Speaker Bios
Speakers from China:
Gao Bingzhong is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology, and Director of Center for Civil Society Studies, Peking University. Professor Gao is a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute this year, 2010-2011. He is also Vice President of China Folklore Society and a member of Expert Committee of Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, Ministry of Culture of China. Gao’s professional research interests are focused around three main avenues: the development of civil society in China, the everyday life of ordinary people, and the institutional efforts to conduct overseas ethnography. Professor Gao has delivered lectures aboard on such issues as “Legitimation of Chinese grass-roots associations” (2002), “Folklore and the cultural reproduction of Chinese Society” (2005), and “The revival of folk religion in Chinese rural areas” (1997). His most recent books include Bluebook of Chinese Civil Society Development 2008 (2008), Folk Culture and Civil Society: Cultural Studies of Modern Process in China (2008), The Degeneration of Ecosystem and the Social and Cultural Changes in Axia of Inner-Mongolia (2007).
Dr. Wang Zhenyao became the director of the new Beijing Normal University One Foundation Philanthropy Research Institute in 2010. As director of the China Institute for Social Policy, he is leading the modernization of philanthropy in China by educating and training potential philanthropists and professionals. He previously served as the Director of Disaster Relief and social Welfare at the Ministry of Civil Affairs of China, where he played a prominent role in directing the government’s response to the Sichuan earthquake and in encouraging private-sector partnerships with NGOs. During his career at the Ministry, he also served as the deputy director general of grassroots governance and construction. In this capacity, he initiated the first mass election method of open nominations of candidates in a village election in China in 1994. This milestone sparked a fundamental change in rural governance and democracy in China. He holds a BA in world history from Nankai University (1981), an MA in law from Huazhong Normal University (1986), an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School (2000), and a PhD from Peking University (2001).
Dr. Zhuang Ailing is the Executive Director of China Foundation Center, Beijing. Inaugurated on July 8, 2010, the China Foundation Center is dedicated to building transparency and accountability of foundations and other nonprofits in China. Dr. Zhuang started her career in NGO in 1990. She first chaired the project office of The Amity Foundation, and then moved on to become the China representative for CBM International and alternative China representative of ORBIS International. She became interested in the management capability development of NPO in 1999. In 2004, Dr. Zhuang founded Shanghai NPO Development Center and took the role of the organization's president and general secretary. She has over ten years of experience in raising funds from overseas for almost 600 different projects in rural poverty alleviation and development, education & rehabilitation of the handicapped, healthcare, employment, education, disaster relief, elderly welfare and children education. From 2004 to 2008, she provided management training for over 3,000 NPO directors and consulting service to over 100 organizations. She has published more than 20 articles on NGO management on domestic and international publications. Dr. Zhuang holds a M.A. degree in English-American literature and a Ph.D. degree in law from Nanjing University. She also has a MPA degree from Harvard Kennedy School.
Speakers from the U.S.
William Alford, Henry L. Stimson Professor and Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School; Director of East Asian Legal Studies; Chair, Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD); Advisor for Domain of Nonprofits in China at Hauser Center at Harvard. He helped found the first academic program in the PRC on American law (through which hundreds of Chinese scholars – many now prominent in legal circles -- studied law in the US). In the years since, he has advised governments, multilateral organizations, foundations, civic groups and NGOs, law firms and businesses—on issues including trade, human rights, intellectual property, the legal profession, legal education and beyond. Through HPOD and Special Olympics (on whose board he serves) he has been involved in pro bono work on disability in China. He is an honorary professor of Renmin University and Zhejiang University. Books he has authored or edited include To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property in Chinese Civilization (1995); Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia (2007); 残疾人法律保障机制研究 (A Study of Legal Mechanisms to Protect Persons with Disabilities) (2007 – with Wang Liming and Ma Yu’er) and Prospects for the Professions in China: Essays on Civic Vocations (2011 – with Ken Winston and Bill Kirby).
Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites from the 7th to the 17th century. He led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research; in 2005 he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis. He also directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. In a collaboration between Harvard, Academia Sinica, and Peking University he directs the China Biographical Database project, an online relational database currently of 70,000 historical figures that is being expanded to cover the Chinese political elite over the last 2000 years. He has authored and edited books including This Culture of Ours’: Intellectual Transitions in Tang and Sung China (1992) and Ways with Words: writing about Reading Texts from Early China (2000).
