A History Working Group seminar with Kyle Harper.

STANFORD—A symposium to facilitate technology, manufacturing, and trade exchange between US and Polish entities took place in Hoover Institution’s Stauffer Auditorium on December 6 and 7. Participants included Polish leaders of industry and academia as well as government officials who were joined by Silicon Valley executives interested in exploring market opportunities and establishing business relationships with Poland.

On Thursday, May 3, 2012, David Brady, deputy director and Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, hosted a conference titled “Global Hotspots: Briefings from Insiders” featuring special guests from different countries. To begin, Oliver “Buck” Revell from the FBI gave remarks titled “The Most Significant Threats to the American People.” His Excellency M. K. Narayanan, past head of India Security, discussed “India’s Worries, Capabilities, Military and Intelligence Cooperation with the United States.” Joseph Felter, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and former national security affairs fellow (2008–9), gave a talk during the luncheon.

The conduct of the Chinese government during the recent EP-3 crisis raised important questions about the state of civil-military relations in China. Observers at the time were divided as to whether the comments of senior military leaders and editorials in military newspapers were different in content than their civilian counterparts. They were also divided over whether these differences reflected only variations in propaganda or actual institutional divergence. In addition, most analysts seemed convinced that the military monopolized critical information flows to the leadership, especially data about the causes of the collision and the lack of mayday calls by the EP-3, thus tying the hands of Foreign Ministry negotiators and perhaps even unnecessarily drawing out the crisis. Using interviews, some secondary sources, and detailed content analysis of civilian and military media during the crisis, this essay explores these themes.

The recent loss of Ming-class submarine Number 361 with all hands aboard and the role of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) medical system in the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) cover-up threaten to further strain a Chinese party-army dynamic that was already undermined by the incomplete leadership transition of the 16th Party Congress. Yet, the evidence also suggests that Hu Jintao, despite the potential opening offered by the governance crisis over SARS, appears unwilling or unable to directly challenge Jiang Zemin's leadership at this point in time, portending more months of jockeying and ambiguity in the political arena and an unclear chain of command in the military realm.

More than three years have passed since the December 1998 announcement that the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) had formally divested itself from commercial operations. The intervening period has witnessed the expected "mop-up" campaigns on the part of the central leadership and significant resistance and foot-dragging on the part of local military officials, repeating the pattern of rectifications in the system since the late 1980s. Given Hu Jintao's role as official head of the central leading group overseeing divestiture and his widely expected ascension to the central leadership core at the Sixteenth Party Congress, the time seems ripe for a re-examination of the civil-military features of divestiture and their implications for the future party-army relationship.

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, the Quantedge Presidential Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, discussed “The Voice of Monetary Policy,” a paper with Tho Pham (University of Reading) and Oleksandr Talavera (University of Birmingham). John Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, was the moderator.

In an era of cynicism, Ronald Reagan can still teach us much. By Hoover fellow James C. Miller III.

At the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival this past July, Salam Fayyad, acting prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, spoke enthusiastically about the rule of law in a future Palestine...