February 2014

John Gittings is a reporter on Chinese and international affairs. He is currently a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He is the associate editor of the Oxford International Encyclopaedia of Peace.

Gittings was based in Hong Kong and Shanghai from 1998 to 2003 as the East Asia Editor for The Guardian. Prior to this position, he worked for The Guardian at the foreign desk and as a foreign leader writer.

Gittings has also taught in Universities in the UK and abroad. He was a senior lecturer in Chinese politics at Polytechnic of Central London from 1976 to 1983 and taught at the London School of Economics’ Centre for International Studies from 1969 to 1971, as well as at the University of Chile’s Institute of International Studies from 1966 to 1967. From 1963 to 1966, he was a research assistant at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Gittings has authored numerous books and book chapters and was Acting Editor of The China Quarterly from 1971 to 1972.

Gittings received an MA in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, Corpus Christi College. He also completed a Civil Service diploma in Chinese language from the School of Oriental and African Studies.

John K. Fairbank (1907-1991) was a highly influential scholar of Chinese history. He is largely credited with founding the field of Chinese Studies in the United States. After graduating from Harvard University, Fairbank traveled to Beijing in 1932 as a Rhodes Scholar to do research on the newly opened Qing Imperial archives. In 1936, he returned from Beijing to Harvard where he was appointed as a History instructor. At Harvard, he started to set up a Chinese studies department. During the Second World War, Fairbank worked as an OSS officer in the Guomingdang capital of Chongqing. After the war, he returned to Harvard as a professor of History. In 1955, he founded Harvard's East Asian Research Center, renamed the Fairbank Center after his retirement in 1977. Fairbank continued to write and participate in scholarly activities up until his death.

John Delury is a Senior Fellow of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations and Professor of Chinese Studies at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) in Seoul, Korea. He also serves as chair of the undergraduate Program in International Studies at Yonsei’s Underwood International College (UIC) and as Founding Director of the Yonsei Centre on Oceania Studies. He is the author of Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China (Cornell University Press, 2022) and co-author with Orville Schell of Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century (Random House, 2013). Based in Seoul since 2010, his articles can be found in journals such as Asian Survey, Late Imperial China, and Journal of Asian Studies. His commentaries appear in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and 38 North, and he contributes book reviews for the quarterly journal Global Asia, where he is Associate Managing Editor.

Delury is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a Pacific Century Institute board member, and a National Committee on American Foreign Policy leadership council member. He is a member of the Republic of Ireland’s foreign affairs advisory network and is invited to offer his analysis on East Asian affairs with government, think tank, corporate, and civil society organizations globally. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in History from Yale University.

Wu Guoguang is a Professor of Political Science and History and Chair in China and Pacific Relations at University of Victoria, Canada. Wu grew up in Shandong, where he was a xiaxiang qingnian (a sent-down youth) and then a factory worker until admitted into Peking University when university admission examinations were restored after the Cultural Revolution. Before attending the Nieman Program at Harvard in 1989, he was an editorialist of the People’s Daily in Beijing. He also joined the preparation for the CCP’s 13th National Congress as a member of the central policy group on political reform and of the drafting group of Zhao Ziyang’s political report. He then earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Princeton University, took research positions at the East Asian Institute of Columbia University and at the Fairbank Center of Harvard, and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before moving to Canada in 2004. His research interests focus on China, currently including political institutions, political change, political economy, globalization, elite politics, politics of mass media, China and the world, and human security.

Wu is the author or editor of more than twenty books. His research articles have appeared in Asian Survey, China Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, Pacific Review, Social Research, and Third World Quarterly, among other publications.