Mary Brown Bullock is Distinguished Visiting Professor of China Studies at Emory University, a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the president emerita of Agnes Scott College. She is the chair of the China Medical Board and a director of the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Committee on U.S. – China Relations, the Asia Foundation and Genuine Parts Company. Mary Bullock previously served as the director of the Asia Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center and the director of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China. While a college president she chaired the National Association of Independent Colleges, the Women’s College Coalition and was a director of the American Council on Education. She was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Agnes Scott College and received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. Her latest book, The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy and China, will be published in spring 2011 by Stanford University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Bruce Dickson is the Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His research and teaching focus on political dynamics in China and Taiwan, especially the role of political parties in the process of political change. Professor Dickson is currently examining the political consequences of economic reform in China, and in particular the relationship between private entrepreneurs and the Chinese Communist Party. He challenges the notion that economic development is leading to political change in China or that China’s private entrepreneurs are helping to promote democratization. Instead, they have become partners with the ruling Chinese Communist Party to promote economic growth while maintaining the political status quo. Professor Dickson’s research illuminates the Communist Party’s strategy for incorporating China’s capitalists into the political system and how the shared interests, personal ties, and common views of the party and the private sector are creating a form of “crony communism.” For the 2006-07 academic year, he received a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for his project, "Turning Wealth into Power: The Evolving Political Influence of China's 'Red Capitalists.'" Professor Dickson is the author of Wealth into Power: The Communist Party's Embrace of China's Private Sector (2008), Red Capitalists in China: The Party, Private Entrepreuneurs, and Prospects for Political Change (2003), Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties (1997).
Nara Dillon is a lecturer on East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the Department of History, Harvard University. From 2003 to 2007 she taught Chinese politics and comparative politics as an Assistant Professor at Bard College. Her interests include the politics of welfare, charity, and health care in China and the rest of the developing world. Her publications include At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and Statebuilding in Republican Shanghai (Stanford, 2008) and articles on gender, private charity, and welfare reform. In her essay on “The politics of philanthropy” in Shanghai from 1932 to 1949 (chapter 9), Nara Dillon analyses the concerted contributions of social networks and government agencies in the organization of aid for victims of the Japanese invasion, civil wars, economic crises, and natural catastrophes. She shows how much the action of the public authorities owed to these associations in the 1930s and how the weakening of these associations and their leaders after the Second World War led to the illusory victory of a welfare state that wanted, but was unable, to take on by itself the responsibility for its social policy. She is currently researching the development of the Maoist welfare state from the 1940s to the 1960s, focusing on programs for workers and unemployed urbanites.
Fengming Cui serves as the Director of China Program at Harvard Law School Project on Disabilities. She holds an Ed.D in special education, specializing in justice, education, and disabilities (Boston University, 2008) and Ed. M with a focus on higher education and disabilities (Nanjing University in China, 2003).
Her scholarly interests include the rights of persons with disabilities, disability laws and policies in China, inclusion in China, participation of persons with disabilities in policy making and implementation, families of children with disabilities, and comparative special education and disability law studies. The major topics of her writing cover the legal rights of persons with disabilities, equal opportunity of children with disability in inclusive education and teacher preparation and training for special education both in Chinese and English. In addition to research, she has been a fan and active volunteer for Special Olympics and close friends of persons with disabilities for advocacy, awareness raising, attitudes change and capacity building.
Peter F. Geithner is an advisor to the Asia Center at Harvard University and a consultant to the Asia Pacific Philanthropy Consortium, Rockefeller Foundation, Sasakawa Peace Foundation, and other organizations. He serves on the boards of the National Committee on United States-China Relations, the China Center for Economic Research (Peking University), the Center for the Advanced Study of India (University of Pennsylvania), Clemente (Holdings) Asia, Inc., and the Institute of Current World Affairs. Mr. Geithner was with The Ford Foundation for 28 years, where he held program management positions mainly concerned with Asia. He was Director of Asia Programs from 1990 to 1996. Prior to assuming that position, he served for two and a half years as the Foundation’s first representative in Beijing, China. His earlier assignments with the Foundation included Program Officer in Charge, Developing Country Programs (New York), Representative for Southeast Asia (Bangkok), Deputy Head, Asia Pacific (New York), and Deputy Representative for India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (New Delhi). Prior to joining The Ford Foundation, Mr. Geithner served with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Washington, D.C.
