In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Having worked with Indonesia’s higher education sector since 2000, I have come to believe that studying abroad is as close as one may come to a “sure thing” in Indonesian developmental assistance. Indonesian students and professors studying abroad are exposed to new educational techniques and knowledge, and will take that expertise home with them either (as graduates) to their new workplace or (as professors) to an educational system sorely in need of innovation. The likelihood that those individuals become leaders in their fields rises exponentially – and, as a result, they have the potential to bring great economic and intellectual benefit to Indonesia. In fact, almost 50 percent of the ministers in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s current cabinet spent some time studying overseas.

Above, students mingle after class at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. Indonesia's student population in higher education has witnessed an explosive 35 percent increase in just six years.

Indonesians who study overseas, most of whom do so in the United States, Australia, the UK, or the Netherlands, carry their experiences – the vast majority of them overwhelmingly positive – with them for the rest of their lives. It is reflected in their work and their conversations; it becomes a part of them and thus the environment they interact with. It is arguably the ideal of what we mean when we speak of long-term impact and sustainability. Absent such exposure, perceptions of the West are often left to be derived from some combination of anti-Western rhetoric, syndicated TV shows, and internet conspiracy theories.

Yet the number of Indonesian students studying in the United States has fallen to half of what it was 10 years ago. That number, and the number of visiting professors, should ideally be increasing dramatically every year, and developmental projects should be making sure that happens. But despite some recent efforts, such as an increase in funds for U.S.-Indonesian Fulbright exchanges, the majority of these developmental opportunities remain untapped.

Read more »

This week, representatives from renowned museums of Asian art from across Asia and the United States met from November 8-10 in a pioneering conference organized by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. The Asia Foundation’s Margaret F. Williams Memorial Fellows in Asian Art Program and the Brayton Wilbur Jr. Memorial Fellows in Asian Art Program sponsored their participation in the “San Francisco Asian Art Forum for Museum Directors” – part of an ongoing series of exchanges the Foundation administers in cooperation with the Museum. The Asian senior museum executives joined their American counterparts to share strategies for fostering greater global awareness of Asian art and cultures while exploring models for collaboration and partnerships among their institutions. According to Dr. Jay Xu, director of the Asian Art Museum, “The Forum is an opportunity for our museum to serve as a bridge of understanding for international museums and the diverse cultures of Asia.”

Left to right: Asian Art Museum Director Jay Xu, Asia Foundation President David Arnold, Ambassador Haydn Williams, and Judith Wilbur. Photo by Whitney Legge.

Inspiration for the Forum grew out of discussions between Dr. Xu and Ambassador Haydn Williams, president emeritus of The Asia Foundation, who recalled our historical engagement in convening for the first time, chief justices, university presidents, and others, respectively, from Asia and the United States. Our relationship with the Asian Art Museum is longstanding, dating back to the mid-1960s, when Avery Brundage first presented his extensive and stunning Asian art collection to San Francisco. During his tenure as Asia Foundation president, Ambassador Williams was a founding member of the Asian Art Commission, formed to help welcome this extraordinary gift to the city. This cooperation with the Museum continues; The Asia Foundation, along with the Henry Luce Foundation, provided core funding for the Directors Forum.

Read more »

Last week, In Asia‘s editor, Alma Freeman, sat down with leading Chinese economist, Cheng Siwei, in San Francisco at the start of a series of high-level presentations he delivered across the United States on China’s economic growth and challenges ahead. Mr. Cheng, former vice chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, is the recipient of the Foundation’s prestigious Chang-Lin Tien Distinguished Visiting Fellow Award and has played a key role in his country’s economic transformation over the last 20 years.

As one of China’s most noted economists, you’ve been on the forefront of the nation’s rapid economic transformation from a largely agrarian economy to an urban society with a highly skilled labor force in manufacturing, and increasingly in the high-tech industry. What do you think accounts for this transformation?

