Tania Branigan is China Correspondent for The Guardian and has been based in Beijing since 2008, covering every major story from the Wenchuan earthquake to the downfall of Bo Xilai, the Olympics, and riots in Xinjiang. Along the way, she has interviewed novelists, yak herders, North Korean workers, dissidents, and a missile researcher turned matchmaker. She has worked for The Guardian since 2000, previously covering U.K. news and politics.
Taisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He has published one book on the comparative history of Chinese and English property institutions (The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England), and is writing another on the late imperial Chinese fiscal state. He has also written a large number of articles, essays, and book chapters, in both academic and media venues, on topics in legal theory and contemporary Chinese law and politics. Zhang is a Global Faculty member at Peking University Law School and holds a secondary appointment at Yale as Professor of History. Previously, he has taught at the Duke University School of Law, the University of Hong Kong, Brown University, and the Tsinghua University School of Law.
Ian Bremmer is the President and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm, which he established in 1998. As the firm’s most active public voice, Bremmer advises leading executives, money managers, diplomats, and heads of state. He is a prolific thought leader and author, regularly expressing his views on political issues in public speeches, television appearances, and top publications, including Time magazine, where he is the foreign affairs columnist and editor-at-large. Dubbed the “rising guru” in the field of political risk by The Economist, he teaches classes on the discipline as Global Research Professor at New York University. His latest book, Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World, was published in May 2015.
Bremmer is credited with bringing the craft of political risk to financial markets—he created Wall Street’s first global political risk index (GPRI)—and for establishing political risk as an academic discipline. His definition of emerging markets—“those countries where politics matter at least as much as economics for market outcomes”—has become an industry standard. ‘G-Zero,’ his term for a global power vacuum in which no country is willing and able to set the international agenda, is widely accepted by policymakers and thought leaders. Said Larry Summers, “Global political economy has no sharper or more prescient analyst than Ian Bremmer.”
Bremmer actively discusses the intersection between politics and markets in speeches and the media. He has published nine books including the national bestsellers Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World and The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? He is a regular columnist for the Financial Times A-List, and has written hundreds of articles for many leading publications. He appears regularly on CNBC, Fox, Bloomberg, CNN, the BBC, and other networks.
Bremmer earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 1994 and was the youngest-ever national fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2007, Bremmer was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, where he is the Founding Chairman of the Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk. He is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and serves on the President’s Council of the Near East Foundation, the Leadership Council for Concordia, and the Board of Trustees of Intelligence Squared.
Tai Ming Cheung is the director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and the leader of IGCC’s Minerva project "The Evolving Relationship Between Technology and National Security in China: Innovation, Defense Transformation, and China’s Place in the Global Technology Order.” He is a long-time analyst of Chinese and East Asian defense and national security affairs. Cheung was based in Asia from the mid-1980s to 2002 covering political, economic, and strategic developments in greater China. He was also a journalist and political and business risk consultant in northeast Asia.
Cheung received his Ph.D. from the War Studies Department at King's College, London University in 2007. His latest book, Fortifying China: The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy, was published by Cornell University Press in 2008. He is an associate adjunct professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at UC San Diego, where he teaches courses on Asian security, Chinese security and technology, and Chinese politics.
Suzanne DiMaggio is the Vice President of Global Policy Programs at Asia Society in New York. She oversees Asia Society’s task forces, working groups, and Track II initiatives aimed at promoting effective policy responses to the most critical challenges facing the United States and Asia. She is currently leading projects focused on U.S.-Iran relations, Burma/Myanmar, regional security in South Asia, and sustainability issues in Asia, including food and water security. Prior to joining Asia Society in 2007, she was the Vice President of Policy Programs at the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA), where she directed programs aimed at advancing multilateral approaches to global problem solving and encouraging constructive U.S. international engagement.
Susan L. Shirk is the chair of the 21st Century China Program and Research Professor of Political Science at the School of Global Policy & Strategy (GPS) at UC San Diego. She also is director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Currently she is an Arthur Ross Fellow at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.
