Celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of the Center on U.S.-China Relations
VIEW EVENT DETAILSPlease join us for an evening of celebration on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations.
Tuesday, February 28, 2017
6:00pm — Musical Performance
7:30pm — Reception & Dinner
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE:
Wu Tong & Ensemble, Abigail Washburn & Wu Fei
DINNER CONVERSATION SPEAKERS:
Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations and Edward Wong, Beijing Bureau Chief for The New York Times
Jonathan Spence, Sterling Professor Emeritus History at Yale University and Susan Jakes, Editor of ChinaFile
Roderick MacFarquhar, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science, Harvard University and Minxin Pei, Tom and Margot Pritzker '72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow and Director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College
HONORARY CHAIRS
Janet Ross, Clifford Ross
Lewis B. Kaden
Harold & Ruth Newman
LEADERSHIP CO-CHAIRS
Lulu & Anthony Wang
Henrietta H. Fore
Elizabeth Gordon
SPONSORS
Duncan Clark
Richard Edelman
Betsy and Edward Cohen
FRIENDS
Karen & Peter Jakes
William & Melinda vanden Heuvel
Cynthia & Leon Polsky
Frank W. Rocco
Connie & Stephen Spahn
Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Foundation
For inquiries about tickets, please contact: [email protected] or 212-327-9358.
PERFORMERS
Wu Tong is a musician and composer and has become his generation’s most visible proponent of traditional Chinese music. He is a performer with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble; founding vocalist of the pioneering rock band Lunhui (Again), which merges Western and Asian traditions; and a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, and Singapore Symphony Orchestra. He performed in and helped produce the album Yo-Yo Ma & Friends: Songs of Joy & Peace, which won 2010 Best Classical Crossover Album Grammy Award.
A unique banjo-guzheng duo, Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei sing and perform their original compositions inspired by the commingling of Appalachian and Chinese folk songs, as well as improvised pieces and traditional tunes.
Abigail Washburn is a Grammy award-winning singer, songwriter, and clawhammer banjo player whose music meshes traditional Appalachian and Chinese folk tunes. Her most recent record with her husband, Béla Fleck, won a 2016 Grammy for Best Folk Album. Washburn is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has regularly toured in China, including a month long tour of China's Silk Road supported by grants from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
Wu Fei is a master of the guzheng, the ancient 21-string Chinese zither. She plays both in the 2,000-year-old vernacular of the instrument as well as in a contemporary idiosyncratic, experimental dialect. Wu composes for choir, string quartet, chamber ensemble, Balinese gamelan, and orchestra; her commissions range from a composition for Percussions Claviers de Lyon that premiered in the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing to live performances in Paris and Tokyo.
SPEAKERS
Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, is a long-time China observer, journalist, and former Dean and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books on China, most recently Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century.
Edward Wong is the departing Beijing Bureau Chief for The New York Times and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Since 2008, he has covered Chinese politics, economics, the military, foreign policy, the environment, culture, and a range of other issues. 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.
Jonathan Spence holds the position of Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University. His books include The Death of Woman Wang, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, and The Search for Modern China, among others. A graduate of the University of Cambridge and Yale University, Spence holds a number of honorary degrees, has served as President of the American Historical Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Susan Jakes is Editor of ChinaFile and Senior Fellow at Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations. From 2000-2007, she reported on China for Time magazine, based in Hong Kong and Beijing. In 2003, she broke the story of the Chinese government’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in Beijing, for which she received a Henry Luce Public Service Award. Jakes holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from Yale University. Her doctoral studies at Yale focused on China’s environmental history and the global history of ecology.
Roderick MacFarquhar is the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science and formerly Director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. Among his numerous publications are Sino-American Relations, 1949-1971; the final two volumes of the Cambridge History of China (edited with the late John Fairbank); and most recently, the co-authored Mao’s Last Revolution. He was the founding editor of The China Quarterly.
Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ’72 Professor of Government and Director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. His research focuses on democratization in developing countries, economic reform and governance in China, and U.S.-China relations. Pei is the author of several books, most recently China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay.