Vishakha N. Desai - Vishakha N. Desai is the sixth president of the Asia Society, assuming the position in July 2004. As chief executive officer, she is responsible for managing an international organization with offices throughout the U.S. and Asia.
She sets the direction for the Society's programs in the diverse fields of arts, culture, policy, business and education, overseeing a budget of $22 million.
James Miles - James Miles has been China Correspondent for the Economist, based in Beijing, since 2001.
Before that, he held many positions with the BBC, including Beijing Bureau Chief for BBC News and Current Affairs, 1988 to 1994, Hong Kong Correspondent, BBC World Service, 1995 to 1997 and Senior Chinese Affairs Analyst, BBC News London, 1997 to 2000. James has been interviewed on CNN, Channel 4 evening news, BBC One Ten O'Clock News, BBC Radio 4 'Today', BBC Radio 5 Live evening news and ITV evening news, amongst others.
Orville Schell - Orville Schell was born in New York City in 1940, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, in Chinese History where he earned a Ph.D (Abd).
He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and traveled widely in China.
He is also a contributor to such magazines as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, the China Quarterly, and the New York Review of Books.
Schell has been the recipient of several writing fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. He is also the winner of numerous awards, including the Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award for Asian Journalism, Overseas Press Club of America's Award for the Best Article on a Foreign Subject, a Mencken Award for the Best Feature and a Page One Award for the Best Investigative Story.
The author of fourteen books, nine of them about China, and the contributor to numerous edited volumes, his most recent books are Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangrila from the Himalayas to Hollywood, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders.
He has also served as a television commentator for several network news programs, has worked both as correspondent and a correspondent and consultant for a number PBS Frontline documentaries and been the correspondent for an Emmy award-winning program for a "60 minutes" segment.
Schell serves on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Sundance Documentary Fund jury, and the Social Science Research Council. He is also a member of the Pacific Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and a regular participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Schell is the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
He was recently appointed Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City.