From 1997 to 2000, Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mongolia.
Shirk’s most recent publications are her edited book, Changing Media, Changing China (Oxford, 2011) and China: Fragile Superpower (Oxford, 2007).
Susan Jakes is Editor-in-Chief of ChinaFile and a Senior Fellow at Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis.
From 2000-2007, she reported on China for Time magazine, first as a reporter and editor based in Hong Kong and then as the magazine’s Beijing Correspondent.
She covered a wide range of topics for Time’s international and domestic editions, including student nationalism, human rights, the environment, public health, education, architecture, kung fu, North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and the making of Bhutan’s first feature film. Jakes was awarded the Society of Publishers in Asia’s Young Journalist of the Year Award for her coverage of Chinese youth culture. In 2003, she broke the story of the Chinese government’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in Beijing, for which she received a Henry Luce Public Service Award. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications.
Jakes speaks Mandarin and holds a B.A. and M.A. from Yale in history. Her doctoral studies at Yale, which she suspended to join ChinaFile, focused on China’s environmental history and the global history of ecology.
Hu Yong is a professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communication, and a well-known new media critic and Chinese Internet pioneer.
Before joining the faculty of Peking University, Hu Yong has worked for a number of media sources for over 15 years, including China Daily, Lifeweek, China Internet Weekly and China Central Television. He is active in industry affairs as he is co-founder of the Digital Forum of China, a nonprofit organization that promotes public awareness of digitization and advocates a free and responsible Internet. He also co-founded Chinavalue.net, a leading business new media in China. In 2000, Hu Yong was nominated for China’s list of top Internet industry figures.
Hu Yong is a founding director for Communication Association of China (CAC) and China New Media Communication Association (CNMCA). His publications include Internet: The King Who Rules, the first book introducing the Internet to Chinese readers, and The Rising Cacophony: Personal Expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age, documenting major transformations in the Chinese cyberspace.
Hu Yong is an active blogger/microblogger. His blog boasts a readership of 3.5 million, and his microblog has 800,000 followers.
Howard W. French is an Associate Professor at the Columbia Journalism School, where he teaches journalism and photography. He was a freelance reporter for The Washington Post, and many other publications, in West Africa. He was then hired by The New York Times and worked as a metropolitan reporter for three years; from 1990 to 2008, he served as Bureau Chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China in Shanghai. From 2005 to 2008, alongside his work for The Times, French was a weekly columnist on global affairs for the International Herald Tribune. His work was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and he was twice the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award. He has also won the Grantham Environmental Award, among other honors.
His work has been published in The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Transition, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Crisis, and Travel and Leisure. He is also a documentary photographer and his work, "Disappearing Shanghai," has been displayed in Asia, Europe, and North America.
French is the author of China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), which was named one of the most notable books of the year by The New York Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and Foreign Affairs. He is also the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004) and Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life (Homa & Sekey Books, 2012).
French was a 2011 fellow of the Open Society Foundations and is presently completing a book for Knopf about how Chinese history shapes its attitudes toward geopolitical power. He received his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Maryland.
Born and raised in China (Shaanxi and Shenzhen), Sun Yunfan has lived in the U.S. for the past decade. She studied painting at the School of Visual Arts and received an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute. She has worked as a graphic designer, independent curator, and freelance writer for various Chinese arts and culture magazines. She also holds a Master’s Degree in Accounting from Utah State University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance from Shenzhen University. Early in her career, she worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Shenzhen and Deloitte & Touche in San Jose, CA and New York City. Sun worked for the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations from 2010 to 2014 and was the ChinaFile Culture Editor.
As an artist, Sun works in a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and artist books. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries in the U.S. and published in art and culture magazines in China. Recently, her artwork was included in Himalaya Song, a multimedia performance project featured at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and named one of the “10 Best Music Films at Sundance 2012” by Rolling Stone.