Merle Goldman is Professor Emerita of History at Boston University and Research Associate of the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. Her work has focused on the intersection between intellectual/cultural history and political history in China. She has written a number of books and articles on the changing relationship between China's intellectuals and the state in the twentieth century, particularly during the Communist era. Her books include Literary Dissent in Communist China (1970); China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (1981); Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Decade (1994); China: A New History, Enlarged Edition (1998), coauthored with John K. Fairbank; and From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China (2005). Goldman’s work on China’s intellectuals in the Chinese Communist Party led her to activism on their behalf when a number of them were persecuted. Goldman served on the Presidential Commission on Radio Free Asia and as a member of the United States delegation to the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.
Joan Kaufman is Senior Fellow, Asia Programs, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University and Faculty Affiliate, Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard Kennedy School ; Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School; Distinguished Scientist and Senior Lecturer at the Schneider Institute for Health Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University; China Director for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). From 1996-2001 Joan Kaufman was the Ford Foundation’s Gender and Reproductive Health Program Officer for China and the first international UNFPA program officer for China from 1980-84. She has serviced on advisory committees for the World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health. Her writing focuses on health and social policies, AIDS, gender equity, and reproductive health and rights. Current research includes studies on health, governance, and women’s participation in China’s countryside, Chinese AIDS orphans, and AIDS public policies. She has published extensively about China’s AIDS epidemic, reproductive health and family planning policy and program, SARS, health sector reform, and many other topics, including a co-edited book on AIDS and Social Policies in China, published in 2006, and a recent chapter on AIDS NGOs in China in State and Society Responses to Social Welfare Needs in China—-Serving the people, published in June 2009. An earlier book A Billion and Counting: Family Planning Campaigns and Policies in the People’s Republic of China (1983) examined China’s population policy, a topic she continues to work and publish on.
Dr. Kleinman is a professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor in the Anthropology Department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), where he directs Harvard’s Asia Center. Since 1968, Kleinman, who is both a psychiatrist and an anthropologist, has conducted research in Chinese society, first in Taiwan, and since 1978 in China, on depression, somatization, epilepsy, schizophrenia and suicide, and other forms of violence. Dr. Kleinman directed the World Mental Health Report, co-chaired the American Psychiatric Association’s Taskforce on Culture and DSM-IV, co-chaired the 2002 Institute of Medicine report on Preventing Suicide, and also co-chaired in 2001 and 2002 both the NIH conference on the Science and Ethics of the Placebo and the NIH conference on Stigma. In September 2003, he co-directed a conference at Harvard on SARS in China; and in the 2003-2004 academic year he co-directed a Conference at Harvard on AIDS in China. In December 2006, he co-directed an NSF funded international meeting on Asian Flus/Avian Flu. Dr. Kleinman’s current research includes a collaborative study with health economists from Harvard School of Public Health on health consequences of rural-urban migration in China and studies on stigma in China with Professor Sing Lee of Hong Kong.
Elisabeth Köll is an Associate Professor in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at the Harvard Business School. She is also a member of the executive committee of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Köll teaches The Entrepreneurial Manager (TEM) in the first-year MBA curriculum and a graduate seminar on global business history in the doctoral program. As part of the school’s January term program, she leads an Immersion Experience Program in China and has previously taught in the elective course “Doing Business in China”. Köll’s central research agenda focuses on the managerial, legal, and financial evolution of firms and the role of entrepreneurship in China throughout the twentieth century to the present. In her work she pursues an alternative approach to the field of business history by shifting the analysis from external factors such as government policies, local politics, or family networks to internal aspects of business institutions such as control and ownership, accounting, and management. Her book From Cotton Mill to Business Enterprise: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (Harvard, 2003) demonstrates how concepts, definitions, and interpretations of property rights, corporate structures, and business practices in contemporary China can be analyzed in terms of their historical, institutional, and cultural roots.
Chris Marquis is an Associate Professor in the Organizational Behavior unit at the Harvard Business School and is affiliated with the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative. Professor Marquis’ current research is focused on the topic of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and in particular how historical and geographic processes have shaped firms' CSR strategies and activities. He has published papers on how local businesses influence the growth of different types of non-profit organizations in US communities, and is currently working on a number of projects that assess how organizations can be designed to maximize both business and social value. He has also published a series of HBS cases focused on the organizational design of CSR activities. This research builds on Marquis’ earlier work that analyzed how firm behavior is shaped by broader contexts such as embeddedness in geographic communities and how environmental conditions during founding periods leave a lasting imprint on organizations. This earlier research examined the effects of these processes in the contexts of community-based social networks and the evolution of the US banking industry.
