International Business Webinar Series hosted by GSU-CIBER

China’s economy and business environment post Covid-19

Featuring:

Dr. Penelope Prime

Clinical Professor of International Business, Georgia State University
Founding Director of the China Research Center

Dr. Qian (Cecilia) Gu

Associate Professor of International Business, Georgia State University
Poets & Quants Top 40 under 40 MBA Professors in 2020

Dr. Leigh Anne Liu

Professor of International Business, Georgia State University
Fulbright-Hanken Distinguished Chair in Business and Economics 2020-2021

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

11:00 AM – 12:00 PM (EST)

REGISTER HERE 

The impact of Covid-19 on Chinese society and economy, and on international business norms, has been rapid and severe. Business as usual may not return any time soon.  Companies need to re-think their strategies in light of China’s, and the global economy’s, downturns; funding for new start-ups may be impacted; and challenges in supply chains may exacerbate the trends of companies diversifying away from producing in China.  Finally, U.S.-China tensions are increasing the political risk on both sides of the Pacific. Some of the changes, however, may bring silver linings and new opportunities.

From this session, participants will learn updates on:

• How China’s economic recovery is progressing
• Challenges, opportunities, and strategies of startups and VC investments in China
• Approaches to Sino-U.S. conflict management
• The status of the U.S.-China phase one trade deal

This program is FREE and open to all, but registration is required.

REGISTER HERE 

Bin Xu, Emory University, Sociology

Zoom Meeting 7:30 (EDT)

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This lecture addresses the social legacy of the Mao era or “historically remaining issue” (lishi yiliu wenti), long-lasting impacts of previous state policies and political practices on involved people’s lives in the post-Mao era. Such social legacy often involves intense interactions between the state and the society and is tangled with institutional and cultural legacies. This point is illustrated in a case study of the historically remaining issues of the Shanghai-Xinjiang migration program, in which about 97,000 Shanghai zhiqing were mobilized in 1963-1966 to settle in the Xinjiang Construction and Production Corps. After a series of petitions and protests in 1979-1980, which culminated in a hunger strike in Aksu, some were allowed to return, while others stayed in Shanghai without documents. For more than thirty years, the zhiqing returnees have been petitioning and protesting to pressure the Shanghai government and the Xinjiang Corps to solve the historically remaining issues, including unstable life, low pensions, and limited healthcare benefits. The Shanghai government responded with suppressing the protests, imprisoning leading activists, and making incremental, ad hoc policy changes. Even those policy changes, however, have created further problems and provoked more grievances.

Penelope B. Prime, Georgia State University

Zoom Webinar 7:30 (EDT)

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The U.S. and China are major trading and investment partners.  Conflicting views on what is fair trade led to a bilateral trade war with escalating tariffs on both sides.   Efforts to re-establish trade and investment flows have been thwarted by geo-political concerns.  Accusations of cyber theft and information warfare on top of the Coronavirus challenges have increasingly strained normal economic interactions.  What is happening in terms of decoupling, what policies and factors are behind the changes, and what is at stake?

Public Lecture
Co-Sponsored by
The Center for International Business Education and Research at Georgia Tech

Blue Jeans virtual meeting; registration required
Meeting URL: https://bluejeans.com/200204418

Moderator: John R. McIntyre, Professor of Management & Founding Director of the Georgia Tech CIBER

Abstract: As discussed in his new book The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Dexter Roberts will describe how surging income inequality, an unfair social welfare system, and rising social tensions block China’s continued economic rise with implications for companies and countries around the world. He will discuss how China is struggling to leave behind its “Factory to the World” growth model, and include its hundreds of millions of left-behind migrant workers into a more innovative, consumption-driven economy and why that means China may not become the superpower the world expects. He will also discuss how COVID-19 has exacerbated the already huge social disparities in China further complicating its ongoing economic transition and putting it at risk of falling into the middle income trap. He will discuss how global supply chain diversification is affecting China and the implications of a Trump administration turning its back on engagement while a Xi Jinping-led China is determined to pursue a “wolf warrior” assertive approach to the world.

Dexter Roberts is an award-winning writer and speaker on China now serving as a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Fellow at the University of Montana’s Mansfield Center. Previously he was China bureau chief and Asia News Editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, based in Beijing for more than two decades. Roberts’ first book, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, and the Future of the World, was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2020. He also publishes a weekly newsletter called Trade War.

