Category: Helen T. Lin Legacy Initiative Tiger Talk Recording

Only recently has it become reasonable that historians should include climate in their analyses of the past. In this case, research on grain prices during the Ming dynasty revealed that China was in lock-step with Europe in experiencing what climate historians call the Little Ice Age, extending from the start of the fourteenth century and carrying on, up and down, into the nineteenth. In this Tiger Talk, Tim Brook explains that given our growing understanding of the role of climate in human society, we have to include climate change as a determining variable in the rise and fall of states and societies. While his recent book The Price of Collapse: Finding the Little Ice Age in Ming China is lauded as providing an entirely new approach to the economic and social history of China, Tim considers The Price of Collapse as “not a book I set out to write, but when I found the evidence, I had no choice but to write it.”

Dr. Brook is a historian of China since the 13th century, and writes on a range of political, social, and cultural topics, with a focus on China’s political, diplomatic, and environmental engagements with the world. He came to UBC from the University of Toronto to serve as the principal of St. John’s College and to hold the Republic of China Chair at the UBC Centre for Chinese Research.

Dr. Brook’s first connections with British scholarship were formed when he was an exchange student in China in the mid-1970s, during which time he became good friends with like-minded British students who similarly ventured out to learn about China as it opened to the world.
Since arriving at UBC in 2004, Dr. Brook has published nine books, mostly notably Vermeer’s Hat and most recently Great State: China and the World. Brook has been honoured with appointments as a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the Royal Society of Canada, a Getty Fellow, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and this past spring, as a visiting professor at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence, where he launched a project on the creation of a 17th-century English library that aspired to encompass knowledge of the world.

Healthcare to the masses knows no border. Kwan Kew Lai fulfilled her childhood dreams of worldwide medical volunteering when she left medical academia as a professor of medicine in 2006 to be a medical humanitarian volunteer. She began her volunteer work right after the Asian Tsunami. Since then she has volunteered all over the world for HIV/AIDS, and worked with refugees and internally displaced people during wars and conflicts, after natural disasters, including the greatest Ebola outbreak in West Africa. She chronicles her experiences in her first two books: Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak, and Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir. Kwan Kew will share what motivated her to change her career path, the challenges she faces, and her myriad of volunteering exploits in her almost two decades of humanitarian work. Her most recent book is a memoir, The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly, describing how she came from an impoverished family in Penang, Malaysia to attend Wellesley College on a full scholarship.

Joan Kaufman’s varied and accomplished career in China is a prism through which we can view the arc of China’s transformation from “reform and opening up” to today. After two degrees in Chinese Studies, a masters in health and medical sciences and a thesis (and book) on China’s Population Policy, Joan moved to China in 1980 to work for the newly opened UN office, for the first of 4 extended work stints in China totaling over 15 years to date, including 5 years as a grant maker for the Ford Foundation’s China Office. She has taught, consulted, and published on China and global health, reproductive health, population, HIV/AIDS, women’s rights, and NGOs over her career. Joan will reflect on her early China days, her funniest China stories of the last 40 years, and the depressing state of US China relations. She continues to travel often to China in her current job as the Senior Director for Academics for Schwarzman Scholars and will also talk about the program and her hopes for the future.

Joan Kaufman, ScD, is the Senior Director for Academic Programs at Schwarzman Scholars, Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Visiting Professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. A public health and China expert, she has lived and worked in China for 15 years since 1980 for the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, and Columbia University.  Prior to joining Schwarzman Scholars, she was the Director of Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia (Beijing) and Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. In 2002, she founded and directed (for a decade) the AIDS Public Policy Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, working in both China and Vietnam. She was a Distinguished Scientist at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management from 2003-2012, Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard from 2001-2002 and a Soros Reproductive Health and Rights Fellow in 2005. Her publications cover global health policy, HIV/AIDS, women’s rights, reproductive health, population, emerging infectious diseases, and civil society with a focus on China. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

CMB was started in 1914 as the second major program of the Rockefeller Foundation, and it was endowed in 1928 as an independent foundation incorporated in New York. Its initial commitment was to establish and operate the Peking Union Medical College in Beijing, which it carried out from 1914 through 1950. After withdrawal from the mainland of China in early 1951, the CMB extended its capacity building work to other Asian countries. Following its return to the mainland of China in 1980, CMB has expanded support in medical education and research to more than a dozen medical universities in China, while continuing to make capacity-building grants in Southeast Asia. Founded in 1914, the China Medical Board (CMB) is an independent American foundation. Its mission is to advance health, equity, and the quality of care in China and Southeast Asia. Working in a spirit of partnership at the forefront of strategic philanthropy, CMB strives to build capacity in an interdependent world that fosters innovation in professional education, policy research, and global health. Dr. Inui served as a Trustee for China Medical Board 1999-2015 and as a consultant for improving residency training in China for CMB 2015-2017.

