The Hoover Institution hosted its fiftieth retreat, beginning on Sunday, October 21, 2012, and ending on Tuesday, October 23, 2012. On Sunday, the Honorable Bob McDonnell, governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia since January 2010 who also currently chairs the Republican Governors’ Association, the Southern Growth Policies Board, and the Southern Regional Education Board, gave the before-dinner remarks. His topics included job creation, economic development, our current debt crisis, and deficit spending. He also touched on two competing visions in the world; the first, which he calls an “entitlement society” with more guarantees, more taxes, more spending, and more regulation as a way to promote success; the second, an “opportunity society” which individuals can work hard, dream big, and use all their talents to be successful with limited government interference.

David Scharia is an Israeli national security lawyer with experience prosecuting Israeli terrorism cases before the Israeli courts, including service on the Attorney General of Israel’s legal staff.

In the final episode of the series for 2020, Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, and John Cochrane reflect on lessons learned from the pandemic, Donald Trump’s future, the ruinous state of the Golden State, how society will differ in 2021, plus what gets them through their daily routines—a mixtape of UK punk, Philly-brand funk, and the soothing sounds of “Sweet Baby James” Taylor.

The Hoover Institution’s annual postdoctoral W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellows have been named for the 2008–9 academic year.

Corruption among Chinese officers and enlisted personnel continues to be a point of tension between civilian and military elites in China. While the level of corruption reached its apex during the late 1980s and early 1990s, affectionately known as the "go-go" years of PLA, Inc., the repercussions of the center's decision in 1998 to divest the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of its commercial operations are still being felt in the system. For the first time, investigators and prosecutors from outside the military apparatus were given the authority to probe and pursue PLA malfeasance, and many in the military felt that the civilians pursued their assignment with far too much vigor and tenacity. This animosity was further exacerbated by reports of PLA complicity in the massive Yuanhua scandal in Xiamen and by the public prosecution of former General Staff Department intelligence chief General Ji Shengde on multiple counts of corruption. This paper analyzes PLA corruption since Tiananmen, with special emphasis on the civil-military aspects of the issue. The first section outlines the course and character of PLA corruption since 1990, as well as efforts by the military and civilian leadership to stamp it out. Particular attention is paid to the divestiture process in 1998, as well as the Yuanhua and Ji Shengde investigations. The article then concludes with an evaluation of the implications of these trends for Chinese civil-military relations and offers predictions for the future.

U.S. secretaries of state George P. Shultz and Condoleezza Rice and Stanford University president John Hennessy were among the featured speakers at a conference at the Hoover Institution on the “How and Why of Promoting Entrepreneurship Abroad.”

The Hoover Institution hosted its annual Board of Overseers’ summer meeting during July 9–11, 2013.

The fifth annual Hoover Institution Workshop on Modern China, entitled “Crossing the 1949 Divide: The Hoover Archives and Contemporary Chinese History,” was held during July 31 and August 4, 2017. Co-organized and cosponsored with the Seminar of East Asian Studies, Free University of Berlin, this year the workshop featured seven speakers from the United States, Germany, Austria, and Taiwan who explored Hoover’s unique modern China collections and evaluated how these historical treasures help reshape our understanding of contemporary China and post-1949 Taiwan. Workshop attendees presented their research to over three hundred audience from the Hoover/Stanford community as well as to researchers and mass media in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Was it a revolution? No. More like a baby-boomer coming-out party— with a rough morning after. By Niall Ferguson.