Zhang Qi is a law professor at Peking University Law School and the executive director of the Institute of Comparative Law and Sociology of Law. Professor Zhang has taught and researched on philosophy of law, comparative law, the Chinese judicial system, and Western legal philosophy. He has been involved in Chinese judicial reform for many years, studying the feasibility of adapting the US guiding cases system into the Chinese system. He earned his LLB from Jilin University in 1982 and his PhD in Jurisprudence from Peking University in 1997. He now is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Some of his recent publications are: “On the Methods of Identifying Guiding Cases ---- Based on the Trial Experience” Peking University Law Journal, No. 3, 2009, (in Chinese); “Identification and Application of the Guiding Elements of a Guiding Case” Legal Science Monthly, No. 10, 2008, (in Chinese); “On the Guidance of the Guiding Cases”，Law and Social Development, No. 6, 2007, (in Chinese); “Toward Harmony ---- Analysis of the Civil Society in Current China” Journal of Peking University, No. 4, 2005, (in Chinese)；“Towards a Precedent System in China ---- One Method of Institutionalization of the Rule of Law in China”, Harvard China Review, Vol. V, No.1 Spring 2004(in English); Legal Reasoning and Legal Institution，The Press of Shandong Renmin, 2003, (in Chinese).
Peter G. Rowe is the Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and University Distinguished Service Professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, where he has taught since 1985. Rowe currently serves as Vice Chairman of the International Advisory Council of the Peoples’ Municipal Government of Wuhan, China (2005 to present) and is a member of the governing board of the UNESCO World Heritage Institute for Training and Research in the Asia and Pacific Region (2008 to present). The general focus of Rowe’s work is on the evolving cultural conditions of modernity, especially as they apply in various regions and to various aspects of the built environment. His recent book Civic Realism probes the question of how best to create viable public space in today’s contemporary, heterogeneous and democratic societies. Similarly, two books: East-Asian Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, and L'Asia e il Moderno explicitly address the manner in which standard western cultural concepts of modernity are being extended and even transformed in rapidly urbanizing areas within Asia. Three of Rowe's most recent books: Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China, Modern Urban Housing in China: 1840-2000, and Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China, deal explicitly with modernizing China, and in Modernity and Housing, as its title suggests, Rowe responds to the question of how best to understand and architecturally tackle today's complex housing environments.
Karla W. Simon is professor of law at the Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America. Professor Simon has taught courses in the law of non-profit organizations, international human rights, federal income taxation, international and comparative taxation, comparative law, and administrative law. She is the author of many articles on various policy subjects in the fields of non-profit organizations, taxation, and administrative law as well as civil society generally and is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Civil Society Law (previously of the International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law). Prof. Simon's more recent work has dealt with comparative aspects of the laws governing civil society, including issues regarding the legal environment for civil society organizations in emerging democracies and transition countries. Professor Simon has delivered lectures on such issues as "International Legal Framework for Freedom of Association" (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), "Regulation of Not-for-Profit Organizations in New Democracies" , "Privatization of Social and Cultural Institutions” and "The Role of a Good Legal Framework for NPOs - Capacity Building and Sustainability" . Her professional activities include co-founding the International Center for Civil Society Law (www.iccsl.org) and the Center for International Social Development at Catholic (cisd.cua.edu) University of America. She recent begun a new listserv for people interested in civil society in China, hosted by CUA Law School.
Joanna Handlin Smith is the Editor of the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, a publication of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Her most recent book, The Art of Doing Good: Charity in Late Ming China (2009), examines, among other issues, how changes in the composition and self-perception of the educated elite influenced charitable activities. She also authored Action in Late Ming Thought: The Reorientation of Lü K'un and Other Scholar-Officials (1983). Smith earned a Bachelor of Arts in Far Eastern Languages from Harvard University, and a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research focuses on trust and friendship in early Qing social networks.
Michael Szonyi is professor of Chinese History at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. Prior to coming to Harvard in 2005, Professor. Szonyi taught at McGill University and University of Toronto. His main research interests are the local history of southeast China, especially in the Ming dynasty; the history of Chinese popular religion, and Overseas Chinese history. His most recent book is Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds (2010), along with earlier works Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line (2008), and Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (2002). Recent research also includes the social history of the Ming Dynasty military. He has traced local cults from the Ming Dynasty and has found that some of these cults continue to exist. Szonyi suggests their traditions can help historians better understand the role of religion in establishing local social orders.