In Murder in Manchuria, Scott D. Seligman explores an unsolved murder set amid the chaos that reigned in China in the run-up to World War II. The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria—an area some called China’s “Wild East”—and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Semyon Kaspé, a young Jewish musician, is kidnapped, tortured, and ultimately murdered by disaffected, antisemitic White Russians, secretly acting on the orders of Japanese military overlords who covet his father’s wealth. When local authorities deliberately slow-walk the search for the kidnappers, a young French diplomat takes over and launches his own investigation.

Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the true, tragic saga of Kaspé is told in the context of the larger, improbable story of the lives of the twenty thousand Jews who called Harbin home at the beginning of the twentieth century. Scott recounts the events that led to their arrival and their hasty exodus—and solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.

Writer, historian, genealogist, and retired corporate executive

Scott is an award-winning writer, a historian and a former corporate executive who holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton and a master’s degree from Harvard. Now based in Washington, DC, he spent much of his career in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, is fluent in Mandarin and reads and writes Chinese. He has worked as a legislative assistant to a member of the U.S. Congress, lobbied the Chinese government on behalf of American business, managed a multinational public relations agency in China, and served as spokesperson and communications director for a Fortune 50 company. He has taught English in Taiwan and Chinese in Washington.

Scott has written four books on early Chinese-Americans and co-authored a Chinese cookbook and a Chinese phrasebook for travelers. His 2018 work, The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice, about a young Chinese man accused of murdering three of his countrymen in Washington, DC in 1919, won the gold medal in history in the 2019 Independent Publisher 2019 Book Awards, and his most recent work, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902, was a finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards.

Few Chinese intellectuals and political reformers turned to Confucianism and Communism for political inspiration at the end of the twentieth century. But the traditions have mounted remarkable comebacks in mainland China. What explains the return of Confucianism and Communism? And what are the implications for Chinese academia and the political system? Drawing on his new book, “The Dean of Shandong,” (Princeton, 2023) — “an inside view of Chinese academia and what it reveals about China’s political system” that was selected as a Financial Times Best Summer Book in 2023– Daniel A. Bell will attempt to answer these questions.

Daniel A. Bell (貝淡寧) is Professor, Chair of Political Theory with the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He served as Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University (Qingdao) from 2017 to 2022. His books include “The Dean of Shandong” (2023), “Just Hierarchy” (co-authored with Wang Pei, 2020), “The China Model” (2015), “The Spirit of Cities” (co-authored with Avner de-Shalit, 2012), “China’s New Confucianism” (2008), “Beyond Liberal Democracy” (2007), and “East Meets West” (2000), all published by Princeton University Press. He is also the author of “Communitarianism and Its Critics” (Oxford University Press, 1993). He is founding editor of the Princeton-China series (Princeton University Press) which translates and publishes original and influential academic works from China. His works have been translated in 23 languages. He has been interviewed in English, Chinese, and French. In 2018, he was awarded the Huilin Prize and was honored as a “Cultural Leader” by the World Economic Forum. He has held fellowships at Princeton, Stanford, and Hebrew University.

“This talk will invite robust audience engagement on a topic of interest to all: China’s place in a changing world. The talk will begin with a lively back-and-forth between Steve Marsheid and Terry Cooke on three focal issues pertinent to the topic: (1) China’s exercise of soft power (economic & cultural), hard power (militarization), and sharp power (economic coercion, as cited by last week’s G7 leaders) internationally; (2) China’s intertwined interests in Ukraine and Taiwan; and (3) China’s bid to build an alternative to the U.S./Western-led liberal, rules-based, democratic global order.

This will set the stage for a longer-than-typical audience involvement segment, structured not strictly as Q&A but more so as open discussion on these and other sub-topics. To engage the maximum number of people in productive and enjoyable consideration of the myriad perspectives that can be brought to bear on this broad topic, we encourage all participants to cultivate a Taoist approach – led more be questions than advocacy of fixed positions and favoring brevity over discursiveness. The idea is that we’re all like the blind-folded Indian sages feeling different parts of the elephant. The whole will ultimately best be apprehended by attending to all the individual perspectives.”

Chairman, Still Waters Green Technology
Steve is Chairman of Still Waters Green Technology, a UK based renewable energy developer. He serves as independent non-executive director of four publicly listed companies: Fanhua, Inc., Jinko Solar Inc., ZZ Capital International Ltd., and Hexindai. Steve is also a trustee emeritus of Princeton-in-Asia. From 1998-2006, Steve worked for GE Capital. During his time with GE, Steve led GE Capital’s business development activities in China and Asia Pacific, primarily acquisitions and direct investments. Prior to GE, Steve worked with the Boston Consulting Group throughout Asia. Steve was a banker for ten years in London, Chicago, New York, Hong Kong and Beijing with Chase Manhattan Bank and First National Bank of Chicago. Steve began his career with the US-China Business Council, in Washington D.C. and Beijing. Steve earned a BA in East Asian Studies from Princeton University in 1976, an MA in international affairs from Johns Hopkins University in 1980, and an MBA from Columbia University in 1991, where he was class valedictorian. He lives in suburban Chicago with his wife and three children.

