china_conference_site

Oystein Alme, Director, The Foundation Voice of Tibet

He has been the director of the Voice of Tibet (VOT) radio station from its start in 1996. It has been targeted from the beginning by systematic attempts at blocking by the Chinese authorities against all its means of dissemination: short wave radio, satellite transmissions and the Internet. VOT endeavors to produce and broadcast unbiased news and information on Tibet-related issues to Tibet and China, in both Tibetan and Mandarin.

Timothy Balding, Chief Executive Officer of the World Association of Newspapers

Timothy Balding was named Chief Executive Officer of the World Association of Newspapers, the global trade organization for the press industry, in November 2005. He had been Director General since 1987, after joining WAN as Deputy Director and Editor of the association's magazine in 1985. Mr Balding, who is British, was formerly a journalist. He worked for several newspapers in Great Britain, including the Oxford Mail, and was a political correspondent for Press Association, the news agency, before moving to France, where WAN is headquartered, in the early 1980s. His honours include that of Knight (First Class) in the Order of the White Rose of Finland. WAN groups 18,000 publications in 102 countries and has consultative status to represent newspapers at the United Nations and its agencies.

Jean-Philippe Béja, Senior Research Fellow, International Relations Studies Center (CERI), Political Studies Institute (IEP-Sciences-Po), Paris

Former Scientific Director of the Centre d'Etudes Français sur la Chine Contemporaine, Hong Kong, Béja is presently a CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences-Po. He was from 1993-1997 Chief Editor of the journals China Perspectives and Perspectives chinoises. He is on the editorial boards of China Perspectives and Perspectives chinoises, Hong Kong, of East Asia: An International Quarterly, New Jersey, and of Chinese Cross-Currents, Macao. He specializes in contemporary Chinese politics. Recent publications include: A la recherche d'une ombre chinoise, Seuil, 2004, on China's pro-democracy movement; he was the editor of "China in Transition," Social Research, Spring 2006, and authored a chapter on "The Civil Rights Movement (weiquan yundong): a new avatar of the pro-democracy movement?" in Amnesty International, Droits humains en Chine: Le revers de la médaille.

Robert O. Boorstin, Corporate & Policy Communications Director, Google, Washington, D.C.

Robert Boorstin helps design and implement Google's strategies on a wide range of policy issues. He has more than 25 years' experience in political communications, national security, public opinion research and journalism. He served more than seven years in the Clinton Administration, including as the President's chief speech writer at the National Security Council and senior advisor to Secretary of Treasury Robert Rubin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher. He helped create the Washington think tank the Center for American Progress and has served as advisor to US and European party leaders and top government officials. Boorstin began his career as a reporter at The New York Times. He earned a B.A. in history from Harvard and an M.Phil. in International Relations from King's College, Cambridge.

Ronald J. Deibert, Director, The Citizen lab, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto

Ron Deibert (PhD, University of British Columbia) is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto -- an interdisciplinary research and development center on the Internet and human rights. He is a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, a research/advocacy project on Internet censorship and surveillance worldwide, and director of the psiphon censorship circumvention software project. He has published numerous articles and two books on issues that relate technology, media and world politics

He is an NGO consultant and advisor on Internet censorship, surveillance and information warfare issues. He is on the editorial board of the journals International Political Sociology, Explorations in Media Ecology, Astropolitics, Fast Capitalism, and Journal of Environmental Peace, the advisory board of The SecDev Group, and The Watston Institute for International Studies InfoWarTechPeace project (Brown University). He earned the University of Toronto Outstanding Teaching Award (2002) and the Northrop Frye Distinguished Teaching and Research Award (2002), and was a Ford Foundation research scholar on information and communication technologies (2002-2004). He was on the Macleans magazine honor roll of Canadians who helped make the world a better place in 2006, and Esquire Magazine's Best and Brightest list for 2007.

Bob Dietz, Asia Program Coordinator, Committee to Protect Journalists, NYC

Since 1977, Dietz has worked as a journalist in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. He started as a freelancer in Tanzania, moved to Uganda after the fall of Idi Amin, and to Somalia in 1981. He was a bureau chief in Cairo and Beirut for Visnews, now Reuters TV, covering Israel's invasion of Lebanon. He moved to Asia as a bureau chief for NBC News in Seoul and Manila, where he opened the NBC bureau shortly before the end of the Marcos regime. In 1988, he won a William Benton Fellowship for Broadcast Journalists at the
University of Chicago, studying international and strategic relations. He was later interim general manager for a start-up Public Broadcasting Service station in his hometown of Philadelphia, before moving to the newly launched CNN International in Atlanta, Georgia.

