Ethan J. Leib is a Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. He is the co-editor (with Baogang He) of The Search for Deliberative Democracy in China (Palgrave Macmillan 2006) and the author of Friend v. Friend: The Transformation of Friendship—and What the Law Has To Do with It (Oxford University Press 2011).
Emily Parker is a Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). The book describes the impact of the Internet and social media in China, Cuba, and Russia.
Previously, Parker was a member of Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. While at State, she advised on issues related to Internet freedom, digital diplomacy, and open government, and traveled to the Middle East to explore the role of new media in post-revolutionary Egypt.
Parker is a founder of a U.S.-China innovation project called Green Electronics: A US-China Maker Challenge. She is also a founder of Code4Country, the first open government codeathon between the United States and Russia. She is a former International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Arthur Ross Fellow at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, and Global Policy Fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, where she researched the role of blogging and social media in today’s Russia.
Parker spent over five years working on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, first as an editorial writer in Hong Kong and later as an op-ed editor in New York. From 2004 to 2005, she wrote a Wall Street Journal column called “Virtual Possibilities: China and the Internet.” She was also a staff op-ed editor for The New York Times. Her chapter on Chinese nationalism appeared in China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (Seven Stories Press, 2008). In 2002, she worked at the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) in Tokyo, where she researched how historical tensions between China and Japan would affect Sino-Japanese business relations.
Parker has worked in China and Japan and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish. She graduated with Honors from Brown University with a double major in International Relations and Comparative Literature (French and Spanish). She has a Masters from Harvard in East Asian Studies.
Emily Brill is a journalist and native New Yorker. She is studying Mandarin in Beijing, following two semesters in Seoul, where she was a Master’s student at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies. She has worked at MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Public Broadcasting’s Charlie Rose, and as a researcher for the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations. She holds a B.A. in History from Brown University.
Ely Ratner is the Maurice R. Greenberg senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His work focuses on U.S.-China relations, regional security in East Asia, and U.S. national security policy.
From 2015 to 2017, Ratner served as the deputy national security advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, covering the global portfolio with particular focus on Asia and China policy, the South China Sea, North Korea, and U.S. alliances in Asia. From 2011 to 2012, while a CFR international affairs fellow, he served in the office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs at the State Department covering China’s external relations in Asia. He also previously worked in the U.S. Senate on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and in the office of Senator Joe Biden. Outside of government, Ratner has worked as a senior fellow and deputy director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and as an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation.
Ratner has testified before Congress and published widely on U.S.-China relations and U.S. national security strategy in Asia. His commentary and research have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Chinese Journal of International Politics.
Ratner received his BA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and children.
Elizabeth Economy is the C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The author of The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future (Cornell University Press, 2004), Economy also co-edited China Joins the World: Progress and Prospects (with Michel Oksenberg, Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1999) and The Internationalization of Environmental Protection (with Miranda Schreurs, Cambridge University Press, 1997). She has published articles in foreign policy and scholarly journals, including Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Policy, and op-eds in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and International Herald Tribune. Economy is vice chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of China and serves on the board of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. She is a frequent guest on nationally broadcast television and radio programs, has testified before Congress on numerous occasions, and regularly consults for U.S. government agencies and companies. Economy is currently writing two books: one on China's rise and its geopolitical and strategic implications, and another, with Michael Levi, on China’s global quest for resources (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2013). Economy received her B.A. from Swarthmore College, her A.M. from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. In 2008, she received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Vermont Law School.
Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, and the forthcoming The Ghosts of Birds. His political articles are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is the current translator of the poetry of Bei Dao, the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, and the general editor of a series, Calligrams: Writings from and on China, co-published by Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and New York Review Books. He is also the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American literature are The Poems of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.
Elbridge Colby is the Robert M. Gates Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where he focuses on strategic, deterrence, nuclear weapons, conventional force, intelligence, and related issues. In 2012, he served as the deputy head for national security personnel on the Mitt Romney pre-transition effort and also worked on several of the campaign’s security policy teams. From 2010 to 2013, he was a principal analyst and division lead for global strategic affairs at CNA. Before that, he served for over five years in the U.S. Government, including as policy advisor to the Secretary of Defense’s Representative for the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, as an expert advisor to the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, as a staff member on the President’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding WMD, with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and with the State Department. Colby co-edited the volume “Strategic Stability: Contending Interpretations” (Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press, 2013), co-chaired a CSIS working group study on U.S.-China nuclear weapons issues entitled “Nuclear Weapons and U.S.-China Relations: A Way Forward” (Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2013), and has published book chapters in a number of edited collections. He also publishes regularly on defense and foreign policy issues in a variety of venues such as Politico, The National Interest, Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, and Orbis. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School.
Einar Engström is Managing Editor of LEAP magazine. Originally trained in Spanish and Portuguese languages and literatures, he moved to China in 2006 to study Mandarin. Before joining LEAP, he served as a freelance writer and translator for various arts organizations. When not working with words, he works with sound as an electronic music producer of various monikers. Engström is based in Beijing.
Koo is a Singaporean documentary photographer currently represented by Cosmos and based in Katmandu, Nepal since 2008. From 2005 to 2008 Koo was a staff photographer with The (Singapore) Straits Times.
Koo worked as a news photographer for five years before turnign to freelance. In 2012, he was awarded one of Singapore’s most prestigious photography accolades, the ICON de Martell Cordon Bleu, which recognizes an outstanding individual for his body of work. He was also a recipient of the Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography in 2010, and the UNICEF Photo of the Year in 2009, and 1st place in Atlanta Photojournalism Seminar’s awards for Feature Picture Stories category. His work was chosen from an international selection to be exhibited in the 2nd Lumix Festival for Young Photojournalism.
His exhibitions include: “Bahini: Life of My Sisters” (April 2010, Nepal, April 2009, Singapore) and “Real People, Real Needs” UNHCR World Refugee Day 2009 (Nepal).
Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance, and book-making.
She is participating in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and has exhibited at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); the Barbican, London (2023); Camera Austria, Graz (2024); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Datsuijo, Tokyo (2024); Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021). Her work is in the collections of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Harvard Art Museums, M+ Hong Kong, the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum of Singapore. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022-2023) and is completing a Ph.D. at King’s College London.
Sim is represented by Zilberman Gallery in Berlin and Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong.