Scholar, diplomat, and author

Terry Cooke founded ReGen250 in 2011 as a 501c3 public-private platform to foster community regeneration through environmental initiatives with global reach. In 2014, our China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (CPGP) initiative to bring low carbon solutions to industrial parks in China became one of only 36 competitively-selected EcoPartnerships under the U.S. Department of State’s and U.S. Departments of Energy’s U.S.-China EcoPartnership program.

In FY2019 and 2020, Terry taught a required masters-level course the University of Pennsylvania’s International Masters of Public Administration degree program under Fox Leadership International and the School of Liberal and Professional Studies. CPGP served as the principal case-study in the syllabus for “China and the U.S. in the 21st Century: Sub-National Sino-American Relations.”

Terry publishes the TEA Collaborative, a blogsite regularly examines Technology, Energy & Environment, and macro-development Ambitions in China. The Wilson Center published his book Sustaining U.S.-China Cooperation in Clean Energy in September 2012.

Previously from 2006-8, Terry served as Director for Asian Corporate Partnership at the World Economic Forum, the host of the Davos Annual Meeting and the ‘Summer Davos’ in China. In 2003, Terry retired with the rank of Counselor as a career-member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Commercial Service following tours in Taipei, Berlin, Tokyo & Shanghai.

Terry received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985, his MA from UCB in 1981 and his BA from Princeton University in 1976. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Nepali.

The talk will take a brisk survey of the theme of Cooperation and Competition in U.S.-China Relations as viewed from three different timeframes: (1) the historical perspective over the most recent 100 years (which will be referenced extremely lightly since it is familiar territory for the Helen T. Lin Legacy audience); (2) the ‘recent history’ perspective of the past 20 years will contrast the two strands through my professional work — the 10-year Framework effort launched by Hank Paulson and expanded by the Obama Administration for cooperation with China in energy, environment and climate change mitigation and the fraught competitive issue, which has waxed and waned, involving semiconductors, microchip supply chains and advanced technologies; and (3) a brief state-of-play analysis of where things stand in my view at the current moment at the national level with Biden Administration policies but also touching on sub-national and people-to-people dynamics.

Terry Cooke founded ReGen250 in 2011 as a 501c3 public-private platform to foster community regeneration through environmental initiatives with global reach. In 2014, our China Partnership of Greater Philadelphia (CPGP) initiative to bring low carbon solutions to industrial parks in China became one of only 36 competitively-selected EcoPartnerships under the U.S. Department of State’s and U.S. Departments of Energy’s U.S.-China EcoPartnership program.

In FY2019 and 2020, Terry taught a required masters-level course the University of Pennsylvania’s International Masters of Public Administration degree program under Fox Leadership International and the School of Liberal and Professional Studies. CPGP served as the principal case-study in the syllabus for “China and the U.S. in the 21st Century: Sub-National Sino-American Relations.”

Terry publishes the TEA Collaborative, a blogsite regularly examines Technology, Energy & Environment, and macro-development Ambitions in China. The Wilson Center published his book Sustaining U.S.-China Cooperation in Clean Energy in September 2012.

Previously from 2006-8, Terry served as Director for Asian Corporate Partnership at the World Economic Forum, the host of the Davos Annual Meeting and the ‘Summer Davos’ in China. In 2003, Terry retired with the rank of Counselor as a career-member of the U.S. Senior Foreign Commercial Service following tours in Taipei, Berlin, Tokyo & Shanghai.

Terry received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985, his MA from UCB in 1981 and his BA from Princeton University in 1976. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Nepali.

Acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) can provide effective and cost-efficient treatment for a wide variety of medical conditions, but have not reached their therapeutic potential in America. In China, the public has known the value of acupuncture/TCM for thousands of years and have ready access to acupuncture in hospitals where Chinese and western medicine are available and practiced side by side, and medical practitioners select the most appropriate treatment for the maximum benefit of patients.

Dr. Yong Ping Chen has been practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for twenty-nine years in China and the U.S.

She completed eleven years of medical school training and earned a MD Ph.D. degree in China, where she studied both Western and Chinese medicine. After receiving her MD in 1984, she worked as a surgeon for two years in her hometown Zhejiang Linhai. Seeking for nonsurgical and more preventative treatment approach, she went to Guangzgou TCM University to do the research on using acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine to treat digestive diseases. She also conducted a research on how acupuncture affects the stomach – colon electrical activities and brain-gut peptides in Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) patients. She published eight books and sixteen research papers before she was invited to teach acupuncture and Chinese Medicine at Chinese medical colleges in Los Angeles in 2002. She later moved to Camarillo to set up her clinic.