In 1995, Dietz moved to Hong Kong, where he spent seven years as a senior editor at Asiaweek. He later joined the World Health Organization, handling media relations and risk communication during the SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. At CPJ, he continues to report widely in Asia. In August 2007, CPJ's Asia program launched "Falling Short: As the 2008 Olympics Approach, China Falters on Press Freedom," at a press conference in Beijing (to be updated in June).

Kathryn Dovey, Program Manager, Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights/Program Director, Entreprises pour les droits de l'homme

She has worked in various capacities in the field of business and human rights since 2004 and established EDH, inspired by BLIHR, in November 2006. Dovey worked previously as a legal officer and international tax advisor. In 2003 she obtained a Masters Degree in International Human Rights Law from McGill University, Montreal, as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar. She earned her undergraduate degrees in law at Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne and King's College London (Maitrise/ LLB). She is based in Paris, where she manages the BLIHR/EDH office.

Fan Ho-Tsai, Chairperson, Hong Kong Journalists Association

Miss Fan has more than 20 years' journalism experience, in print, radio and TV news. She has worked for the Hong Kong Economic Times, Commercial Radio, and Asia Television. Her last fulltime job was as News Editor of Hong Kong Broadband Network, a 24-hour pay TV station, where she ran daily newsroom operations. She became a freelancer in 2006, to allow her to study at Hong Kong Baptist University for an MA in International Journalism Studies.

Jocelyn Ford, Chair, Media Freedoms Committee, Foreign Correspondents Club of China

A Beijing-based freelance correspondent, Ford challenged self-censorship in Japan In the late 1980s, she challenged when she worked for Kyodo News Service and became the first foreign reporter assigned to the Japanese prime minister's press corps. She later became Tokyo bureau chief for U.S. National Public Radio's premier business show Marketplace. In 2001, she joined state-run China Radio International, where she helped develop, co-produce and co-host CRI's first live English-language news show since the 1989 events of Tiananmen Square. Her CRI show Realtime Beijing worked to overcome censorship orders and to broadcast accurate, balanced news. In 2002, Ford rejoined Marketplace, opening its Beijing bureau.

Gao Yu, Freelancer, Laureate of WAN's 1995 Golden Pen of Freedom and the first UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize winner

Born in 1944 in Chongqing, she graduated from the Languages and Literature Department of the People's University of China. In the 1980s, she worked as an editor at the Xinhua news agency. She is well-known as a columnist both in the Chinese-language press of Hong Kong and in the United States. In 1988, she became assistant editor of the weekly economic review of the Sciences Institute of the Chinese Society. On June 3 1989, the Beijing Security Office arrested her for her coverage of the 1989 Beijing democracy movement. She was the only intellectual among the 64 persons arrested. She was detained for 15 months.

On Oct. 2, 1993, two days before a planned visit to the Journalism Research Institute at Columbia University, she was rearrested. She was given a six-year sentence for "revealing state secrets." She refused to acknowledge commiting any crime. She was the laureate of WAN's 1995 Golden Pen of Freedom. In 1997, she was first laureate of UNESCO's annual World Press Freedom Prize. On the eve of a high-level Chinese official visit to the United States, she was released "on bail for medical reasons." She has continued as a freelancer in the Chinese press.

Merle Goldman, Professor of History Emerita, Boston University

She has a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College (1953); M.A. Radcliffe College (1957); and a Ph.D. in History and Far Eastern Languages, Harvard University (1964). She is a Research Associate at the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard.

She has been awarded grants by the Social Science Research Council (1969-70), US State Department (1974-75), Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, Bunting Institute (1964-66, 1976-77); American Council of Learned Societies (1979), Wang Institute Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Chinese Studies (1984-85), Guggenheim Foundation (1987-88). She was awarded the Radcliffe Graduate Medal for Distinguished Achievement in June 1981; her awards ceremony speech, "The Persecution of China's Intellectuals," was widely reprinted. She was President of the New England Council of Association for Asian Studies (1985-86) and has been an Adjunct Professor of the Foreign Service Institute, US State Department, since 1998.

