February 2014

Jiang Qisheng is a writer and political activist. In 1968, the Chinese government sent him to the countryside for re-education. He received a Master’s degree in aerodynamics from the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and then held a teaching post at Tsinghua University from 1985 to 1988. In 1988, he started studying for his Ph.D. at Renmin University in Beijing and became involved in the 1989 Tiananmen student movement as a member of a delegation that met with national leaders in an attempt to resolve the protests peacefully. He was jailed for eighteen months in 1989-1991 because of his activities in the protests. After his release, he was denied regular employment and became a translator and freelance writer, publishing numerous articles in American, Japanese, and Hong Kong journals.

In April 1999, Jiang wrote an open letter entitled “Light a Myriad Candles to Collectively Commemorate the Brave Spirits of June Fourth.” Following the publication of this letter, he was arrested and held at the Beijing Detention Center for nearly two years. In 2000 he was convicted of “incitement to subvert state power,” for which he served two more years in prison.

Jiang was one of the drafters of “Charter 08” and has been subjected to continued harassment by the authorities ever since. His book My Life in Prison: Memoirs of a Chinese Political Dissident (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012) was originally published in Chinese in Hong Kong in 2005. He is also the author of A Life of Truth (Chinese, Hong Kong Laogai Research Foundation, 2009).

Wei Peh T’i (often published under the name Betty Peh-Ti Wei) received an AB from Bryn Mawr College, an MA from New York University, and a PhD from the University of Hong Kong. She is an Honorary Institute Fellow for the Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and an Honorary Professor in the Institute of Qing Studies at Renmin University in Beijing. Wei is a Founding Member of the Bryn Mawr College International Council. She served on the Board of Governors of the Chinese International School in Hong Kong and the Board of Governors of the Y.K. Pao School in Shanghai.

Wei's full-length books include East Asia History 1870-1952 (Oxford University Press, 1981); Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Ruan Yuan, 1764-1849: The Life and Work of a Major Scholar-Official in Nineteenth-Century China before the Opium War (Hong Kong University Press, 2008).

Jerome A. Cohen, a professor at New York University School of Law since 1990 and Faculty Director of its U.S.-Asia Law Institute, is a leading American expert on Chinese law and government. A pioneer in the field, Cohen began studying China’s legal system in the early 1960s and from 1964 to 1979 introduced the teaching of Asian law into the curriculum of Harvard Law School, where he served as Jeremiah Smith Professor, Associate Dean, and Director of East Asian Legal Studies. In addition to his responsibilities at NYU, Professor Cohen served for several years as C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he currently is an Adjunct Senior Fellow. He retired from the partnership of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP at the end of 2000 after twenty years of law practice focused on China. In his law practice, Professor Cohen represented many companies and individuals in contract negotiations as well as in dispute resolution in China. He continues to serve as an arbitrator and expert witness in disputes relating to China and to Chinese in the United States.

Professor Cohen has published several books on Chinese law, including The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-63 (Harvard University Press, 1968), People’s China and International Law (Princeton University Press, 1974) and Contract Laws of the People’s Republic of China (Longman Group, 1988). In addition, he has published hundreds of scholarly articles on various topics as well as a book, China Today and Her Ancient Treasures (Henry N. Abrams, 1975), co-authored with his wife, Joan Lebold Cohen, and a regular series of journalistic opinion pieces for various newspapers. In 1990, he published Investment Law and Practice in Vietnam. He continues his research and writing on Asian law, specifically focusing on legal institutions, criminal justice reform, dispute resolution, human rights, and the role of international law.

Outside academia, Professor Cohen has served in government, first as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. from 1958 to 1959 and then as a full-time consultant to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1959. He has also testified at many congressional hearings on China.

Professor Cohen is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale College (B.A. 1951). He spent the academic year 1951-1952 as a Fulbright Scholar in France and graduated, in 1955, from Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. He was Law Secretary to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court in the 1955 Term and Law Secretary to Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court in the 1956 Term.

Wang Lixiong is a Chinese writer and scholar. His political prophecy novel Yellow Peril, published in Chinese in 1991, was ranked forty-first in Yazhou Zhoukan’s “100 Most Influential Chinese Novels of the Twentieth Century.”

Since the 1990s, his writing has often centered around the politics of ethnicity in China. Wang is the author of China Tidal Wave (translated from the original Chinese to English by Anton Platero, BRILL/Global Oriental, 2008), and The Struggle for Tibet, co-authored with Tsering Shakya (Verso, 2009), as well as many other books in Chinese.

Wang was a member of the Chinese Writers Association until his resignation in 2001 in protest of the group’s restrictions on free expression by its members. In 2009, he received the Dalai Lama’s Light of Truth Award. He resides in Beijing.