Michelle King, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hil

Zoom Webinar 7:30 (EDT)

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Chop Fry Watch Learn is a cultural and social history of postwar Taiwan, told through the life and career of Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004), cookbook author and television personality, often called the “Julia Child of Chinese Cooking.” Fu authored dozens of cookbooks and appeared as an instructor on television for four decades, beginning in 1962. Women in her generation, which included both housewives and career women, turned to Fu because she taught them how to cook an astounding range of unfamiliar Chinese regional dishes on their television sets, in ways their own mothers and grandmothers never could. As her fame grew, Fu and her cookbooks traveled beyond the borders of Taiwan, teaching the rest of the world how to cook Chinese food. Fu’s story offers a way to examine a much more personal and intimate set of concerns about food, family, gender roles, and cultural identity. This is not a story of timeless tradition, but of modern transformation—of self and family, of cuisine and society.

This is an online event. A Zoom link will be sent to registrants prior to the event.

Relations between the United States and China are souring dramatically in what is rapidly becoming a Cold War setting. This is having significant impact on multiple sectors including universities that over four decades have built a web of linkages largely regarded as of mutual advantage. In particular, faculty in STEM and other fields including bio/medicine and Chinese students at American universities, have become increasingly entangled in the escalating confrontation between Washington and Beijing.

Presidential directives, Congressional committees, actions by federal departments and funding agencies (including NIH and NSF), as well as steps taken by some university administrations, have had a major impact on university-based research collaborations with Chinese counterparts.

Leading researchers, the majority of them of Chinese descent, are charged with betraying the trust placed in them by university administrations and federal granting agencies by transferring cutting-edge knowledge back to China as part of “whole of society” efforts to enhance China’s economic and military power at the US’s expense.

In this online encounter we will ask:

What are the national security and integrity of research considerations behind these actions?
What is the scale and scope of activities considered improper or illegal?
What have been the consequences for American universities and how have they responded?
What are the implications for third countries, including Canada?
How do we balance the advantages of open science, collaborations, education and exchange with the need to protect national security, maintain cyber security, safeguard intellectual property, and maintain ethical standards?
Moderator: Meigan Aronson, Dean of Science, UBC

Presenters:

Paul Evans, Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, UBC
John Krige, Regents Professor Emeritus, Georgia Tech; Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Green College, UBC
Commentator:

Allison Macfarlane, Director and Professor, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, UBC
Speakers’ Bios:

Paul Evans (PhD with distinction Dalhousie University 1982) has been a Professor at the University of British Columbia since 1999, teaching Asian and trans-Pacific international relations. His work was based at the Institute of Asian Research and the Liu Institute for Global Issues which are now both located in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA). An advocate of cooperative and human security, he has been studying and promoting policy-related activity on track-two security processes and the construction of multilateral institutions since 1988. His recent writings and media commentaries have focused on Canada-China relations, Asian security dynamics, and the emergence of techno-nationalism as a defining force in regional affairs, including a recent essay “Techno-nationalism in China-US Relations: Implications for Universities,” East Asian Policy, June 2020.

John Krige is Regents Professor Emeritus in the School of History and Sociology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He is an historian working at the intersection between science, technology and foreign policy. He has been a Visiting Fellow in Residence at Green College, and at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. His most recent monograph, co-authored with Mario Daniels (Amsterdam), is entitled Knowledge and National Security in Cold War America (University of Chicago Press, in press). He is also the author of a recent essay, “Scholars or Spies? U.S – China Tension in Academia,” China Currents, Fall 2020. He has retired and lives in Paris.

Moderator’s Bio:

Dr. Meigan Aronson was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia (UBC) on September 1, 2018. Dr. Aronson brings a strong commitment to research, teaching and learning. She has an extensive publication record (more than 140 articles, including in Nature Communications, PNAS, Physical Review Letters, and Physical Review B). She has been honoured with a number of fellowships, including American Physical Society Fellow, and most recently, Fellow of the Neutron Scattering Society of America. To date, Dr. Aronson has received more than US$13.5 million in sponsored research support. She is passionate about mentoring students and postdoctoral fellows, and has a deep commitment to diversity and improving the success of students and faculty.

