Michael Yamashita

on February 10, 2014

Photographer Michael Yamashita has been shooting for the National Geographic magazine for more than thirty years, combining his dual passions of photography and travel.  After graduating from Wesleyan University with a degree in Asian studies, he spent seven years in Asia, which has become his photographic area of specialty. Upon returning to the U.S., Yamashita began shooting for the National Geographic as well as other American and international magazines and clients.

His work has taken him to six continents, and as a third-generation Japanese-American, he is fluent in Japanese, and has covered the length of Japan, from Hokkaido to Kyushu.  Yamashita’s particular specialty is in retracing the paths of famous travelers, resulting in stories on Marco Polo, the Japanese poet Basho, and the Chinese explorer Zheng He. 

His feature documentary, The Ghost Fleet, inspired by his National Geographic story about the 15th-century Admiral, won the Best Historical Documentary prize at the New York International Independent Film Festival and his National Geographic Channel documentary, Marco Polo: The China Mystery Revealed, based on his three-part magazine story, received two Asian Television and Film Awards.  It was also included in the top twenty most popular NG Channel documentaries of the decade.

Yamashita has received numerous industry awards, including those from the Pictures of the Year, Photo District News, the New York Art Directors Club, and the Asian-American Journalists Association.  Major exhibits of his work have opened throughout Asia, in Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Taipei and Singapore, as well as in Rome, Venice, Frankfurt, and Perpignan, France.  His work has been exhibited at galleries in Los Angeles and at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.

Yamashita has published nine books (most inspired by his 30 National Geographic stories): The Great Wall From Beginning to End; New York: Flying High, an aerial portrait of Manhattan; Zheng He: Tracing the Epic Voyages of China’s Greatest Explorer; Japan: The Soul of a Nation; Marco Polo, A Photographer’s Journey; Mekong: A Journey on the Mother of Waters; In the Japanese Garden; A Pictorial Tribute to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy; Lakes, Peaks and Prairies: Discovering the U.S. Canadian Border.

While not traveling, Michael Yamashita lives with his family in rural New Jersey, where he maintains a studio and is an active volunteer fireman.

Michael Zhao

on February 10, 2014

Michael Zhao is a multimedia producer who focuses on environmental issues in China. From 2003 to 2005, he was a News Assistant in the Beijing Bureau of The New York Times, where he worked with Pulitzer Prize winners Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley. While reporting with Yardley on the shrinking Crescent Lake in Dunhuang, Gansu province, a tourist spot along the ancient Silk Road in Northwestern China, Zhao took a picture with his point-and-shoot camera that ended up being used on the front page of the Times despite his lack of professional training in photography at that time.

Zhao later attended the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he studied multimedia journalism and switched focus from print to new media. He finished a thesis project in multimedia about electronic waste from developed countries being dumped in China. This project was advised by Orville Schell, who was then Dean of the School of Journalism. Zhao now works for Schell in the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. With the Center, Zhao has launched China Green, a site focusing on China’s environmental issues. He has also recently launched China Air Daily, an interactive website on air pollution.

Michel Hockx

on February 10, 2014

Michel Hockx is Professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, the Director of the SOAS China Institute, and the President of the British Association for Chinese Studies. His forthcoming book, due to be published by Columbia University Press in 2014, is called Internet Literature in China.

Minxin Pei

on February 10, 2014

Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. Pei was previously a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as the director of its China Program from 2004 to 2008. He was an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University from 1992 to 1998. His research focuses on democratization in developing countries, economic reform and governance in China, and U.S.-China relations.

Pei is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994) and China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard University Press, 2006). His research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, and many edited books. Pei's op-eds have appeared in the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek International, The Wall Street Journal, and The International Herald Tribune. He is a columnist for The Indian Express and L’espresso and is a regular contributor to The Diplomat.

Pei received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University.

May 2012

Nathan Gardels

on February 10, 2014

Nathan Gardels has been editor of New Perspectives Quarterly since it began publishing in 1985. He has served as editor of Global Viewpoint and Nobel Laureates Plus (services of Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media) since 1989.

