the University of London’s School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), 1987-1996, where he also served as Editor of The China Quarterly. He has served on the Board of Directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, Advisory Board of the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), East-West Center Fellowship Board, is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and member of its Board of Studies, is a participant in the Aspen Strategy Group, and other public policy and scholarly organizations. An active public intellectual and frequent commentator in the international media, he also serves on numerous editorial boards, and has been a consultant to governments, research institutions, foundations, universities, corporations, banks, and investment funds.

He has been selected for numerous awards and grants, including as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Senior Scholar by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and a Senior Fulbright Scholar (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). He has received research grants from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, German Marshall Fund, Hinrich Foundation, the British Academy, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and has been a visiting scholar or professor at universities in Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, and he has lectured all over the world.

As an author, Professor Shambaugh has published more than 30 books, including most recently International Relations of Asia (third edition, 2022); China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now (2021); Where Great Powers Meet: America & China in Southeast Asia (2021); and China & the World (2020). Other books include The China Reader: Rising Power (2016); Tangled Titans: The United States and China (2012); China’s Communist Party: Atrophy & Adaptation (2008); Power Shift: China & Asia’s New Dynamics (2005); and Modernizing China’s Military (2002); Making China Policy (2001); The Modern Chinese State (2000); Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory & Practice (1994); American Studies of Contemporary China (1993); and Beautiful Imperialist (1991). He has also authored numerous reports, scholarly articles and chapters, newspaper op-eds, and book reviews. He is reasonably fluent in Chinese, and has some French, German, and Spanish.

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Gregg A. Brazinsky works on U.S.-East Asian relations and East Asian international history. He is interested in the flow of commerce, ideas, and culture among Asian countries and across the Pacific. He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. He is the author of two books: Winning the Third World (2017), which focuses on Sino-American Rivalry in the Third World and Nation Building in South Korea (2007), which explores U.S.-South Korean relations during the Cold War. Currently, he is working on two other book projects. The first examines American nation-building in Asia during the Cold War. The second explores Sino-North Korean relations between 1949 and 1992 and focuses specifically on the development of cultural and economic ties between the two countries. He has received numerous fellowships to support his research including the Kluge Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Smith Richardson Foundation junior faculty fellowship, and a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Center. Professor Brazinsky also currently serves as the director of the George Washington Cold War Group.

As director of the Asian Studies Program, Professor Brazinsky has attracted some of the brightest students from around the country and the world who share a commitment to pursuing careers related to Asia. He helped to launch a special mentoring program for Asian Studies MA students and has worked to expand fellowship and professional opportunities for students in the program.

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Antoine Roth is an assistant professor at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. His research and teaching focuses on Chinese foreign policy and the international politics of East Asia. He writes a regular column on Sino-Japanese relations for the Tokyo Review. He holds a PhD in international politics from the University of Tokyo and a Master in Asian Studies from George Washington University. 

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Robert Sutter is Professor of Practice of International Affairs at the Elliott School of George Washington University (2011-Present ). He also served as Director of the School’s main undergraduate program involving over 2,000 students from 2013-2019. His earlier full-time position was Visiting Professor of Asian Studies at Georgetown University (2001-2011).

A Ph.D. graduate in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University, Sutter has published 22 books (four with multiple editions), over 300 articles and several hundred government reports dealing with contemporary East Asian and Pacific countries and their relations with the United States. His most recent book is Chinese Foreign Relations: Power and Policy of an Emerging Global Force, Fifth Edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).

Sutter’s government career (1968-2001) saw service as senior specialist and director of the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division of the Congressional Research Service, the National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and the Pacific at the US Government’s National Intelligence Council, the China division director at the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

This talk introduces Imperial Gateway, which explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan’s empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. The book uncovers a half century of dynamic relations between Japan, Taiwan, China, and Western regional powers. Japanese officials in Taiwan did not simply take orders from Tokyo; rather, they often pursued their own expansionist ambitions in South China and Southeast Asia. When outright conquest was not possible, they promoted alternative strategies, including naturalizing resident Chinese as overseas Taiwanese subjects, extending colonial police networks, and deploying tens of thousands of Taiwanese to war. The Taiwanese—merchants, gangsters, policemen, interpreters, nurses, and soldiers—seized new opportunities for socioeconomic advancement that did not always align with Japan’s imperial interests. Imperial Gateway shows how Japanese officials and Taiwanese subjects transformed Taiwan into a regional gateway for expansion in an ever-shifting international order.

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Professor Seiji Shirane is an Assistant Professor of Japanese History at The City College of New York (CUNY). He received degrees in history from Yale University (BA) and Princeton University (PhD), and his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

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A native of China, Professor Daqing Yang graduated from Nanjing University and received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He specialized in the history of modern Japan. His research interests include the Japanese empire, technological developments in modern Japan, and the legacies of World War II in East Asia.

In 2004, Dr. Yang was appointed a Historical Consultant to The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group at the U.S. National Archives. In fall 2006, Dr. Yang served as the Edwin O. Reischauer Visiting Professor of Japanese Studies at Harvard University.

Professor Yang is a founding co-director of the Memory and Reconciliation in the Asia Pacific program based in the Sigur Center for Asian Studies, and is currently working on a new project on postwar China-Japan reconciliation. He is the author of Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945. He co-edited the following books: Memory, Identity, and Commemorations of World War II: Anniversary Politics in Asia Pacific; Toward a History Beyond Borders: Contentious Issues in Sino-Japanese Relations, which was also published simultaneously in China and Japan; Rethinking Historical Injustice and Reconciliation in Northeast Asia; and Communications Under the Seas: The Evolving Cable Network and Its Implications.