In the past, China mainly relied on investment and exports for economic growth. But this pattern is no longer sustainable. China must rely more on domestic consumption, and to do that, we must raise the purchasing power of the people – that’s the most important thing. Because labor costs are going up, we will also have to upgrade our industrial structure. As this happens, some labor-intensive industries will move from the coastal area to the west, and even from China to other Asian countries. It’s natural that as labor costs go up, along with our economic growth, we will have to raise people’s purchasing power by paying people higher salaries.

The purchasing power of China’s urban residents is four times more than the people in the countryside. What concerns do you have about the divide between China’s rural and urban citizens? What is being done to narrow this gap?

This is what we call a dual economic structure. The development of China’s urban and rural areas happened very differently. After the establishment of new China, this difference still exists. The income of an urban resident is three times higher than a rural resident, and the purchasing power is four times higher than the rural area. We need to fill this gap. To do this, we gave some tax exemptions and reductions for rural people.

Read more »

For many first- and second-generation people of Sri Lankan heritage, Sri Lanka casts a curious spell. It may be a result of being fed a steady diet of their parents’ nostalgia pie. Other children of recent immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe, Central America, and Africa might experience the same emotional tug, but if you’ve grown up in a Sri Lankan sub-culture, you can be excused for thinking that your situation is a little different.

From decades of civil war, Sri Lanka has lost significant economic ground and many of its most skilled and educated leaders. Photo by Karl Grobl.

The island’s exoticism has been romanticized by Western explorers, writers, and scholars for centuries, and this picture has been embraced and embellished by Sri Lankans themselves, particularly among the hundreds of thousands of diaspora sprinkled throughout the world.

Cultivating feelings of “exceptionalism” is partly an antidote to the country’s obscurity in their adopted countries, and resistance to conflating all of South Asia with India: “no, it’s that island off the tip of India” is something that easily trips off the tongue of overseas Sri Lankans.

This sense of nostalgia is likely to be familiar to anyone of Sri Lankan heritage with parents who migrated to America, England, Australia, or Canada in the 1960s and 1970s and who cling to recollections of an idyllic place they knew as Ceylon. During that time, there was no television to while away the evenings; conversation was the favorite past time. Friends and neighbors didn’t call ahead before meeting, they just dropped in. Limited social mobility generally kept people from getting above their station in life.

Read more »

The Asia Foundation awarded its prestigious Chang-Lin Tien Distinguished Visiting Fellow Award to leading Chinese economist Cheng Siwei, and has arranged a series of high-level exchanges across the United States on China’s economic growth and challenges ahead. As former vice chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Cheng has played a key role in his country’s economic transformation over the last 20 years. As the concurrent chair of the International Finance Forum, Beijing, and president of the Association of Management Modernization, China, Cheng is intimately acquainted with a range of domestic and global economic issues confronting China today.

On October 20, Cheng will speak at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club on challenges to rebalancing China’s economy. He continues to Silicon Valley to meet with William Perry, former secretary of defense, and Stanford University faculty and students. Cheng will also present at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, the World Affairs Council in Boston, Harvard University, and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., among others.

On October 25, he will join Arianna Huffington, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, economist Niall Ferguson, George W. Bush, former U.S. senate majority leader Tom Daschle, journalist Katie Couric, and others as a featured speaker at the 2011 Global Financial Leadership Conference in Naples, Florida.

The Chang-Lin Tien Distinguished Visiting Fellow Award is named for the late Dr. Chang-Lin Tien, renowned thermal scientist, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and chairman of The Asia Foundation Board of Trustees.

Stay tuned for an exclusive interview in next week’s In Asia with Mr. Cheng.

This is the first article in a special Young Leaders Series to In Asia written by rising leaders in Southeast Asia who participated in the 25th Asia-Pacific Roundtable program in Kuala Lumpur, co-sponsored by ISIS MALAYSIA, The Asia Foundation, and Pacific Forum CSIS. In their essays, the participants were each asked to answer the following question: In your view and from your country’s perspective, what role do you expect the U.S. to play in Southeast Asia?  

