Deborah Davis is a Professor Emerita of Sociology at Yale University, where she previously chaired the Department of Sociology, the Council on East Asian Studies and the Women Faculty Forum. Currently she is a visiting faculty member at Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University and an honorary professor at Fudan University. She previously served six terms as a Trustee of the Yale-China Association and chaired the Advisory Board of the Universities’ Service Center Library at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has served on the editorial boards of The China Quarterly, The China Review, and the Chinese Sociological Review. Her most recent book, coedited with Terry Lautz is Chinese Encounters with America, a Tucker-Cohen book with Columbia University Press.

Hung Huang from childhood has been steeped in East-meets-West interaction. Her mother Hanzhi Zhang was a Chinese diplomat; her stepfather was the late Foreign Minister Guanhua Qiao. At age 12, Huang was tapped by Chinese leaders to travel to the US, where she lived with an American family to learn English and embed in American culture. She attended Vassar College and later began a career in business. She became the publisher of a glossy Chinese fashion publication, and then began to blog. Her independent voice made her an influencer before the word even came into popular usage. Today her candid comments attract many followers on various social media platforms.

Melinda Liu opened Newsweek’s first Beijing bureau in 1980, and has lived and worked in the China mainland for nearly three decades as a U.S. foreign correspondent. In addition to reporting on multiple aspects of China’s modernization as Newsweek Beijing Bureau Chief, she has covered conflicts and military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia and Haiti. She contributed a chapter profiling media personality Hung Huang in the book Chinese Encounters with America: Journeys that Shaped the Future of China, edited by Deborah Davis and Terry Lautz.