Rogier Creemers

on February 5, 2014

Rogier Creemers is an Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese Studies at Leiden University. With a background in Sinology and International Relations, and a Ph.D. in Law, his research focuses on Chinese domestic digital technology policy, as well as China’s growing importance in global digital affairs. He is the principal investigator of the NWO Vidi Project “The Smart State: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and the Law in China.” For the Leiden Asia Centre, he directs a project on China and global cybersecurity, funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is also a co-founder of DigiChina, a joint initiative with Stanford University and New America.

Roderick MacFarquhar

on February 5, 2014

Roderick MacFarquhar (1930-2019) was Director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University and the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science.

His publications include The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals (Praeger, 1966); The Sino-Soviet Dispute (coauthored with G.F. Hudson and Richard Lowenthal, Praeger, 1961); China under Mao: Politics Takes Command (M.I.T. Press, 1966); Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971 (Praeger, 1972); The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward (edited, Harvard University Press, 1989); the final two volumes of the Cambridge History of China (edited with John K. Fairbank, Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng 2nd Edition (Cambridge University Press, 1997); a trilogy, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (Columbia University Press); and Mao’s Last Revolution (coauthored with Michael Schoenhals, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

MacFarquhar was the Founding Editor of The China Quarterly and was a fellow at Columbia University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Royal Institute for International Affairs. In previous personae, he was a journalist, a TV commentator, and a Member of British Parliament.

Robert Williams

on February 5, 2014

Robert Williams is a lecturer at Yale Law School and a Senior Fellow of Yale’s China Law Center. He received a B.A. from Vanderbilt University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Following law school, he clerked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice and for The Honorable E. Grady Jolly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He was also an attorney in private practice.

Dan Washburn

on February 5, 2014

Dan Washburn is Managing Editor at Asia Society in New York. He is currently working on a book about the development of golf in China for Oneworld Publications in London. From 2002 to 2011, Dan worked as a freelance writer based out of Shanghai. His work has appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, Financial Times Weekend Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Economist, ESPN.com, Golf World, Golf Digest, and other publications. In 2005, he founded the popular website Shanghaiist.com.

Robert A. Scalapino

on February 5, 2014

Robert Scalapino was the founder and first Chairman of the National Committee on United States-China Relations and the founding director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1978 to 1990. During his undergraduate studies at what is now the University of California, Santa Barbara, and while he earned his masters and PhD at Harvard University, Professor Scalapino studied politics, mostly focusing on US-European relations. During World War II, he served as a Naval officer and was trained in Japanese language, sparking his interest in East Asian studies. He began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley in 1949, ending his career there as the Robson Research Professor of Government, Emeritus.

Professor Scalapino authored thirty-nine books on East Asia, demonstrating his broad knowledge of the region and influence in the field. He gained notoriety in the 1960s for speaking out in support of President Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. He also notably advocated for better relations with China in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as against human rights abuses in Taiwan.

Professor Scalapino served as an advisor to heads of state and key policy makers around the world, including three U.S. presidents. He was a frequent visitor to the People's Republic of China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Taiwan, and the countries of Southeast Asia and Central Asia. He twice headed an American delegation to Korea, and he served as a visiting lecturer at Peking University in 1981, 1985 and 1999. After retiring from teaching in 1990, Professor Scalapino remained active in political and development issues in Asia. He passed away on November 1, 2011 at the age of 92.

Robert Keatley

on February 5, 2014

Robert Keatley has served as editor of three newspapers during his journalism career. After earning degrees from the University of Washington and Stanford University and serving in the Navy, Keatley joined the Wall Street Journal, where he spent most of his career. He was a staff reporter in San Francisco, New York, London, and Hong Kong before becoming the Journal’s diplomatic correspondent in Washington. In that capacity, he made a lengthy visit to China in the spring of 1971 as the first American reporter to receive an individual journalist’s visa following the advent of Ping-Pong diplomacy; the trip included an interview with Premier Zhou Enlai. Keatley returned to China the following February to cover the visit of President Nixon and has made many additional visits since then, including trips accompanying Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Cyrus Vance.

Keatley became the Journal’s foreign editor in New York in 1978 before becoming editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong in 1979, and concurrently publisher in 1983. In 1984, he was named editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels. He returned to Washington in 1992 to serve as a writer and editor specializing in international political and economic issues.