The United States currently plays many roles in the Asia-Pacific region, but from a Philippine perspective, three top the list:  U.S. involvement in regional security architecture and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea-West Philippine Sea (SCS-WPS); U.S. leadership in forging the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP-A); and the U.S. role in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Risk Reduction (HADR). As ministers convene for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in San Francisco this week, these issues are likely to emerge as top priorities during discussions.

With 40,298 kilometers of U.S. coastline that meets the Pacific Ocean, the security of the Asia-Pacific region is obviously a top U.S. national security concern. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on a recent visit to India, “much of the 21st century will be written in Asia.” In his testimonial to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific in March, Assistant Secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell furthered this statement when he declared “Essential to our long-term national interests is to make sure that the United States remains true to its identity as a Pacific power.”

Most agree that the United States remains the world’s largest and foremost military and naval power. Over the decades following World War II, this position has effectively deterred any would-be aggressors in the region, and has served as a successful counter-weight to China’s rapidly expanding military ambitions. It must be noted, however, that the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has exposed to the world the futility of decisive military action when unaccompanied by real and sustainable public participation, country ownership by the citizens, and a government that is inclusive of all sectors and levels of its society.

Read more »

Below is an article by David Huebner, U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, after his recent trip to Canterbury with the 2010-2011 Luce Scholars, originally published on his blog.

Before leaving for Washington last month I spent a couple of days in Canterbury with a very special group of folks – the 2010-2011 Luce Scholars. I myself was a Luce Scholar back in the stone age (1984-1985), before the current class of Scholars was born, and I thoroughly enjoyed reconnecting with an important part of my early personal and professional development.

The Luce Scholars Program promotes and broadens an awareness of Asia among young future leaders. Launched by the Henry Luce Foundation in 1974, it targets Americans under the age of 29 across a variety of professional fields including medicine, science, public health, journalism, law, the arts, and policy studies. The participants are chosen through a rigorous multi-step process that emphasizes leadership potential and adaptability.

Above, David Huebner with Luce Scholars on a recent trip to New Zealand. Photo by Ted Alcorn.

One of the unique elements – and great strengths – of the Program is that it is targeted at young leaders who have had little or no experience of Asia, and who otherwise might not have an opportunity in the course of their careers to come to know Asia. Thus, it attracts a dynamic, eclectic group of people-in-progress rather than a homogenous group of already-Asia-focused careerists.

The other defining feature and great strength of the Program is that it is oriented around individualized, year-long professional placements in Asia, rather than academic study or general travel. Using its extraordinary network of relationships, The Asia Foundation finds a job for each Scholar based on the person’s individual career interests and experience.

Read more »

As we pulled up to a nondescript office building in Charlottesville, Virginia, a woman on her cell phone waved cheerily to us, confirming we had finally arrived at the right place after a two-hour drive from Washington, D.C., and adventures with wavering GPS signals. I waved back, relieved, and hopped out of the passenger seat of our van to escort H.E. Minister Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s minister of education, up the steps to meet Ms. Gertrude Ivory, associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction in the Charlottesville school system.

Dr. Rosa Atkins (left), superintendent of the Charlottesville City School System, (behind, Mr. Ihsan Taheri, Assistant to the Minister), Minister Wardak, and Ms. Susan Wardak (right), director of teacher education department, Afghan Ministry of Education, walk along a corridor at Greenbrier Elementary. Photo by Abduljalil Ghafoory, Embassy of Afghanistan, Washington, D.C.

As the minister and his delegation of education advisors exchanged greetings with Ms. Ivory, I wondered nervously whether these people from totally different places would find enough to talk about on this warm June morning in rural Virginia. We walked through the door, no sign out front, nothing to indicate the warm hospitality and enthusiastic discussion we were about to experience. Then just inside, there stood the superintendent of Charlottesville City Schools, Dr. Rosa Atkins, with her entire School Board and most of its senior administrators, all on hand to welcome Minister Wardak and his advisors to their school system. We were soon to discover that these educators had a great deal in common, despite their very different working environments.

