Scott Kennedy
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Political Science
University of Indiana, Bloomington
My interest in East Asia comes from two sources; the first is my interest in world affairs in general, and the second is my family’s experience in the region. My grandmother was stationed in Macau for the Christian Science Monitor in the early 1970s, and my uncle has lived in Japan for most of the past 40 years. Further prompted by my grandfather, an engineer who had traveled to Asia, I tried a Chinese language course my second year in college. But it was a semester in Beijing in 1988 – meeting average Chinese, riding on trains, and bicycling down Changan Avenue through Tiananmen Square – that sealed my fate as someone who wanted to make China a part of my career. Since then, my research interests have focused in on two areas, both of which cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. The first is political economy. My dissertation, which I am currently revising into a book, examined to what extent economic factors affect the ways in which companies lobby the government and if that in turn shapes which companies have the greatest influence over public policy. My favorite part of the project were the interviews, an exhilarating experience and an invaluable tool given the potential weaknesses of macro quantitative data in China. I am also quite interested in questions of foreign policy and US-East Asian relations. I recently edited a book, entitled China Cross Talk, on the American debate over China policy since normalization. My interest in US-East Asian relations derives partly from my time at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, DC, where I learned that it is important for scholars not only to carry on a dialogue with each other but also to speak to audiences beyond academia in the public policy arena, the business community, and the broader public.
Publications:
The Business of Lobbying in China (Harvard University Press, 2005); China Cross Talk: The American Debate Over China Policy Since Normalization, A Reader (2003); "China’s Emerging Credit Rating Industry: The Official Foundations of Private Authority," The China Quarterly (forthcoming June 2008); “Transnational Political Alliances: An Exploration with Evidence from China," Business & Society, Vol. 46, No. 1 (March 2007); "The Political Economy of Standards Coalitions: Explaining China’s Involvement in High-Tech Standards Wars," Asia Policy, No. 2 (July 2006); "China’s Porous Protectionism: The Changing Political Economy of Trade Policy," Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 120, No. 3 (Fall 2005); "The Price of Competition: Pricing Policies and the Struggle to Define China's Economic System," China Journal, No. 49 (January 2003).