The U.S.-Asia Law Institute kicks off its 2024-2025 programs by taking a close look at a problem right here at home: racial profiling of Asian Americans, including at universities. During the Trump administration, the Department of Justice created the China Initiative, a program presented as safeguarding universities and businesses from economic espionage. In practice, it raised widespread concerns of racial profiling of Chinese American and immigrant academics and researchers, many of whom were accused of failing to disclose routine academic activities – but not of espionage or national security breaches. Although the program ended in 2022, there are ongoing efforts to revive it. The Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF), a new civil rights advocacy organization created in response to the China Initiative, reports that Asian American researchers and scholars continue to face bias and heightened scrutiny in their working and living environments. AASF Executive Director Gisela Perez Kusakawa will discuss the current challenges faced by Asian American researchers, scholars, and students from Asia, the chilling effect this has, and the need for legal scholars to help develop innovative solutions to the tensions between national security and American values.

China’s success in cultivating Big Tech firms has enabled it to emerge as a formidable rival to the United States in the digital sphere. But in the past few years, the Chinese government has embarked on a massive regulatory crackdown, targeting its largest tech corporations such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Meituan. Many Western experts have viewed this tech crackdown as an assault on private businesses, causing doubt among investors about whether Chinese firms are still investable. Professor Angela Zhang will go beyond the headlines to unravel the dynamic complexity of China’s regulatory governance. Drawing insights from her newly published book, High Wire: How China Regulates Big Tech and Governs Its Economy, she will introduce the dynamic pyramid model of regulation, an analytical framework that demystifies Chinese regulatory governance. She will examine the impact of the tech crackdown on the administrative state, the competitive landscape, and global tech rivalry. And she will peer into the future by examining China’s strategy for regulating generative artificial intelligence. 

Ensuring women’s property rights has long been seen as essential to ensuring their enjoyment of other human rights, from personal safety to economic development. The expert committee that interprets and seeks to enforce the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has over the years developed a unique body of jurisprudence interpreting the convention’s requirement that women enjoy property rights equal to those of men. What is surprising is that this jurisprudence – which encompasses the right to contract, administer property, access credit and government benefits, make use of agricultural land, access adequate housing, and more – has received very little attention from scholars. Law Professor José E. Alvarez, director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at NYU Law School, will explain what he calls CEDAW’s “progressive property jurisprudence.”

China’s escalating coercion campaign against Taiwan is causing seismic shifts in strategic thinking across the region, perhaps nowhere more than in Japan. Although most discussions about the status and future of Taiwan focus on the China-Taiwan-US triangle, Japan arguably has as much or more at stake than the US. Japan’s first and third-largest trading partners are China and Taiwan, respectively. If hostilities broke out between the two, it would be difficult for Japan to remain on the sidelines. Yuki Tatsumi, director of the Japan Program at the Stimson Center, will explain Japan’s perspective on Taiwan, how it hopes to maintain the status quo, and how rising tensions have pushed it to dramatically revise its national security posture.

The 2021 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games were initially seen as a testament to resilience as the world recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. But this image was sullied by subsequent allegations of widespread bribery and price-fixing involving a director of the Organizing Committee, major sponsors, and contractors. Professor Masayuki Tamaruya of the University of Tokyo will discuss why international sports financing so often produces corruption scandals, perennial challenges in both international and domestic sports governance, and Japan’s efforts to improve transparency and compliance in its own sports federations and university sports – with mixed results.  

An obscure reef in the South China Sea has become the latest flashpoint in China’s long-running campaign to dominate the South China Sea. Since last summer, the Chinese Coast Guard has repeatedly employed water cannons, lasers, and acoustic weapons and rammed Philippine Navy and Coast Guard vessels to prevent them from resupplying military personnel positioned at Second Thomas Shoal. Jay Batongbacal, a lawyer and professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law, will discuss how this tiny maritime feature became a potential conflict site, why a 2016 ruling by an international tribunal in the Philippines’ favor has not ended the dispute, and how international law can continue to be effective in the face of Chinese attacks.

As interest in AI surges around the world, and concerns about the risks and harms of AI technology are wide-ranging. Regulatory discussions are correspondingly complex, touching on values such as human rights, democracy, and sustainability. Professor Hiroki Habuka of the Kyoto University Graduate School of Law and Professor Daniel Francis of NYU School of Law will use the current Japanese approach to AI regulation as a framework to explore some of the big questions that AI presents to legislators, citizens, and regulatory theorists.

The U.S.-Asia Law Institute hosts Ma Ying-jeou (LLM ‘76) in conversation with USALI founder and Director Emeritus Jerry Cohen. He will talk about the complicated relationships among Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China and the United States.

China has rapidly emerged as a global leader in artificial intelligence, closely rivalling the United States. China is also at the forefront of regulating AI. It has proactively introduced some of the world’s earliest and most comprehensive rules concerning algorithms, deepfakes, and chatbots, among others. Angela Zhang, global professor of law at NYU School of Law, will take a dive deep into China’s regulatory landscape and provide a critical assessment of its AI governance strategies. She will also forecast the future direction of China’s AI regulation and explore its potential implications on the global community. Professor Benedict Kingsbury of NYU School of Law will moderate.

China’s dramatic economic growth over the past four decades has challenged conventional assumptions about the relationship between legal systems and economic development. While China has invested heavily in building its legal system, the role of formal law in governing Chinese markets is clearly different from its role in Western democracies. Tamar Groswald Ozery, who studies the intersection of Chinese law and political economy, will talk about the ways that law has been used in China since 2010 to reconfigure market governance to handle the consequences of prior decades of state capitalism. This reconfiguration is achieved through the mobilization of legal institutions in two directions: intensifying the presence of the regulatory state in the market, and shifting substantial market governance powers directly to the Communist Party. The talk is based on Ozery’s new book, Law & Political Economy in China: The Role of Law in Corporate Governance & Market Growth (Cambridge University Press). The book analyzes market development in China from 1978-2021, and concludes that law serves as an internal party-state instrument for allocating political-economic power.

The women’s movement in the Republic of Korea has been one of the most active and impactful in the region. South Korea joined CEDAW in 1984 and ratified its optional protocol in 2006. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family has led important reforms. But women activists are now facing a severe backlash, and the ministry itself is under attack. Korean feminist activist OH Kyung-jin will discuss the history and development of the women’s movement, the role played by CEDAW in its achievements, and the factors that have produced the current backlash against women’s rights activism.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is one of the most widely embraced international conventions, ratified by 189 states including states in East Asia. But what impact has it had on the actual lives of women in East Asia?

Over the last decade, a growing number of countries have adopted new laws and other mechanisms to address a gap in national criminal legal systems: the absence of meaningful procedures to raise post-conviction claims of factual innocence. These legal and policy reforms have responded to a global surge of exonerations facilitated by the growth of national innocence organizations that increasingly collaborate across borders. These developments have occurred with little direct help from international law. Although many treaties recognize extensive fair trial and appeal rights, no international human rights instrument—in its text, existing interpretation, or implementation—explicitly and fully recognizes the right to assert a claim of factual innocence. This omission is international law’s innocence gap. This panel will present its analysis of the gap and discuss ways to address it.