Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia

Lin Wei

China’s Toilet Revolution

August 8, 2019
Each year, November 19 marks the date of an important revolution in China—World Toilet and China Toilet Revolution Awareness Day. Though washroom puns often accompany headlines about China’s effort to improve the state of its public restrooms, the issue is no laughing matter in the eyes of the country’s leaders. President Xi’s “Toilet Revolution” announcement in 2015 was front-page news in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and a useful cipher for understanding Beijing’s policy priorities. At the time of Xi’s announcement, China’s public bathrooms were described as unhygienic, filthy, crude, anxiety-inducing, and often in short supply. The condition of the country’s bathrooms was both a mounting issue for China’s growing tourism industry as well as an ongoing public health crisis.... Read more about China’s Toilet Revolution
Elizabeth Plantan

A Tale of Two Countries

July 29, 2019

Elizabeth Plantan, a China postdoctoral fellow with the Ash Center, spent her 21st birthday in Irkutsk, Siberia, near Lake Baikal. With windchill, the temperature was minus 55 degrees Fahrenheit. “It's the sort of cold where your eyelashes freeze, but everyone still walks everywhere in the snow,” she recalled.

Plantan, then an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, made the long trek to Irkutsk because she hoped to completely embed herself into Russian culture and community. “I wanted there to be very few foreigners so I wouldn't have any temptation to speak English,” she said of her decision to swap the mild climate of Middletown, Connecticut, for the subarctic Siberian environment.... Read more about A Tale of Two Countries

5G Tower

Huawei, a self-made world-class company or agent of China's global strategy?

May 21, 2019

For most Americans, Huawei is hardly a household name. The Chinese telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics manufacturer has had only a limited consumer footprint in the United States. That began to change, though, last year when the daughter of the company’s founder and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, stepped off a plane in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was immediately taken into custody by Canadian authorities at the behest of the United States. Her arrest for allegedly helping Huawei evade US sanctions on Iran, and the tit-for-tat detention of a number of Canadian citizens in China, has brought renewed attention on the company, its relationship with China’s military and intelligence agencies, and its ambitious goals to be a dominant player in the race to deploy 5G wireless technology around the world. 

Paul Clifford, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Ash Center and author of The China Paradox: At the Front Line of Economic Transformation, helped shed light on Huawei’s growth strategy and addressed directly some of the security claims lodged at the company by senior Trump administration officials at a talk at the Ash Center earlier this spring.... Read more about Huawei, a self-made world-class company or agent of China's global strategy?

Playing by the Informal Rules
Li, Yao. 2018. Playing by the Informal Rules. Cambridge University Press. Visit Publisher's Site Abstract

Yao Li, Cambridge University Press, November 2018  

Growing protests in non-democratic countries are often seen as signals of regime decline. China, however, has remained stable amid surging protests. Playing by the Informal Rules highlights the importance of informal norms in structuring state-protester interactions, mitigating conflict, and explaining regime resilience. Drawing on a nationwide dataset of protest and multi-sited ethnographic research, this book presents a bird's-eye view of Chinese contentious politics and illustrates the uneven application of informal norms across regions, social groups, and time. Through examinations of protests and their distinct implications for regime stability, Li offers a novel theoretical framework suitable for monitoring the trajectory of political contention in China and beyond. Overall, this study sheds new light on political mobilization and authoritarian resilience and provides fresh perspectives on power, rules, legitimacy, and resistance in modern societies.

 

Shabbir Cheema, November 2018

This policy brief explores how democratic processes in local governance affect access to urban services in Asian cities, especially for marginalized groups. It is based on research conducted by a group of national research and training institutions in nine cities in five Asian countries as well as regional dialogue hosted and facilitated by East-West Center with the support of the Swedish International Center for Local Democracy (ICLD). Governance process variables investigated were local government resources and capacity; mechanisms for local participation, accountability, and coordination; use of information and communications technology (ICT); implementation and replication of good practices; and management of peri-urbanization. This brief outlines research findings that are applicable across countries at the city level.

