Soft Power and the Conceptualization of Asian Identity with panelists Steve Fish, Josh Kurlantzick, Chyungly Lee, Richard Madsen, and chaired by T.J. Pempel
This conference will explore a number of broad threads under the rubric of "soft power." The overarching goal is to examine some of the important ways in which culture, product branding, export projection of national cultures, athletic events, and global NGOs serve to create a more unified (or divided) Asia.
To what extent are cultural and athletic activities used by national governments to project positive images? Do transnational groups such as NGOs operate independently of governments as cross national cultural unifiers? Are cultural products such as films, soap operas, and toys moving more easily across national borders in ways that foster some comprehensive sense of "Asian-ness" or "Asian identity?"- Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley
Bio
M. Steven Fish
M. Steven Fish is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching interests include post-Soviet politics, democratization and regime change, and general comparative politics. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics.
He is the author of Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2005), winner of best book prize in the Comparative Democratization section for the American Political Science Association, and, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1995) and a coauthor of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2001).
Joshua Kurlantzick
Joshua Kurlantzick is a visiting scholar in the Carnegie Endowment's China Program. Also a special correspondent for The New Republic and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, Kurlantzick is assessing China's relationship with the developing world, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Kurlantzick's book, Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power is Transforming the World (Yale University Press), focuses on how China uses its soft power - culture, investment, academia, foreign aid, public diplomacy - to influence other countries in the developing world. Additionally, Kurlantzick is currently a fellow at the USC School of Public Diplomacy and the Pacific Council on International Policy.
Kurlantzick was previously foreign editor at The New Republic. Earlier, he covered international economics and trade for U.S. News and World Report. He also reported on Southeast Asia for The Economist as a correspondent based in Bangkok, Thailand. Kurlantzick's articles also have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, Current History, and The Washington Quarterly.
Chyungly Lee
Chyungly Lee is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of International Relations at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. She obtained her Ph.D. from Department of Politics and Government at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1995. Her current research focus includes; Asia-Pacific security cooperation, economic security, Asian regionalism and human security. She is also the Co-Executive Director for Taiwan's participation in the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP) and she is on the Advisory Committee of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins University Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
Richard Madsen
Richard Madsen is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Professor Madsen spent time studying in Taiwan and was the former Chair of the Program in Chinese Studies at UCSD. He is the author of four books on China, Chen Village (with Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger), Morality and Power in a Chinese Village, and Unofficial China (with Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz); and The World of God: The Catholic and Civil Society in China. He is a co-author (with Robert Bellah, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton) of Habits of the Heart, and The Good Society. Finally, he is author of China and the American Dream, a work on the cultural dimensions of the US–China relations. In 1986, Professor Madsen was a Jury nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-Fiction for Habits of the Heart.
T.J, Pempel
T. J. Pempel (Ph.D., Columbia) joined Berkeley's Political Science Department in July 2001 and served as director of the Institute of East Asian Studies from 2002 until 2006. There he held the Il Han New Chair in Asian Studies.
Just prior to coming to Berkeley, he was at the University of Washington at Seattle where he was the Boeing Professor of International Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies and an adjunct professor in Political Science. From 1972 to 1991, he was on the faculty at Cornell University; he was also Director of Cornell's East Asia Program.
He has also been a faculty member at the University of Colorado and the University of Wisconsin. Professor Pempel's research and teaching focus on comparative politics, political economy, contemporary Japan, and Asian regionalism.