Sidney Rittenberg

on February 7, 2014

Sidney Rittenberg was founder and president of the China consulting team Rittenberg Associates, Inc. He lived and worked in China for 35 years after World War II, when he joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in China following his U.S. Army training in Chinese Language and Area Studies. During the Mao Zedong era, Rittenberg was held in solitary confinement for 16 years on suspicion of being an American spy.

Rittenberg was Frey Distinguished Professor of Chinese History at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and was Visiting Professor of China Studies at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Washington. He was a frequent keynote speaker at business seminars and the subject of numerous TV and media interviews, in both the U.S. and China. Rittenberg was co-author, with Pulitzer Prize winner Amanda Bennett, of The Man Who Stayed Behind (2001). He studied at the University of North Carolina and the U.S. Army Language School, Stanford University.

Shen Wei

on February 7, 2014

Born and raised in Shanghai, Shen Wei is an artist based in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, with venues including the Museum of the City of New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg (Florida); and the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai. His work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, Aperture, ARTnews, GQ China, American Photo, and Chinese Photography. Shen Wei’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Library of Congress, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Chinese in America, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others.

Shen Wei is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Arts Residency, the Asian Cultural Council Arts & Religion Fellowship, and the Urban Artist Initiative NYC Fellowship. He holds an M.F.A. in photography, video, and related media from the School of Visual Arts, New York; and a B.F.A. in photography from Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Shelly Kraicer

on February 7, 2014

A long-time Beijing resident, Shelly Kraicer is a writer, critic, and film curator, who recently returned to his native Toronto. Educated at Yale University, he has written film criticism in Cinema Scope, Positions, Cineaste, the Village Voice, and Screen International. Since 2007, he has been a programmer of East Asian films for the Vancouver International Film Festival, and has consulted for the Venice, Udine, Dubai, and Rotterdam International Film Festivals.

Edward Wong

on February 7, 2014

Edward Wong is Beijing Bureau Chief for The New York Times. Since 2008, he has covered Chinese politics, economics, the military, foreign policy, the environment, culture, and a range of other issues. He has been a writer on three in-depth series, which explored China’s growing global reach, cultural production and censorship, and the 2012 leadership transition. Since being posted to China, he has also reported from countries across Asia, including Afghanistan, North Korea, and Myanmar.

Wong has worked for The Times for more than thirteen years. His first foreign assignment for the newspaper was in the Baghdad bureau, where he covered the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007. Between his Iraq and China assignments, he studied Mandarin at Middlebury College and at Taiwan University. He first went to China in 1996, when he studied Mandarin at Beijing Language and Culture University. Wong’s parents are from Hong Kong and Guangdong Province, and he is conversant in Cantonese. He has also written often on travels in the Himalayas. Wong has a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Virginia and dual Master’s degrees in International Studies and Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sheila Melvin

on February 7, 2014

Sheila Melvin writes about culture in China.  She is a regular contributor to The International Herald Tribune and Caixin, and her articles have appeared in numerous other publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of two books, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese (co-authored with her husband, Jindong Cai) and The Little Red Book of China Business. She is at work on a new book that examines China’s quest to become a cultural superpower.

Sharron Lovell

on February 7, 2014

Sharron Lovell is a multimedia storyteller and educator. She is currently based between Rome and Beijing and possesses a misguided love of China’s lower tier cities. She lectures on multimedia journalism for a Beijing-based, U.K.-accredited Master’s program and is co-hosts a podcast on multimedia journalism.

Lovell’s work has been published in National Geographic books, PBS, Aeon, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Politiken, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Irish Times, Forbes, The Independent, Grazia, Ms., Adbusters, Le Monde, and The Financial Times.

Sharon Hom

on February 7, 2014

Sharon K. Hom, Executive Director of Human Rights in China (HRIC), leads its human rights and media advocacy and strategic policy engagement with NGOs, governments, and multi-stakeholder initiatives. She is also adjunct professor of law and directs the China and International Human Rights Research Program of the Robert Bernstein Human Rights Institute at NYU School of Law. Professor of law emerita at the CUNY School of Law, Hom taught law for 18 years, including training judges, lawyers, and law teachers at eight law schools in China. Hom has presented extensively on a variety of human rights issues before key U.S., European, and international policymakers. She regularly appears as guest and commentator in broadcast programs worldwide, and is frequently interviewed by and quoted in major print media. In 2007, she was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the “50 Women to Watch.”

HRIC has covered human rights and democracy developments in Hong Kong extensively, and initiated a “Conversations Toward a Democratic Future” project that brings together young Hong Kongers and mainlanders living in Hong Kong.

Shai Oster

on February 7, 2014

Shai Oster is an award-winning Hong Kong-based Reporter-at-Large for Bloomberg News. Over nearly two decades as a journalist in China, Europe, and the U.S., he has covered a broad range of economic, business, and social issues. In 2013, he won his second Asia Society Osborn Elliott Journalism Prize and George Polk Award for his role in Bloomberg’s groundbreaking coverage that for the first time documented the fortunes amassed by China’s leaders. The “Revolution to Riches” series revealed the wealth accumulated by the family of President Xi Jinping and traced how business dynasties created by the heirs of Mao’s comrades-in-arms contribute to China’s rising inequality.

Before joining Bloomberg, Oster was a Beijing and Hong Kong-based correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, covering energy and the environment. In 2008, he was the recipient of both the George Polk Award for environmental reporting and Asia Society's Osborn Elliott Award for a series of stories exposing environmental problems linked to China’s Three Gorges Dam project. He was also part of a team of Wall Street Journal reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for International Reporting on China for reports on the adverse impact of China’s growth.

Previously, he covered OPEC for Dow Jones Newswires in London and served as Beijing Bureau Chief for Asiaweek magazine. His first job in China was as a Copy Editor at China Daily, the official English-language newspaper in Beijing.

A graduate of the Columbia University Journalism School, Oster was born in Jerusalem and speaks Hebrew, French, and Chinese.

Edward Friedman

on February 7, 2014

Edward Friedman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has worked in rural China, co-authoring Chinese Village, Socialist State (Yale University Press, 1993) and Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (Yale University Press, 2007) and serving as the major editor condensing and re-organizing Yang Jisheng's great study of the Leap era famine Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) for an English-reading public. He also studies Chinese foreign policy, having done work for the United States Government off and on starting in 1965.

Sebastian Veg

on February 7, 2014

Sebastian Veg is a Research Professor (Directeur d’Études) at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Science, Paris, and an Honorary Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His interests are in 20th century Chinese intellectual history, literature, and political debates, as well as intellectual and cultural debates in Hong Kong. He has written about and translated Lu Xun, as well as contemporary writers like Yu Jian and Dung Kai-cheung. He is presently working on a project on Chinese intellectuals’ new role after 1989.