Commentator:

Dr. Allison M. Macfarlane – featureDr. Allison M. Macfarlane is Professor and Director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs within the Faculty of Arts at UBC. Dr. Macfarlane has held both academic and government positions in the field of energy and environmental policy, especially nuclear policy. Most recently, she directed the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at the George Washington University. She recently held a fellowship at the Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Applied Public Policy at Flinders University and Carnegie Mellon Adelaide in Australia.

Webinar Poster

Co-Sponsors: The Centre for Chinese Research, the Institute of Asian Research, the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, as well as Green College, UBC

Virtual webinar hosted by SFU’s Jack Austin Centre for Asia Pacific Business Studies in partnership with the Chinese Globalization Association (CGA).

About This Event
The Chinese Globalization Association and SFU’s Jack Austin Center for Asia Pacific Business Studies are pleased to present a keynote speech by a distinguished Professor of Management and Global Business, Farok J. Contractor. In this keynote speech, Farok J. Contractor will explore the potential for economic collaboration between China and the United States.

The talk will examine the future of the US-China relationship and policy dilemmas between these two global powers.

The webinar will also feature Eric Werker, William Saywell Professor at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, as the discussant.

The webinar will be co-moderated by Jing Li, the Co-Director of the Jack Austin Centre for Asia Pacific Business Studies of SFU’s Beedie School of Business and by John R. McIntyre, founding Director of the Georgia Tech Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER).

Presentation Abstract
Despite enormous economic complementarities and synergies between the US and China, the current relationship is akin to a quarrelling couple that still needs each other because of the 639 billion in bilateral trade in goods and services, and the “Direct Investment Position” of the two countries combined exceeding $ 130 billion, in 2019.

Putting aside nationalism and ambitions – whether political or corporate – there is no structural or fundamental reason why the two economies should not cooperate on a broad range of issues and sectors, ranging from healthcare to green energy to vehicles, for mutual benefit.

However, because of psychosomatic anti-globalization reactions in the US after 2016, and in China an exaggerated sense of nationalism and nursing 178-year-old grievances that bear little relevance to the present day, the two largest economies are now in an artificial state of tension.

This presentation will focus on the potential future relationship and policy dilemmas. Here are just two examples: China’s portraying itself as the new champion of globalization which then also requires its grudging acceptance of universally accepted rules. For the US, one policy dilemma is how to maintain an open-innovation environment while dealing with the real and imagined ghosts of intellectual asset theft. But there remain the vast majority of areas, sectors and subjects on which the two biggest economies can cooperate, for mutual benefit.

Weihua An, Emory University, Sociology
You Said, They Said: A Framework on Informant Accuracy with Application to Studying Self-Reports and Peer-Reports of Adolescent Smoking in China

Zoom Meeting 7:30 (EDT)

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Social research heavily relies on self-reported data. However, it is known that self-reports, especially of sensitive behaviors, tend to be biased. Among many endeavors to address self-reporting bias, informants (such as peers, co-workers, and family members) are often employed to provide alternative reports to supplement self-reports. In this paper, I discuss the necessity and the applicability of using informant reports and the types, measures, and determinants of informant accuracy. I show that studying informant accuracy not only helps deepen our understanding regarding how perceptions of alters are configured, but also helps develop more effective methods to utilize informant reports to correct self-reporting bias. I also propose a general framework that links informant accuracy to informant characteristics as has been done in prior studies, but also to alter characteristics, dyadic characteristics, and features of the object being reported on. I illustrate the framework through a case study of self-reports and peer-reports of smoking among 4,094 middle school students in China. The results reveal mechanisms that can account for previous findings, present more nuanced patterns beyond previous findings, and show the distinctive logics for identifying the presence and the absence of a behavior.

Zhuo (Adam) Chen, University of Georgia

Zoom Webinar 7:30 (EDT)

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Seventeen years after the SARS outbreak, with cities in lockdown and tens of thousands of patients in intensive care units in China because of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, disease prevention and control has again been put into spotlight, albeit unwanted. This presentation will discuss China’s disease control prevention systems, its evolution over time, and its key components and structure. I will also provide a comparison between the public health systems in China and that in the US, with a particular focus on the emergency preparedness and response. The presentation will offer some food for thought on China’s public health systems and policy recommendations.