Chen’s Chinese Medicine in Camarillo is a general practice clinic treating the full range of conditions for which acupuncture is effective, including digestive diseases, immune and nervous system disorders, stress and pain related conditions, as well as providing general wellness and preventative health treatment. Chinese herbal treatments are also available in the form of herbal teas, pills, tablets, granules and fresh cooked herbal soups.

Angus Taylor Simmons, a senior Foreign Service Officer at the Department of State, joined the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School in August, 2012 as its sixth Public Diplomat in Residence. Simmons came to the Center with over thirty years of experience in policy and program implementation, public diplomacy, negotiation, and management responsibilities. Previously, he served as Economic Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Prior to that, he served two tours as head of the U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Najaf, Iraq, and as Political Counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Simmons has had various other diplomatic assignments throughout his career across Asia and South Asia. These include U.S. Consul General in Mumbai, India; U.S. Consul General in Shenyang, China; Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; and Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, Burma. Simmons is a graduate of Oxford University in Oriental Studies as well as the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He speaks Chinese, Japanese and Arabic.

In the fall of 1971, Zhou Enlai selected an extraordinary group of Chinese foreign affairs officials to send to New York to open China’s Mission to the United Nations after the PRC regained its UN seat that November. The group that lived and worked in New York in the years that followed were arguably the most outstanding collection of foreign affairs officials that China has ever gathered in one place outside China. In these early years they managed major aspects of China’s relations with the United States government and people-to-people relations as well as China’s representation in the UN. They came from a variety of Chinese institutions (not just the Foreign Ministry). They included, beginning a couple of years after 1971, five children sent to study in New York on a special program approved by Mao Zedong, two of whom are well-known in China today. The years from 1971 to after Mao’s death in 1976 were tremendously eventful for this small group. One was murdered in their original hotel. They had to decipher and try to manage the conflicts over the PRC and Taiwan that fiercely, sometimes violently, split Chinese communities in the US. They had to figure out Andy Warhol, and what to do about interviews with Jiang Qing on instructions from Beijing (when Jiang Qing was still a major political figure in China). They had to very quickly figure out the complexities of New York real estate for a growing band of diplomats. Professor Sidel will review a number of these events and what became of key figures in this group.

Mark Sidel is Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an elected member of the American Law Institute. He serves on the boards of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, the China Medical Board, Give2Asia (the primary philanthropic intermediary between the United States and China), Latitude Global, and The Rights Practice (US).

Sidel is affiliated for research with University of Liverpool School of Law and Social Justice and its Charity Law and Policy Unit (as visiting Chair in Global Justice and Honorary Professor in Law); the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy (CSIP) in New Delhi; the US-Asia Law Institute (USALI) at NYU Law School; the Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management (CNSM) at City University of New York, Baruch College; the University of Western Australia Law School; and the Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 2016 and 2017 Sidel served as the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation Visiting Chair in Community Philanthropy at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University; in spring 2018 as Ian Potter Foundation Fellow at the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies in Brisbane; and in February-March 2020 as visiting scholar at the University of Western Australia Law School in Perth. From 2020-2024 he served as visiting professor of law at Cardozo Law School in New York.

In addition to his academic work, Sidel has served as president of the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR), the international academic association working to strengthen research on civil society, philanthropy and the nonprofit sector; on the Council on Foundations Community Foundations National Standards Board, the national accrediting and standard setting body for American community foundations and trusts; and on the boards of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA), the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), and other organizations.

Advising and consulting assignments have included SIDA/Indevelop (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, on human rights programs in China); the government of Denmark (Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Danish development cooperation, on human rights and legal reform programs in Vietnam); the Ford Foundation (on legal reform programs in China); the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights (on human rights and legal reform programming in China and Vietnam); the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (on philanthropic law and policy in China); and many other international and donor organizations. Over the past eight years Sidel has assisted a wide range of US and other foundations, NGOs, think tanks and others with issues under the Chinese Overseas NGO Law.

Professor Sidel has served as Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Melbourne Law School, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po, in the chaire Asie), Brooklyn, Cardozo, Victoria, Vermont, Miami and Denver law schools and other institutions, and as W. G. Hart Lecturer in Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London.

In 2008 he won the ICNL-Cordaid Civil Liberties Prize for his work on the impact of anti-terrorism law on civil society in comparative perspective, and in 2012 he was named to the Outstanding Academic Award by the Nonprofit Organizations Committee of the American Bar Association, Business Law Section. He is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. in history), Yale University (M.A. in history), and Columbia Law School