She has published numerous books, including "From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China," Harvard Press, 2005, in paperback, 2007; "Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era," Harvard Press, 1994 (listed by the New York Times as "Notable Book of the Year," chosen by the American Publishers Assn. as best book on government of 1994); "China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent," Harvard Press, 1981, paperback, 1987; "Literary Dissent in Communist China, Harvard Press, 1967, Atheneum paperback, 1970; "China: A New History, Enlarged Edition," co-authored with John K. Fairbank, Belknap Press of Harvard Press, 1998, updated 2006. She has been editor or co-editor of eight other books on China and written more than 70 articles in scholarly journals and in The New York Review of Books, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New Republic and elsewhere.

Her husband, Marshall Goldman, is Professor of Economics at Wellesley College and Associate Director of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian Studies; they have four children and 10 grandchildren.

Guo Guoting (Thomas), Maritime and Human Rights Lawyer

He has 21 years of experience as a maritime lawyer and four years as a human rights lawyer. He has also taught law and has published 10 books on law and 500 essays and case studies. He is currently studying for an LLM degree at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He earned an LLB in international law in 1984 from Jilin University, Changchun, China.

From 2002-2005, he was managing partner of the Shanghai Tian-yee Law Group, focusing on human rights cases involving dissidents and Falun Gong members, while also handling maritime and insurance cases. From 2000-2002, he directed the maritime and admiralty department at Richard Wang & Co. In 1999-2000. He was a partner at SG & Co. in Shanghai and in 1996-1998 a founding partner in Zenith Law Firm in Fuzhou. He also did legal work in Hong Kong and Fujian, appearing as an attorney in courts throughout the PRC, various maritime courts, higher courts and China's Supreme Court.

He is an arbitrator of the China International Economic & Trade Arbitration Commission (CIETAC) and has been an arbitrator of the China Maritime Arbitration Commission (CMAC). In 2003-05 he was a visiting professor at Wuhan University Law School and in 2001-05 a researcher at the Foreign Economic and Trade University of China as well as the Shanghai Maritime University. He has written extensively on various aspects of maritime law.

Sharon K. Hom, Executive Director, Human Rights in China

Professor of law emerita of City University of New York's School of Law, Hom has more than 16 years' experience in Sino-American law training and legal exchanges, including as a faculty member and director of the China Center for American Law Study in China, and on the U.S.-China Committee on Legal Education Exchange with China (1990- 2000). She also served as teaching faculty and program director of the US Clinical Legal Education Workshop at Tsinghua University Law School in Beijing (June 2000).

She has made presentations on human rights issues before a number of policymakers, including the US Congressional House Committee on International Relations (February, March 2006), the US Congressional Executive Commission on China (June 2004, February 2008), and the European Parliament (2005, 2007). Hom was recently named by The Wall Street Journal last year as one of "50 Women to Watch" for their impact on business. She has published extensively on Chinese legal reform, trade, technology and human rights

Huang Xiaolu, Expert on China's environmental issues

Born in Nanjing, China in 1946, she grew up at the campus of Tsinghua University in Biejing, China's most prestigious university. She studied at the schools attached to it and taught in its Middle School in 1965-68 and 1978-82. She has resided in Maryland since 1982.

She created the Huang Wanli Study Fund in Washington, DC, in honor of her late father, a distinguished professor of water engineering at Tsinghua who campaigned against ecological disasters he predicted if the Three Gorges Dam were built. He was publicly attacked, isolated, jailed and sentenced to hard labor over his opposition in the 1950s to the Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River. After he argued that the dam was bound to fail, he was labeled a "rightist." When he was sent to hard labor near Sanmenxia during the Cultural Revolution, his predictions about the dam had been realized. Prof. Huang wrote a number of times to the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party on why the TGD should not be built and requesting that there be public input on its feasibility. Nov. 14, 1992, Prof. Huang wrote: "The TGD should never be built. It's not a matter of building it now or later, or a matter of the country's financial situation. It is not a simple matter of ecology, flood prevention, economic development, or national defense. The physical condition of the evolving Yangtze River riverbed and the river's current economic value will not allow the existence of this dam. A democratic government that respects science will not initiate this disastrous project. If the dam is built, eventually, it will have to be destroyed."

Alberto Ibargüen, President and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

He is the former publisher of The Miami Herald and of its Spanish-language sister publication, El Nuevo Herald. During his tenure, The Miami Herald won three Pulitzer Prizes and El Nuevo Herald won Spain's Ortega y Gasset Prize for excellence in journalism.

He studied at Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He served in the Peace Corps in Venezuela's Amazon Territory and in Colombia. He practiced law in Hartford, Conn. Until joining The Hartford Courant, and then Newsday in Long island, N.Y. before moving to Miami.

