Monday, July 20, 2020

Presentation 19:30, Close 20:30 (HKT)

In 2008, China’s Communist Party created the Thousand Talents Program (TTP) to counteract the brain drain trend that had seen many of the country’s best and brightest minds emigrate and settle overseas. According to Li Yuanchao, the reformist former Chinese Communist Party Politiburo member who developed the program, the stated goal of the TTP was to build an “innovative society.”  However, in the past few years, the United States government has become growingly alarmed by and hostile towards the TTP, particularly in the technology development domain.  

Under the current political atmosphere in Washington, American suspicion regarding China’s aspirations to become a scientific superpower through the TTP is only growing stronger.  Cases of Chinese discrimination in universities and within corporations are increasingly institutionalized.  Hurdles to cooperation are becoming more commonplace. As neither the United States nor China would benefit from a permanent technological decoupling, what steps should China take to make their national talent programs more open? Likewise, how can America make its investigations into these alleged cases more transparent?  Join Asia Society Hong Kong Center as we host Professor Frank H. Wu, President of Queens College at City University of New York and author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White and Professor David Zweig, Director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, to engage in this important dialogue on the need for better ‘rules of the road’ on scientific advancement and cooperation between the US and China.  Ms. Ying Chan, former Founding Director of the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, will moderate this timely discussion.

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Professor Frank H. Wu was named President of Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), in 2020. Prior to then, he served as Chancellor & Dean, and then William L. Prosser Distinguished Professor at University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He was a member of the faculty at Howard University, the nation’s leading historically black college/university (HBCU), for a decade. He served as Dean of Wayne State University Law School in his hometown of Detroit, and he has taught in various roles at Michigan, Columbia, Stanford, Peking University School of Transnational Law, and Johns Hopkins.  Professor Wu is the author of Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White. He blogged regularly for six years at Huffington Post, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, LA Times, Detroit Free Press, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle of Higher Education, and National Law Journal. Prior to his academic career, he held a clerkship with the late U.S. District Judge Frank J. Battisti in Cleveland and practiced law with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco – while there, he devoted a quarter of his time to pro bono work on behalf of indigent clients. He received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. with honors from the University of Michigan. (Remote)

Professor David Zweig (Ph.D., The University of Michigan, 1983) is Professor Emeritus, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.  He is also Director of Transnational China Consulting Limited (HK). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard in 1984-85. He has lived in Hong Kong since 1996. Dr. Zweig studied in Beijing in 1974-1976 and did field research in rural China in 1980-1981 and 1986. In 1991-92 and 1997, he carried out local field research on China’s “opening to the outside world.” Since 1991, he has travelled all over China surveying and interviewing returned academics, scientists, entrepreneurs and employees, as well as Chinese studying and working in Japan and the West. In June 2012, he gave Li Yuanchao, the head of the Organization Department of the Chinese Communist Party a critical evaluation of the CCP’s Thousand Talents Plan. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Internationalizing China: domestic interests and global linkages, China’s Brain Drain to the US, and Sino-U.S. Energy Triangles: Resource Diplomacy under Hegemony. He is a Contributing Writer to the South China Morning Post. His new report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (Washington, DC) is “America Challenges China’s National Talent Programs,” CSIS, No. 4, May 2020. He has two online classes registered with COURSERA, one on domestic Chinese politics and one on China and the World, where he has taught over 19,000 students.

Ying Chan is an award-winning journalist, educator, e-learning advocate and media consultant. She currently serves as the Master of Shun Hing College at The University of Hong Kong, which is a residential college committed to enhancing learning experience through extra-mural intellectual and social engagements. Ms. Chan is Founding Director of The University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre (1998–2016), and has spent 23 years in New York City as a journalist, covering immigration, political campaign finance and U.S.-China relations. (Moderator)

China-US “20/20”s

At the start of a new decade, the vision of the world will continue to be dominated by the trajectory of China-US relations in the years and decades ahead. In January 2020, we inaugurated this series with a discussion by Niall Ferguson to glance back at history and look forward in the coming decade at the opportunities and challenges that the two largest economic forces in the world will likely face, both together and independently. Only a “20/20” vision brought about by the long-lasting bridges between the peoples, institutions and diplomatic levels of these two super-powers will be able to contribute to the stability and resilience of the region and the world.