Robert Weller is Professor of Anthropology and Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Professor Weller's areas of specialization are in Chinese religion and ritual, social and political change, environment, and anthropological theory. Professor Weller’s earliest work began with the problem of religious meaning and authority. He continues to have an interest in the limits to interpretational authority, especially through one of its most extreme forms –silence. His work on Chinese civil society, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan (1988), looks at the influx of ideas about governance and social organization and their long-term consequences, arguing that civil society in China can be built without looking like any western antecedents. In addition, Professor Weller’s interest in the relationship between state and society has continued through his edited book , Civil Life, Globalization, and Political Change in Asia (2007), on nongovernmental organizations and political change in Asia. It also informs one of his current major projects, an examination of the new role of religions in civil life, through delivery of a wide range of secular services to people in Chinese societies—building hospitals, offering scholarships, providing emergency aid, and taking care of the elderly.
Martin K. Whyte is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Whyte’s primary research has been to try to understand social change and social patterns in contemporary China, including sociology of the family and study of the post-communist transitions. Whyte has done research on and written about many aspects of the Chinese society, including political controls at the grass roots, village life, urban social patterns, education and schooling, inequality, the role of women, human rights trends, family planning and reproductive rights, and Chinese workers. Whyte had published an edited collection of papers drawing on a survey project that focused on relations between aging parents and their grown children in urban Chinese families, entitled China's Revolutions and Inter-Generational Relations (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2003) One recent research project involves surveys on Chinese popular perceptions of inequality trends and views about distributive justice issues. Results of a 2004 national survey are published in his book: Myth of the Social Volcano (2010). In 2009, Whyte and colleagues directed a five-year follow-up survey to examine whether recent trends, including the global financial meltdown, have made Chinese citizens more or less critical of the market-based inequalities within which they now live. Whyte also edited a conference volume: One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China (2010), following a 2006 conference he organized on the rural-urban gap in China.
Kenneth Winston, Lecturer in Ethics, teaches practical and professional ethics. He created the Kennedy Schools course in professional ethics for mid-career students, which has been offered since 1986. Winston is also faculty chair of the Kennedy Schools Singapore Program, which supports faculty exchanges with the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. In recent years, he has helped to build HKSs capacity in comparative and international ethics, developing new cases and teaching in overseas venues, especially in Asia. Winston has written extensively on case teaching, professional ethics, and legal theory. He holds degrees in philosophy from Harvard College and Columbia University, and has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a senior research fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a John Dewey Senior Fellow. As part of HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series, Dr. Winston has written on “Reflections on Jesuit Mission to China” (2010), “The Internal Morality of Chinese Legalism” (2005) and “Advisors to Rulers –Or, What the Kennedy School of Government Can Learn from Chinese Scholar-Officials, and Vice Versa” (2005).
Guobin Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. Yang has published on a wide range of social issues in China, including the internet and civil society, environmental NGOs, the 1989 student movement, the Red Guard Movement, and collective memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Recent projects have examined China’s emerging environmental movement and the role of the Internet in the transformation of Chinese society. His books include The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia University Press, 2009. Winner of best book award, Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association, 2010), Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (edited with Ching-Kwan Lee, 2007), China's Red Guard Generation: Loyalty, Dissent, and Nostalgia, 1966-1999 (under contract, Columbia University Press), and Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (2 volumes. Library of Chinese Classics in English Translation, Beijing, 2003). Yang is a member of the editorial boards of The China Quarterly, Public Culture, and the International Convention for Asian Studies Publications Series of the Amsterdam University Press.
Moderators
William Alford, Henry L. Stimson Professor and Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School; Director of East Asian Legal Studies; Chair, Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD); Advisor for Domain of Nonprofits in China at Hauser Center at Harvard. He helped found the first academic program in the PRC on American law (through which hundreds of Chinese scholars – many now prominent in legal circles -- studied law in the US). In the years since, he has advised governments, multilateral organizations, foundations, civic groups and NGOs, law firms and businesses—on issues including trade, human rights, intellectual property, the legal profession, legal education and beyond. Through HPOD and Special Olympics (on whose board he serves) he has been involved in pro bono work on disability in China. He is an honorary professor of Renmin University and Zhejiang University. Books he has authored or edited include To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property in Chinese Civilization (1995); Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia (2007); 残疾人法律保障机制研究 (A Study of Legal Mechanisms to Protect Persons with Disabilities) (2007 – with Wang Liming and Ma Yu’er) and Prospects for the Professions in China: Essays on Civic Vocations (2011 – with Ken Winston and Bill Kirby).
Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research is centered on the history of China’s cultural elites from the 7th to the 17th century. He led Harvard’s university-wide effort to establish support for geospatial analysis in teaching and research; in 2005 he was named the first director of the Center for Geographic Analysis. He also directs the China Historical Geographic Information Systems project, a collaboration between Harvard and Fudan University in Shanghai to create a GIS for 2000 years of Chinese history. In a collaboration between Harvard, Academia Sinica, and Peking University he directs the China Biographical Database project, an online relational database currently of 70,000 historical figures that is being expanded to cover the Chinese political elite over the last 2000 years. He has authored and edited books including This Culture of Ours’: Intellectual Transitions in Tang and Sung China (1992) and Ways with Words: writing about Reading Texts from Early China (2000).
L. David Brown is Senior Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. He has been Associate Director for International Programs at the Center and Lecturer in Public Management at the Harvard Kennedy School for the last decade. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Boston University School of Management and President of the Institute for Development Research for twenty years before that. He has worked on the issues of civil society development in Asia, Africa and Latin America since the mid-80s. He has also been a researcher and consultant on the problems and possibilities of civil society partnership with government and business to solve social problems. Since 2007, he has been engaged in capacity building for nonprofits in China. He has written or edited Creating Credibility: Legitimacy and Accountability for Transnational Civil Society, Transnational Civil Society: An Introduction (with Srilatha Batliwala), The Struggle for Accountability: NGOs, Social Movements and the World Bank (with Jonathan Fox),and Managing Conflict at Organizational Interfaces.
Deborah S. Davis is a Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her primary teaching interests are historical and comparative sociology, inequality and stratification, contemporary Chinese society, and methods of fieldwork. In addition to teaching at Yale, she runs a summer fieldwork seminar where Yale students work collaboratively with students from Hong Kong and China. In past summers the seminar has investigated such topics as transformations of childhood consumption, changing concepts of privacy and property rights, the uses of public space in new and old residential communities in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and interaction of household and village level resources for predicting school attendance in rural Yunnan. Davis is currently a member of the National Committee on US China Relations and in 2004 helped launch the Yale China Health Journal. Her past publications have analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, social welfare policy, consumer culture, property rights, social stratification and occupational mobility. In 2008 Stanford University Press published Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China, co-edited with Wang Feng. Currently she is completing a monograph entitled A Home of Their Own, a study of the social consequences of the privatization of real estate in urban China.
Marion R. Fremont-Smith is Senior Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she is directing a study of accountability and the regulation of nonprofits. Her recent book, Governing Nonprofit Organizations: Federal and State Law and Regulation, was published last spring, and she is now writing about government regulation of charitable fundraising. Mrs. Fremont-Smith's interest in nonprofits began when she was assistant attorney general and director of the Division of Public Charities in Massachusetts. She was then research director for Russell Sage Foundation, where she conducted two major studies on philanthropy. In 1964, she joined the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall and Stewart, specializing in nonprofit practice. She was elected partner in 1971, a position she held until 1997, when she became senior counsel and joined the Hauser Center. She has served on the boards of Independent Sector, the Council on Foundations, and the Foundation Center. A member of the Massachusetts Attorney General's Advisory Committee on Public Charities, she is a director of numerous charitable organizations.
Saturday Keynote Speaker
John Fitzgerald is representative of the Ford foundation's office in Beijing. He develops the overall strategy and direction of the foundation's work in China, which emphasizes opportunities for poor and marginal communities to participate fully and equally in China's development. His individual grant making focuses on U.S.-China relations and civil society issues, aiming to build new-generation expertise on the United States and China, and to support Chinese institutions in strengthening domestic infrastructure for the lawful development of civil society. Before joining the Ford Foundation in 2008, John was head of the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and director of the International Center of Excellence in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. He served as a member of the Australia-China Council of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and as chairman of the Committee for National and International Cooperation of the Australian Research Council. He also served as president of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia.
His publications include Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (1996), and Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (2007).
