On October 31, Just World Educational will release the second session of the US-China Public Dialogue that JWE is holding jointly with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University in Beijing.
This dialogue session will focus on economic issues. JWE President Helena Cobban will be hosting two very experienced specialists:
From Beijing we’ll have Mr. He Weiwen, a Senior Fellow with the Chongyang Institute and Vice Chairman of the Global Alliance of SMEs. Mr. He worked as Economic and Commercial Counselor in the Chinese Consulates General in San Francisco and New York, 1997-2003. He is the author of three books and 200 articles on economic and trade affairs.
From here in Washington DC we’ll have Dr. Yukon Huang, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dr. Huang was formerly the World Bank’s country director for China and, before that, director for Russia. His research focuses on China’s economy and its regional and global impact and he’s an adviser to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and various governments and corporations. His latest book was Cracking the China Conundrum: Why Conventional Economic Wisdom Is Wrong (Oxford U.P., 2017).
The first session of this Public Dialogue series featured Dr. Michael Swaine of the Quincy Institute (here in DC) and Amb. He Yafei of of the Chongyang Institute conducting a rare and informative conversation on several geopolitical and military-strategic issues. The video and other records of that conversation can be found at this Resource Page on our website.
A first, blogged summary of some of the highlights of the first dialogue session can be found here.
The conversations in this series are conducted in English and are released in the US, Chinese, and global media markets in video, audio, and text formats, with subtitles as necessary for each market.
This project is also supported by the international No Cold War coalition.
For 20 years earlier in her career, Ms. Cobban contributed a regular column on global affairs to The Christian Science Monitor. In announcing the US-China Dialogue project, she stated that she considers it important, at a time when many political forces in the United States are building up fears of– and hostility toward– China, to try to arrest and reverse that escalation of tensions.
She said she is particularly happy that, through the collaboration with the Chongyang Institute, JWE is able both to demonstrate to publics in the United States and worldwide that reasoned discussion of tricky issues is still very possible and to start, through such discussions, to lay out fruitful pathways for further cooperation over the months ahead.
In the initial planning for this project, the first “dialogue” session was intended to be a wide-ranging conversation on the past 50 years of US-China relations between veteran U.S. diplomatist Amb. Chas W Freeman, Jr and the Chongyang Institute’s Executive Dean Dr. Wang Wen. However, due to Amb. Freeman’s ill-health that session had to be postponed. We will be glad to inform you when it is possible to set a new date for it.