Evan A. Feigenbaum
Evan A. Feigenbaum is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research in Washington, Beijing and New Delhi on a dynamic region encompassing both East Asia and South Asia. He is also the 2019-20 James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Initially an academic with a PhD in Chinese politics from Stanford University, Feigenbaum’s career has spanned government service, think tanks, the private sector, and three major regions of Asia.


M. Taylor Fravel
M. Taylor Fravel is the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and Director of the MIT Security Studies Program at MIT. Taylor is a graduate of Middlebury College and Stanford University, where he received his PhD. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, a Fellow with the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also has graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, and The China Quarterly, and is a member of the board of directors for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Maritime Awareness Project.
Arthur Kroeber
Arthur Kroeber is Founding Partner and Head of Research at Gavekal Research. Earlier, he co-founded the China-focused research service Dragonomics in Beijing in 2002 and was the editor of its flagship journal China Economic Quarterly through 2017. Since Dragonomics’ 2011 merger with Gavekal he has been head of research for the combined operation. Before founding Dragonomics, he spent 15 years as journalist specializing in Asian economic affairs, and reported from China, India, Pakistan and other Asian countries. Presently he also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Economics at the NYU Stern School of Business, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and a senior non-resident fellow of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center in Beijing. His book “China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know” was published by Oxford University Press in 2016, with a second edition in 2020, and is widely used in university classrooms.


Kaiser Kuo
Kaiser Kuo is co-founder of the Sinica Podcast and editor-at-large of The China Project. Until April 2016, he served as director of international communications for Baidu, China’s leading search engine. In 2016, he returned to the U.S. after a 20-year stint in Beijing, where his career encompassed music, journalism, and technology. He also spent a year in Beijing from 1988 to 1989, when he co-founded the Chinese heavy metal band Tang Dynasty as lead guitarist. In May 2016, he was honored by the Asia Society with a leadership award for “revolutionizing the way people live, consume, socially interact, and civically engage.”
Susan A. Thornton
Susan Thornton is a retired senior U.S. diplomat with almost three decades of experience with the U.S. State Department in Eurasia and East Asia. She is currently a Senior Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center. She is also the director of the Forum on Asia-Pacific Security at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Until July 2018, she was Acting Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of State and led East Asia policymaking amid crises with North Korea, escalating trade tensions with China, and a fast-changing international environment. In previous State Department roles, she worked on U.S. policy toward China, Korea and the former Soviet Union and served in leadership positions at U.S. embassies in Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus and China.


Sophie Richardson
Sophie Richardson serves as the China Director at Human Rights Watch. She has overseen the organization’s research and advocacy on China since 2006, and has published extensively on human rights and political reform in the country and across Southeast Asia. She has testified to the Canadian Parliament, European Parliament, and the United States Senate and House of Representatives. She is the author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Columbia University Press, 2009), an in-depth examination of China’s foreign policy since 1954’s Geneva Conference, including rare interviews with Chinese policy makers.
Deborah Seligsohn
Deborah Seligsohn is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at Villanova University. Her research focuses on Chinese governance of air pollution. The major focus has been on how corporate concentration (whether companies compete with one another) affects the Chinese government’s ability to regulate air pollution. She also researches other aspects of environmental governance in China, India, and US-China relations, including the role of transparency in autocratic governance and the impact of the China trade shock on US politics. Prior to embarking on an academic career, she had a career in policy, first with the US State Department and then with the World Resources Institute.


Mark Sidel
Mark Sidel is the Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has consulted and published widely on the nonprofit sector and philanthropy in China, India, Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia. He served on the Ford Foundation team that established the Foundation’s office in China, and as the Foundation’s first program officer for legal reform and nonprofit organizations based in Beijing in the late 1980s. Later he developed and managed Ford’s country programs in Vietnam, and then managed Ford’s regional program on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector in South Asia, based in New Delhi. He serves on the board of the Washington-based International Center for Not-for-Profit Law and a number of other groups.
Paul Triolo
Paul Triolo is Senior Vice President for China and Technology Policy Lead at Albright Stonebridge Group. He advises clients in technology, financial services, and other sectors as they navigate complex political and regulatory matters in China and around the world. An expert in global technology policy, he was most recently founder, Practice Head, and Managing Director of the Geo-Technology practice at Eurasia Group. Previously, he spent more than 25 years in senior positions in the U.S. government, analyzing China’s rise as a technology power and advising senior policymakers on a broad set of technology-related issues. At the beginning of his career, he worked as an engineer for a semiconductor testing firm in Silicon Valley.