Keatley retired from the Journal in 1998 and returned to Hong Kong for three years, where he was editor of the South China Morning Post. During the fall of 2005, he taught at the journalism department of Tsinghua University in Beijing and in 2007 organized a seminar on business journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai. In 2006, Keatley founded and served as editor of the Hong Kong Journal until it stopped publishing in 2012. He is currently a consultant for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Robert Kapp

on February 5, 2014

Robert A. Kapp maintains his own China consultancy, Robert A. Kapp & Associates, Inc., in Port Townsend, Washington.  He is Senior Advisor to The China Program of the Carter Center, and served, in reverse chronological order, as President of the the Washington D.C.-based U.S.-China Business Council from 1994-2004; President of the Washington Council on International Trade, 1987-1994, and Founding Executive Director of the Washington State China Relations Council, 1979-87.  He earned his Ph.D. in modern Chinese History at Yale, and taught on the faculties of Rice University and the University of Washington through the 1970s.

Robert Barnett

on February 5, 2014

Robert Barnett is a writer and researcher on nationality issues in China, focusing on modern history, politics, and culture in Tibet. His publications include studies of Chinese policies in Tibet, border issues, social management, language policies, women in politics, cinema, television, and religious regulations in Tibet.

He is currently Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London, and an Affiliate Lecturer at the Lau China Institute, Kings College, London. He founded the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University in New York, where he was Director of Modern Tibetan Studies and an Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Tibetan Studies for some 19 years. He has also taught at Princeton, INALCO (Paris), Tibet University (Lhasa), and IACER (Kathmandu).

His recent books and edited volumes include Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Cultural Revolution by Tsering Woeser (Nebraska, 2020); Conflicting Memories: Tibetan History under Mao Retold with Benno Weiner and Françoise Robin (Brill, 2019); Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field, with Ronald Schwartz (Brill, 2008); and Lhasa: Streets with Memories (Columbia, 2006).

From 2004 to 2018, Barnett ran a series of training and development programs in Tibet, including six at Tibet University. He is a frequent commentator on Tibet and nationality issues in China for the BBC, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media.

Damien Ma

on February 5, 2014

Damien Ma is a Fellow at The Paulson Institute, where he focuses on investment and policy programs and the Institute’s research and think tank activities. He is the co-author of In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade.

Previously, he was a lead China analyst at Eurasia Group, a political risk research and advisory firm. He specialized in analyzing the intersection between Chinese policies and markets, with a particular focus on energy and commodities, industrial policy, U.S.-China trade, and social and internet policies. His advisory and analytical work served a range of clients, from institutional investors and multinational corporations to the U.S. government. Prior to joining Eurasia Group, he worked at a public relations firm in Beijing, where he served clients ranging from Ford to Microsoft. He also was a manager of publications at the U.S.-China Business Council in Washington, D.C.

Ma writes regularly for The Atlantic and publishes widely, including in Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, and Foreign Policy, as well as appearing in a range of broadcast media, such as the Charlie Rose show, Bloomberg, and the PBS NewsHour. He also served as an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Ma is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and some Shanghainese dialect.

Richard H. Solomon

on February 5, 2014

Richard H. Solomon served as President of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally established and funded organization, between 1993 and 2012. He led its growth into a nationally recognized center of international conflict management analysis and applied programs around the world. He currently is a Senior Fellow at the RAND Corporation.

Prior to his tenure at the Institute of Peace, Solomon was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 1989 to 1992. In that position, he negotiated the Cambodia peace agreement (the first United Nations Security Council conflict settlement); had a leading role in the dialogue on nuclear issues between the United States and South and North Korea; helped establish the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation initiative; and led U. S. negotiations with Japan, Mongolia, and Vietnam on important bilateral matters. In 1992–1993, Solomon served as U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines, where he coordinated the closure of U.S. naval facilities and developed a new framework for bilateral and regional security cooperation.

Solomon previously served as Director of policy planning in the State Department (1986-1989), and as a senior staff member of the National Security Council (1971-1976), where he participated in the normalization of relations with China. He began his career in 1966 as a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He also served for a decade as head of the Political Science Department at the RAND Corporation (1976-1986).

In 1995, Solomon was awarded the State Department's Foreign Affairs Award for Public Service, and he has received awards for policy initiatives from the governments of Korea and Thailand, and from the Cambodian community in the U.S. In 2005, he received the American Political Science Association's Hubert H. Humphrey Award for "notable public service by a political scientist." In 2012, he received an honorary Doctorate from Whittier College; and also in 2012 he received an Honorary Doctorate in Human Letters from Plymouth State University.

Solomon holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published eight books on a range of topics related to international affairs.