The Charlottesville City School system had 4,030 students enrolled for the 2010-2011 school year, with average class sizes between 17 and 20 students. In Afghanistan, according to Ministry of Education figures, the average class size in 2010 was 43 students, and only 37 percent of school-age girls were enrolled. In the Charlottesville teacher workforce, 60 percent of the teaching staff holds an advanced degree, while only 27 percent of Afghan teachers have completed high school and received teacher training. Approximately 77 percent of the graduates from Charlottesville High School go on to attend college, while in Afghanistan the national literacy rate remains 12 percent among females and 39 percent among males.

Read more »

Few Americans will ever get the opportunity to meet an Afghan governor, an advisor to President Hamid Karzai, or an Afghan parliamentarian, much less discuss in person the critical issues that underlie efforts toward future peace and security in Afghanistan. Last week, The Asia Foundation, in collaboration with the Hayward-Ghazni Sister City Committee (HGSCC) and the U.S. Embassy/Kabul, facilitated the exchange of a distinguished delegation of 11 Afghans from Ghazni Province to Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Bay Area to highlight the relationship among Afghanistan, the U.S., and the Bay Area, home to largest Afghan population in the U.S.

While in the U.S., the delegation discussed ambitious plans for Ghazni's role as a national cultural heritage center.

While in the U.S., the delegation discussed ambitious plans for Ghazni’s role as a national cultural heritage center. Situated in eastern Afghanistan, along the strategic route that links Kabul and Khandahar, Ghazni plays a key role in the historical, economic, agricultural, and political realms of contemporary Afghanistan, and in 2007 was named the “Capital of Islamic Culture” for 2013 by the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

As the delegation met with U.S. government officials, non-profits, city leaders, and universities, they discussed Afghanistan’s poverty, obstacles to effective governance, Afghan perceptions of the U.S., and how education and employment are critical to overall security and sustainable economic development.

For further information regarding their trip, listen to a panel discussion from the June 6 Commonwealth Club of California event with three of the delegation members: Mr. Mohammad Musa Khan Ahmadzai, governor of Ghazni; Mr. Mohammad Yousaf Pashtun, senior advisor to President Karzai on Urban Development and National Construction; and Ms. Shah Gul Rezaie, member of parliament. During this discussion, the panelists stressed the importance of peace and security, employment, and transparent governance as foundational pillars on which Afghanistan’s future should be built, and the role that Ghazni can play in efforts to promote cultural heritage and the overall prosperity of Afghanistan.

Elizabeth Grant, who previously worked in The Asia Foundation’s Kabul office, is currently Senior Program Officer for Afghanistan  in San Francisco, and can be reached at egrant@asiafound.org.  She accompanied the Afghan delegation during their visit to the Bay area last week.

Seasoned observers of Sino-U.S. relations are describing President Hu Jintao’s state visit this week as the most important bilateral event since Deng Xiaoping headed to Washington in 1979 or even since Nixon’s historic trip to China in 1972. That may be an exaggeration, but Hu and President Obama are meeting at a critical moment amid growing uncertainty and divisiveness in the relationship. Over the past year, the two countries have not only sparred over such longstanding issues as U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, human rights, and currency reform, but also over new problems such as South China Sea navigation rights, exports of rare earth minerals, and North Korean attacks on South Korea. These circumstances have injected a new “realism” into the bilateral relationship, coupled with calls for the two leaders to redefine relations in a manner that acknowledges disagreements while identifying realistic areas of cooperation going forward.

China's President Hu Jintao meets with President Obama in Washington. Photo: TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

On the eve of his visit to Washington, President Hu declared the two countries should find “common ground” on issues from fighting terrorism and nuclear proliferation to cooperating on clean energy. “There is no denying that there are some differences and sensitive issues between us,” he replied to written questions from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Read more »