China and the World of Ideas with discussants Roderick MacFarquhar and Tu Weiming speaking at the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival. Elliot Gerson moderates.
Some of the most inspired and provocative thinkers, writers, artists, business people, teachers and other leaders drawn from myriad fields and from across the country and around the world all gathered in a single place - to teach, speak, lead, question, and answer at the 2006 Aspen Ideas Festival. Throughout the week, they all interacted with an audience of thoughtful people who stepped back from their day-to-day routines to delve deeply into a world of ideas, thought, and discussion.
Bio
Elliot Gerson
Elliot Gerson is executive vice president for Seminars and Public Programs at the Aspen Institute. Gerson is responsible for the Aspen Institute's seminars, including the Executive Seminar, topical and custom seminars, and those offered in Socrates programs. He also manages the Institute's public programs, including the Aspen Ideas Festival and the World Biomedical Forum.
As American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, he manages the US Rhodes Scholarships. He is also a founding trustee of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation Trust, which focuses on African higher education and leadership; a director of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, affiliated with the National Institutes of Health; and director of a Kabul-based logistics, security, and construction company focused on the reconstruction and redevelopment of Afghanistan.
He was a US Supreme Court clerk and has practiced law, held executive positions in state and federal government and in a presidential campaign, served as president of leading insurance and health care companies, and served on many nonprofit boards, especially in the arts and humanities.
Roderick MacFarquhar
Roderick MacFarquhar is the Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science, Professor of Government, and director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.
A former journalist, television commentator, Member of Parliament, and founding editor of The China Quarterly, he is the author of many publications, including The Politics of China: The Eras of Mao and Deng, The Great Leap Forward, The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, China under Mao, Sino-American Relations 1949-1971, and The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, and The Origins of the Cultural Revolution. His most recent book is Mao’s Last Revolution.
Tu Weiming
Tu Weiming is Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies at Harvard University and director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. He taught Chinese intellectual history, philosophies of China, and Confucian humanism at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, and he also taught at Peking University, Taiwan University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Ecole des Haute Etudes in Paris. He has written and edited many books, including Confucian Spirituality and Confucianism and Human Rights. He is currently studying the modern transformation of Confucian humanism in East Asia and Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource for human flourishing in the global community.