Since January 2014, Gardels is Editor-in-Chief of THEWORLDPOST. He is a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute and the Think Long Committee for California.

Gardels has written widely for The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, U.S. News & World Report, and the New York Review of Books. He has also written for foreign publications, including Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Le Figaro, the Straits Times (Singapore), Yomiuri Shimbun, O’Estado de Sao Paulo, The Guardian, Die Welt, and many others. His books include At Century’s End: Great Minds Reflect on Our Times (ALTI Pub., 1995) and The Changing Global Order (Blackwell, 1997). He is coauthor with Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy of American Idol After Iraq: Competing for Hearts and Minds in the Global Media Age (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

Since 1986, Gardels has been a Media Fellow of the World Economic Forum (Davos). He has lectured at the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) in Rabat, Morocco and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, China. Gardels was a founding member at the New Delhi meeting of Intellectuels du Monde and a visiting researcher at the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow before the end of the Cold War. He has been a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as well as the Pacific Council, for many years.

From 1983 to 1985, Gardels was executive director of the Institute for National Strategy where he conducted policy research at the USA-Canada Institute in Moscow, the People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, the Swedish Institute in Stockholm, and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Bonn. Prior to this, he spent four years as key adviser to the Governor of California on economic affairs, with an emphasis on public investment, trade issues, the Pacific Basin, and Mexico. Gardels holds degrees in Theory and Comparative Politics and in Architecture and Urban Planning from UCLA.

Nicholas Bequelin

on February 10, 2014

Nicholas Bequelin is East Asia Director at Amnesty International, based in Hong Kong. A former Visiting Scholar at The China Center, Yale Law School, and previously at Human Rights Watch, he obtained his Ph.D. in History from the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris, in 2001, and is a graduate in Chinese from the School of Oriental Languages and Civilizations. He is a regular interviewee of major international media on legal, political, and human rights developments in China. Bequelin’s publications have appeared in The China Journal, The China Quarterly, and The Journal of Asian Studies, as well as various newspaper and magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, and Foreign Policy.

Nicholas D. Kristof

on February 10, 2014

Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and former Beijing correspondent for the paper. Kristof grew up on a sheep and cherry farm near Yamhill, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and then studied law at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, graduating with first class honors. He later studied Arabic in Cairo and Chinese in Taipei. Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to more than 140 countries, plus all fifty states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island. After joining The New York Times in 1984, initially covering economics, he served as a Times correspondent in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Tokyo. He also covered presidential politics and is the author of the chapter on President George W. Bush in the reference book The Presidents. He later was Associate Managing Editor of the Times.

In 1990, Mr. Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, then also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement. Mr. Kristof won a second Pulitzer in 2006. He has also won other prizes, including the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly award, the Online News Association award and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award. Mr. Kristof and Ms. WuDunn are authors of China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia, and Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

Paula S. Harrell

on February 10, 2014

Paula S. Harrell (Ph.D., Columbia University) is a China-Japan historian specializing in nineteenth and twentieth century history and contemporary economic development. In addition to research and university teaching (modern China and modern Japan), she worked for a decade as a management specialist in the World Bank’s China Department on projects in education and agriculture. In 2008, Harrell joined the adjunct faculty at Georgetown University where she offers courses on twenty-first century China in historical perspective, including, currently, a new course called “China and the Internet: Challenging America in Cyberspace.” Her most recent publication is Asia for the Asians: China in the Lives of Five Meiji Japanese (MerwinAsia/Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University, 2012), a companion volume to her earlier study, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895-1905 (Stanford University Press, 1992).

Peony Lui

on February 10, 2014

Peony Lui is an undergraduate at the University of Washington, Seattle, majoring in International Studies and Political Economy. She is an intern with the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. Her experience includes working as a research assistant at the Jackson School of International Studies, as well as interning at the Seattle Chinese Times, for which she wrote an editorial review of poetry. Lui is passionate about fostering international understanding and aspires to work in the field of public policy or journalism.