The University of Pittsburgh's Asian Studies Center will host Dr. John Yasuda of Indiana University and his talk "On Feeding the Masses: The Politics of Regulatory Failure in China" on November 7 as part of the center's Talking About Asia series.
Professor Yasuda explores why China's food safety system is failing despite concerted state efforts to reform its regulatory framework. His research seeks to gain analytical leverage from the often cited but understudied notion that China's scale lies at the core of its governance challenges. In large, heterogeneous polities like China where millions of actors are operating at varying scales or "degrees of zoom" in diverse economic and geographical settings, scale politics are particularly fierce due to evolving social constructs, non-linear dimensions, and scale externalities.The talk begins at 12:00 pm in 4217 Posvar Hall (map) and is free and open to the public.
