Join us for the return of an Asia Society tradition: a conversation with experts about the year ahead. For this year’s iteration, Bloomberg’s Bobby Ghosh will lead a conversation with Bates Gill, Executive Director, Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis who will cover China and U.S.-China relations, the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict’s Senior Advisor Sidney Jones who will cover Southeast Asia, and economist Paul Sheard who will focus on Japan's economic and policy outlook and give a big picture outlook for the global economy.

What are the most important developments to expect in Asia in 2024? From highly consequential elections in the U.S., Taiwan, and Indonesia to the continuing impact and uncertainty of the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel-Hamas, from rising interest rates to breathtaking disruptions by Artificial Intelligence, Asia security and dynamism will be tested next year. Join us to discuss trends, events and leaders in Asia to watch in 2024.

Speakers

Dr. Bates Gill is Executive Director of Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Prior to joining the Asia Society, he held a number of research and academic leadership positions and most recently, he was professor and chair of the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University in Sydney and was also the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence with the Asia Society Australia. In other roles, he served as director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, as Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and as founding director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. Among his other professional affiliations, he is a Senior Associate Fellow with the Royal United Services Institute in London and serves on the Board of Governors of the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, and on the Board of Advisors of the National Bureau of Asian Research. The author or editor of nine books, his most recent book, Daring to Struggle: China’s Global Ambitions Under Xi Jinping was published in 2022. He received the Royal Order of the Commander of the Polar Star, the highest award bestowed up foreigners by the Swedish monarch, for his contributions to Swedish interests.

Sidney Jones is Senior Adviser to the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) in Jakarta and an adjunct associate professor at New York University. She served as IPAC director from 2013 to 2021, when she returned to New York. From 2002 to 2013, she  worked for the International Crisis Group in Jakarta, first as Southeast Asia project director, then as senior adviser to the Asia program. She had earlier worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and New York (1977-84); Amnesty International in London as the Indonesia-Philippines-Pacific researcher (1985-88); and Human Rights Watch in New York as the Asia director (1989-2002). In 2000, she served as Chief of the human rights office of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). She holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and has been a visiting fellow at Australian National University (1995); Berkeley (2012) and Central European University (2017). She received an honorary doctorate in 2006 from the New School in New York.

Dr. Paul Sheard,an Australian American economist, was formerly Research Fellow and Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and before that Vice Chairman of S&P Global. He held chief economist positions at S&P Global, Nomura Securities, and Lehman Brothers, and was Japan Strategist at Baring Asset Management. He was Lecturer in Economics at the ANU and Associate Professor of Economics at Osaka University, and held visiting positions at Stanford University and the Bank of Japan. He has served on several World Economic Forum panels and was appointed by two prime ministers to serve on advisory committees of the Japanese Government. He was a non-executive director of ORIX Corporation. A member of the Bretton Woods Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Economic Club of New York, he sits on the board of the Foreign Policy Association and on the advisory board of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. He is the author of the recent Wall Street Journal bestselling business book, The Power of Money: How Governments and Banks Create Money and Help Us All Prosper; author of two books in Japanese, one, The Crisis of Main Bank Capitalism, won the prestigious Suntory-Gakugei Prize. He has a Master of Economics and PhD from the ANU, and an honorary Doctor of Laws from his alma mater, Monash University.

Bobby Ghosh (moderator) is an Indian-born American journalist. He is a member of the editorial board at Bloomberg, based in New York, where he writes editorials and columns on the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and the wider Islamic world. Previously, he served as editor-in-chief of the Hindustan Times until November 2017. Prior to that, he was managing editor of the business news website Quartz and TIME magazine's World Editor. He is an American national and he was the first immigrant to be named TIME World Editor in more than 80 years. He was also TIME's Baghdad bureau chief, and one of the longest-serving correspondents in Iraq. He has written stories from other conflict areas, including Palestine and Kashmir. He has also worked for Time Asia and Time Europe and has covered subjects as varied as technology and football, business and social trends. He started his career as a journalist with the Deccan Chronicle, a popular English daily, at Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India.