Ibargüen is chairman of the board of the Newseum in Washington, DC, a museum for free speech and free press. He is on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations and of ProPublica and has been chairman of the board of the Public Broadcasting Service. For his work to insure the safety of journalists in Latin America under the aegis of the Inter American Press Association, Ibargüen received a Maria Moors Cabot citation from Columbia University. He holds an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from George Washington University.

Robert Ménard, Secretary General of Reporters Sans Frontieres

Born in 1953 in Oran, Algeria, he earned a degree in philosophy from Paul Valéry University in Montpellier. He founded RSF (Reporters Without Borders) in 1985. Before that, he was a journalist with Radio France Hérault in southern France from 1983-1989 and freelanced in the region from 1981-1982. He is on the editorial board of the monthly magazine Médias.

He has received numerous awards for his free speech/press freedom work, including an Emmy of the US National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 2006, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought of the European Parliament in 2005, the Journalism and Democracy Prize of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1997, and the European Union's Lorenzo Natali Prize in 1992.

He has co-authored "Ces journalistes que l'on veut faire taire" ("Journalists Somebody Wants to Silence") in 2001 and "La censure des bien-pensants" ("Censorship by the Virtuous") in 2003.

Watson Meng, Founder (2000) and Editor, Boxun News (boxun.com)

Boxun is the first and most popular Chinese online news site based on citizen journalism. Meng's previous positions include commercial manager at Unilever, Zhangjiakou, China, 1995-96; accountant and project manager at Motorola, Tianjin, China, 1992-95. He holds an M.B.A. from Duke University, Master of Economics from Nankai University, China, and Bachelor of Electronic Engineering from Hebei Institute of Technology, China. He was a Fellow at the America-China Economics Training Center at People's University in 1989-1990.
His recent activities include panelist, "The Citizen Journalist: The Internet as a Tool for Freedom of Speech," May 2007; and a guest speaker of Reporters Sans Frontieres annual news conference, Washington D.C. He served as a technical consultant in 2000 for Human Rights Watch's Chinese web site and again in 2001 for Human Rights in China's web project.

Julien Pain, Editorial Director, the "Observers" web site, France 24 television

Pain, 32, is a journalist who directs the innovative "Observers" web site of the French all-news TV channel France 24. The site (www.observers.france24.com) is dedicated to viewer-submitted materials, such as photos and amateur videos, subjected to professional editing. He worked at Reporters Sans Frontieres from 2003 to 2007 as Head of its Internet Freedom Desk, devoted to monitoring and lobbying against Internet censorship and supporting cyberdissidents. As such, he edited a widely translated "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents."

Paul E. Steiger, Editor-in-Chief, President and CEO of Pro Publica

Pro Publica is a non-profit, non-partisan group doing investigative journalism in the public interest. It began in January 2008, headquartered in New York City. For 16 years previously, he was the Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal. Under his leadership, its reporters and editors were awarded 16 Pulitzer Prizes.

Steiger is also the Chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based NGO founded in 1981 to defend press freedom worldwide. He is a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. A 1964 graduate of Yale University in economics, he lives in New York City.

Steiger began his journalism career in 1966 as a reporter in the San Francisco bureau of The Wall Street Journal. In 1968, he moved to the Los Angeles Times as a staff writer and, in 1971, he transferred to that paper's Washington, DC bureau as an economics correspondent. He returned to Los Angeles in 1978 to serve as the Times' business editor. In 1983, Mr. Steiger rejoined the Journal as an assistant managing editor. He was named Managing Editor in 1991.

He has won many awards, including in 2005, the Decade of Excellence award of the World Leadership Forum in London; also in 2005, the University of Missouri School of Journalism awarded him a Missouri Honor Medal for distinguished service in journalism; in 2002, the first Leadership Award; and also in 2002, the Columbia Journalism Award for a "singular journalistic performance in the public interest." The National Press Foundation awarded him the 2001 George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award. He was a member of thePulitzer Prize Board from 1998 to 2007, serving as Chairman in his final year. Mr. Steiger personally won three Gerald Loeb Awards and two John Hancock awards for his economics and business coverage.

Per Toien, Chief of Information, Norwegian Olympic and Para-Olympic Committee & Sports Confederation (NIF)

He is a senior adviser on sports policy at NIF. His background is as a teacher, journalist, and public relations adviser. Formerly in charge of sport development and strategy for NIF, and project director of Sport for All programs in Zimbabwe and Zambia. He was the head coach of the Norwegian National Basketball Team.