mccain

Remembering Senator John McCain and his efforts to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War

September 11, 2018

As much of official Washington gathered in the cavernous nave of the Washington National Cathedral earlier this month to pay their final respects to the late Senator John McCain, Harvard’s Thomas Vallely MC/MPA 1983 stood among former presidents, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, and military service members to say goodbye to a friend of 30 years with whom he had worked to reshape U.S. policy in Southeast Asia... Read more about Remembering Senator John McCain and his efforts to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War

Lower Mekong River Basin

Ensuring the Future of the Lower Mekong Basin

July 25, 2018

A small, intensely blue, frozen pool sits isolated in a sparsely populated area of the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai, China. It is hard to imagine, but this bit of ice, the Lasagongma Spring, is the start of a river that serves as the lifeblood to 60 million people.

With spring’s arrival, the ice melts and the pool is awash as mountain snows turn to water and flood the valley. Ultimately, the water will flow through China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, entering Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and then emptying into the South China Sea (or the East Sea to the Vietnamese). In total, the waters of the Greater Mekong Basin help feed an estimated 300 million people... Read more about Ensuring the Future of the Lower Mekong Basin

Yuheng Wen

Fellows Focus: Dalio Scholar’s Campaign for Education Equality in China

July 16, 2018
Born and raised in a rural village in central China’s Henan Province, Yuheng Wen MPA ’19, dropped out of middle school at age 13. Now, two decades later, he is at Harvard exploring ways to promote education equality in China in part with the support of the Ash Center’s Dalio Scholars program, which provides scholarships to graduate students from China who are proven leaders in philanthropy or who demonstrate clear philanthropy sector leadership potential... Read more about Fellows Focus: Dalio Scholar’s Campaign for Education Equality in China
Dr. Tu Anh

Vietnam Executive Leadership Program Celebrates 10th Anniversary

June 28, 2018
The Ash Center sat down with Dr. Vu Thanh Tu Anh, Dean of the Fulbright School of Public Policy and Management, the first academic unit of Fulbright University of Vietnam. Dr. Tu Anh, also a non-resident fellow at the Ash Center, was in Cambridge for the 10th anniversary of the Vietnam Executive Leadership Program (VELP), an executive education program run by the Ash Center, which provides public policy training to senior Vietnamese government officials.... Read more about Vietnam Executive Leadership Program Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Jun Jie Woo, May 2018 

Decades of rapid economic growth and urbanization in Singapore have given rise to new and increasingly complex policy problems. Singapore’s policymakers have sought to address these problems by leveraging emerging technological solutions such as data analytics. This has culminated in the “Smart Nation” initiative, a nationwide and whole-of-government effort to digitize Singapore’s policy processes and urban environment. More importantly, the initiative has given rise to administrative reorganization and increased state-citizen engagement. These changes portend more fundamental shifts in Singapore’s governing milieu.

Students

Teaching in Technicolor: Alumna Transforms Myanmar Education with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

December 1, 2017

“I was a misfit, not book smart,” says Hla Hla Win MC/MPA 2016. After completing ninth grade, Win walked out of her school in Myanmar and didn’t return. Fifteen years later, she walked across the stage at Harvard Kennedy School’s 2016 commencement and into her role as founder and CEO of a social enterprise named 360ed.... Read more about Teaching in Technicolor: Alumna Transforms Myanmar Education with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

David Dapice, November 2017

How rapidly will or could demand for power grow in Vietnam? What will interest rates be? Will the cost of generating plants go up or down, and by how much? What will the cost of each fuel be? Will the cost of carbon or other pollution begin to enter into investment decisions?

This paper will examine these questions. It will begin by looking at demand projections and investments in efficiency – getting more output per kilowatt hour used. It will then try to estimate the costs of building and running various types of generating plants in Vietnam over time. It will also use various costs of carbon to see if including these both as a source of global warming and as an indicator of local pollution changes the calculation. Changes in the domestic supply of gas will also influence the set of potential solutions, as will the declining costs of solar electricity and battery storage. In all of this it is the system or mix of investments that need to work, not any single investment.

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