February 2014

Yanzhong Huang is a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he examines issues of emerging powers, global health rule-making, health-related development assistance, and universal health coverage. He is also an Associate Professor and Director of Global Health Studies at the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, where he developed the first academic concentration among U.S. professional schools of international affairs that explicitly addresses the security and foreign policy aspects of health issues. He is the founding editor of Global Health Governance: The Scholarly Journal for the New Health Security Paradigm.

Huang has written extensively on global health governance, heath diplomacy and health security, and public health in China and East Asia. He has published numerous reports, journal articles, and book chapters, including articles in Survival, Foreign Affairs, Bioterrorism and Biosecurity, and the Journal of Contemporary China, as well as op-ed pieces in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Diplomat, and South China Morning Post, among others. In 2006, he coauthored the first scholarly article that systematically examines China’s soft power. His new book, Governing Health in Contemporary China (Routledge 2012), looks at health care reform, government ability to address disease outbreaks, and food and drug safety in China.

Huang is often consulted by major media outlets, the private sector, and governmental and non-governmental organizations on global health issues and China. He has also been frequently invited to speak at leading academic institutions and think tanks. In 2012, he was listed by InsideJersey as one of the “20 Brainiest People in New Jersey.” He was a Research Associate of the National Asia Research Program, a Public Intellectuals Fellow of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, an Associate Fellow of Asia Society, a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University. He obtained his B.A. and M.A. from Fudan University and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Joseph W. Esherick is a Professor Emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. He received a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersection of social and political history of modern China. His major publications include Reform and Revolution in China: the 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei (University of California Press, 1976), The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (University of California Press, 1988), and Ancestral Leaves: A Family Journey Through Chinese History (University of California Press, 2011). A volume on the fall of the Qing, China: How the Empire Fell, co-edited with George Wei, is forthcoming in 2014 from Routledge.

Jonathan D. Spence held the position of Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University, and is well-known throughout the world for his insightful views on modern China. His books include The Death of Woman Wang (Penguin, 1979), To Change China: Western Advisers in China (Revised edition, Penguin, 1980), Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man (Viking, 2007), and The Search for Modern China (Third edition, Norton, 2012). A graduate of the University of Cambridge and Yale University, Spence holds a number of honorary degrees, has served as president of the American Historical Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has held both a MacArthur and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received the Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George from Queen Elizabeth II.

Jonathan Landreth is a freelance reporter, writer, editor, and media strategist. He served as ChinaFile Managing Editor from its launch in Spring 2013 until Spring 2018. He previously reported from Beijing from 2004 to 2012, with a focus on the media and entertainment industries and their effect on the world’s perception of China. He was the founding Asia Editor of The Hollywood Reporter, in Beijing in 2005, and his subsequent freelance work from China appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The China Economic Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Forbes, Wallpaper, Marie Claire, The Times of London, and Travel+Leisure. Since 2012, he has had a hand in organizing the annual Asia Society U.S.-China Film Summit in Los Angeles. In 2015, he launched China Film Insider, a website devoted to covering the growing ties between China and Hollywood. In 2018, he helped the San Francisco Green Film Festival select a series of documentaries about China’s environmental challenges.

From 2002 to 2004, Landreth was with Reuters in Singapore, where he covered the global oil trade. From 2000 to 2002, he reported for Reuters in New York, covering the health and energy industries, and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath. Before Reuters, he was a Founding Editor at the New York- and Beijing-based website VirtualChina (1999-2000). Prior to his work as a reporter, Landreth edited non-fiction books at Henry Holt & Company in New York (1993-1998). He holds a B.A. in English Literature from the University of California, Berkeley (’92), and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (’99). He is the proud father of a daughter whose passport is impressively packed for a 14-year-old.