Jon Williams, BBC World News Editor

He leads reporting teams in 41 bureaus worldwide, working for the BBC's domestic and international news services, on radio, TV and online. As UK News Editor, he won a Royal Television Society award for the BBC's reporting of the July 7 bomb attacks on London. He was previously Deputy Editor of Britain's most watched TV News program, "The Six o'clock News," during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the 9/11 attacks on the United States. In September 2007, he won an International Emmy Award for the BBC's coverage of the war in Lebanon. A graduate of the University of Manchester, he is on the board of the St. Christopher's Fellowship -- a charity for homeless and vulnerable young people.

Steve Wilson, European Sports Editor, Associated Press, London

A Washington, D.C. native, he graduated from Tufts University in 1979 and has worked in AP bureaus in Boston, Miami, New York, New Delhi, Rome and London. He has been in his present position since 1991 and has covered 10 summer and winter Olympic Games and has covered the International Olympic Committee and the Olympic movement since 1991.

Richard N. Winfield, Chairman, World Press Freedom Committee

Since 2002, Richard N. Winfield has regularly taught courses in comparative mass media law and American mass media and Internet law at Columbia Law School and Fordham Law School in New York City. He serves of counsel to Clifford Chance US LLP and leads the media law reform programs of the International Senior Lawyers Project, which he co-founded in 2000. Since 2006, he has served as Chairman of the World Press Freedom Committee. For over three decades, Mr. Winfield served as general counsel of the Associated Press (AP) while a partner in the New York law firm of Rogers & Wells, which became Clifford Chance US LLP. There he defended AP and other media clients in many hundreds of press freedom cases in the United States and abroad. Mr. Winfield's articles on freedom of expression have appeared in the Journal of International Media and Entertainment Law, Communications Lawyer and other legal publications.

Yuwen Wu, News and Current affairs Editor, BBC Chinese Service

Yuwen was born in China and educated in China, Britain and Canada. She started working for BBC World Service in 1995, and is nowin charge of news and current affairs output in the BBC's Chinese Service. She has written and spoken extensively on Chinese affairs, especially on the situation of the news media in China.

Henrikas Yushkiavitshus, Independent Media Consultant, Paris

Born in 1935 in Lithuania, he began his career at the Lithuanian Television Center (1960-1966). From 1966 to 1971, he was Director of the Technical Center of the International Radio and Television Organization (OIRT - Intervision) in Prague. From 1971 to 1990, Vice-Chairman of the Soviet State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting (Gostelradio). From 1990 to 2001, Assistant Director General/Communication of UNESCO. Since 2001, he has been an Adviser to the Director General of UNESCO.

Starting with the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, as a member of Eurovision Intervision operations group and later as a member of the International Olympic Committee's Television Commission, he participated in preparation and execution of TV and radio
coverage of Olympic Games. In 1981, he was awarded the IOC's Silver Order. His other national and international awards include the State Prize of the U.S.S.R., EMMY Directorate Award of the US National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, U.S.S.R. Order of the Red Banner for his contribution to the Apollo-Soyuz space flight, Lithuania's Order of Gediminas and the Lithuanian Grand Cross of Commander.

Zhang Yu, Coordinator, Independent Chinese PEN Center of International PEN

Born in Wuhan, Hubei Province, central China, in 1952, he resides in Sweden. He graduated 1977 in chemical engineering from Wuhan Institute of Chemical Technology, Wuhan, China, and was a teaching assistant there from 1977-81. He became a research assistant in the department of Inorganic Chemistry, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm in 1982, was awarded a Ph.D there in 1987, serving there as a Research and Senior Scientist from 1988-2005. In 1991-1993, he was a Visiting Researcher in Analytical Chemistry at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain.

In 1990, he founded and was Publisher and Editor of the monthly Nordic Chinese newsletter in Stockholm until it ceased publication in 1997. Since he has been 2000, Editor-in-Chief of the monthly Nordic Chinese Communication magazine based in Oslo, Norway. Starting in 2003, he has been Coordinator of the Writers in Prison Committee, Independent Chinese PEN Center in Stockholm. He has also been active in the Swedish Section of Amnesty International and the Federation for a Democratic China.

Although he holds a valid Chinese passport, since February 2007, he has twice been denied reentry to the China Mainland, even in transit through its airports, based on an oral decision for "activism" allegedly endangering national security because of his PEN activities.