Zhang Xiaoran

on February 5, 2014

Zhang Xiaoran is U.S.-China Dialogue Fellow with Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations, where she works on the U.S.-China Dialogue project and on Chinese social media outreach. She holds a B.A. from Peking University, where she concentrated in Chinese Literature and Film, and an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. Zhang spent a winter doing volunteer work in a charity school in India, and previously interned at Sanlian Life Week, a Mainland Chinese magazine.

Bill Bikales

on February 5, 2014

Bill Bikales is a Harvard-trained Economist and East Asia Specialist, currently heading Bikales Advisors in Washington, DC, an economic and political advisory service. He has a track record of major achievement in supporting macroeconomic policy reform in developing economies, having led highly successful economic policy programs in China, Mongolia and Ukraine, and served for three years as Principal Economist for Southeast Asia at the Asian Development Bank.  Bill’s particular focus is economic and political development trends in China and Mongolia, having worked in both for extended periods and frequently returning to both for analytical and policy work. He worked for nine years in China, where he was responsible for economic policy work for several United Nations agencies, and for eight years in Mongolia including 6 years as Economic Advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office.  Bill received two medals from the Government of Mongolia in recognition of his contributions to Mongolian development.  He speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and in addition to China and Mongolia has lived and worked in Ukraine (3 years), Philippines (3 years), Hong Kong (3 years) and Taipei (2 years.)  His publications have dealt with the political economy of fiscal, financial, social and environmental policy-making in China and Mongolia.

 

Bi Cheng

on February 5, 2014

Bi Cheng is an M.A. candidate in Conference Interpretation at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. His language combination is English and Mandarin Chinese, but he is also fluent in Cantonese. He holds a B.A. in Professional Accountancy from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with minors in Translation and French Studies. He has also studied at Washington University in St. Louis as an exchange student. He has worked for China Economic Review and Modern Weekly as an intern and his current career goal is to become a professional conference interpreter.

Zhou Ruijin

on February 5, 2014

Zhou Ruijin is the author and editor of several books and serves as a Ph.D. Advisor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He graduated from Fudan University with a degree in Journalism. Upon graduating, he served as a reporter, editor, commentator, and Deputy Editor-in-Chief for the Liberation Daily, the daily newspaper of the Shanghai Committee of the Communist Party of China. In 1991, under the pen name Huangfu Ping, he was in charge of writing a series of editorials entitled “Reform and Liberalization Need New Thinking” that drew worldwide attention. From 1993 to 2000, he was Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the People’s Daily.

Barry Naughton

on February 5, 2014

Barry Naughton is the So Kwanlok Chair of Chinese International Affairs at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Naughton is an authority on the Chinese economy, with an emphasis on issues relating to industry, trade, finance, and China’s transition to a market economy. Recent research focuses on regional economic growth in the People’s Republic of China and the relationship between foreign trade and investment and regional growth. His book, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978-1993 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), is a comprehensive study of China’s development from a planned to a market economy that traces the distinctive strategy of transition followed by China, as well as China’s superior growth performance. It received the Ohira Memorial Prize in 1996.

Zijian Mu

on February 5, 2014

Zijian Mu is a documentary filmmaker based in Paradise Valley, Arizona.

He is a Qiang minority and a native of Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County, China. His first documentary, One Child, explores the lives of the parents who lost their only children in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake in China. The film was shortlisted for the 87th Academy Awards® (Documentary Short Subject) and has won the 2014 Student Academy Awards and the 2013 Sidney Gross Memorial Prize for Investigative Journalism.

Mu has also contributed work for The Economist, Vice, and CNN. In 2013 he co-produced a short film, "Free Advice Girl," and the film was selected as a finalist for the 2013 Hot Docs International Documentary Challenge and screened at the festival. He holds an M.A. in News and Documentary from New York University.

Aryeh Neier

on February 5, 2014

Aryeh Neier is President Emeritus of the Open Society Foundations. He was president from 1993 to 2012. Before that, he served for twelve years as Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, of which he was a founder in 1978. He worked for fifteen years at the American Civil Liberties Union, including eight years as National Executive Director. He served as an adjunct professor of law at New York University for more than a dozen years, and has also taught at Georgetown University Law School and the University of Siena (Italy). In the fall of 2012, he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs of Sciences Po. Neier is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and has published in periodicals such as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Foreign Policy. For a dozen years, he wrote a column on human rights for The Nation. He has contributed more than 200 op-ed articles in newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The International Herald Tribune. Author of seven books, including his most recent, The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton University Press, 2012), Neier has also contributed chapters to more than twenty books. He has lectured at many of the country’s leading universities. He is the recipient of seven honorary degrees and numerous awards from such organizations as the American Bar Association, the Swedish Bar Association, the International Bar Association, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Arthur Waldron

on February 5, 2014

Arthur Waldron is a China specialist who teaches international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his A.B. in 1971 and his Ph.D in 1981, both from Harvard. Overseas he has studied in France, the former USSR, Taiwan, and Japan. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University starting in 1981 and taught there until 1991. Thereafter, he was professor of strategy at the US Naval War College in Newport, RI and adjunct professor at Brown University, until moving to Philadelphia in 1997. Professor Waldron is the author of three monographs: The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1989), How the Peace Was Lost (Hoover Institution Press, 1992), and From War to Nationalism: China's Turning Point 1924-1925 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), as well as editor of or contributor to more than twenty other books. Professor Waldron has visited China dozens of times.

Arthur R. Kroeber

on February 5, 2014

Arthur R. Kroeber is founding partner of Gavekal Dragonomics, an independent economic research firm focusing on China and its global impact, with offices in Beijing and Hong Kong. Before founding Dragonomics in 2002, Kroeber worked for 15 years as a financial journalist and economic analyst in China, Taiwan, and India. He is an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the New York University Stern School of Business, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. The second edition of his book China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

Andrew J. Nathan

on February 5, 2014

Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. He is also chair of the steering committee of the Center for the Study of Human Rights and chair of the Morningside Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Columbia. Nathan served as chair of the Department of Political Science, chair of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Before coming to Columbia in 1971, he taught at the University of Michigan. His teaching and research interests include Chinese politics and foreign policy, the comparative study of political participation and political culture, and human rights. 

Nathan is co-chair of the board of Human Rights in China, a member of the board of Freedom House, and a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch, Asia, which he chaired from 1995 to 2000.  He is the regular Asia book reviewer for Foreign Affairs magazine and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy, The China Quarterly, The Journal of Contemporary China, China Information, and others.

Professor Nathan is the author and co-author of numerous books, including, Peking Politics, 1918-1923 (University of California Press, 1976); Chinese Democracy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); China’s Crisis (Columbia University Press, 1990); and The Tiananmen Papers, co-edited with Perry Link (Public Affairs, 2001); among others.

Nathan’s articles have appeared in World Politics, Daedalus, The China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Asian Survey, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Asian Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. His research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and others.

Professor Nathan received a B.A. in History, summa cum laude (1963), an M.A. in East Asian Regional Studies (1965), and a Ph.D. in Political Science (1971) from Harvard University.