China Boom CMS

<p><strong>Francis Leung</strong> has worked as an investment banker in Hong Kong for nearly thirty years. He has been dubbed &quot;father of red chips&quot; for leading the effort to get the first Chinese companies listed on the Hong Kong stock market, and managing the first initial public offering of a Chinese company on the Hong Kong stock market. He has worked closely with Hong Kong tycoon, Li Ka-shing, was Asia chairman for Citigroup Global Markets and is a senior adviser to CVC Capital Partners.</p>

<p><strong>Federico Rampini</strong> is <i>la Repubblica</i>'s New York Bureau Chief. Previously, he has served as&nbsp;a columnist and correspondent for<em> la Repubblica</em> in Beijing, where he inaugurated the publication's China bureau in July 2004. As a special envoy, he travels frequently to India, Japan and Southeast Asia. From 2000 to 2004, Rampini was <em>la Repubblica's</em> West Coast correspondent based in San Francisco, California. From 1997 to 2000, he was the European editor of <em>la Repubblica.&nbsp;</em></p> <p>In 2005, his essay &quot;The Chinese Century,&quot; topped the Italian bestseller charts in non-fiction for several months and is now in its sixteenth edition. His 2006 book <em>The Chindia Empire: China, India and Their Surroundings: the Asian Superpower with 3.5 billion Citizens</em> (Knopf), has exceeded 100,000 copies sold. In 2007, Rampini released his latest book, <em>Mao's Shadow</em> (Knopf). Rampini was named among the &quot;EV50,&quot; the European Voice poll of the fifty most influential personalities in Europe in 2005. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism and at the Shanghai University of Economics and Finance.</p>

<p><strong>Fan Jianchuan</strong>, a private collector, founded China's largest museum, the Jianchuan Museum, in 2006. Fan's project includes eight museums commemorating the Sino-Japanese War. Twelve others deal with the 10-year Cultural Revolution, initiated by Mao Zedong in 1966. Fan displays more than 200,000 historic photos, posters, stamps, chinaware, letters, uniforms, badges and other antiques from the Mao era. The museums also house his collection of more than 10,000 paintings, manuscripts and other relics from wars in China's modern history, before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Fan has spent 30 million yuan (US$3.6 million) over the past 20 years collecting the antiques. His museums, covering 33 hectares, cost another 100 million yuan to build. Fan, 47, had been a soldier, a teacher and vice mayor of his hometown Yibin City for two years before founding the Chengdu-based Jianchuan Group, which is involved in real estate development, hotels and cultural projects.</p>

<p><strong>Elizabeth Economy</strong> is the C.V. Starr senior fellow and director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Economy has published widely on both Chinese domestic and foreign policy. Her most recent book, <em>The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China&rsquo;s Future</em> (Cornell University Press, 2004), won the 2005 International Convention on Asia Scholars Award for the best social sciences book published on Asia, and was named one of the University of Cambridge&rsquo;s Top 50 Sustainability Books in 2008 and one of the top ten books of 2004 by the Globalist. She has published articles in foreign policy and scholarly journals including <em>Foreign Affairs</em>, <em>Harvard Business Review</em>, <em>Survival</em>, and <em>Current History</em>; and op-eds in the <em>New York Times</em>, the<em> Washington Post</em>, and the<em> International Herald Tribune</em>, among others. She is a frequent guest on nationally broadcast radio and television programs, has testified before Congress on numerous occasions, and regularly consults for US government agencies and companies. Dr. Economy received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, her AM from Stanford University and her BA from Swarthmore College.</p>

<p><strong>Chen Ping</strong> is the executive chairman of the board of TideTime Group, a company primarily engaged in education, media &amp; culture, and investment. In September 2004, TideTime Group became the single largest shareholder of Sun Sports Media and renamed the company TideTime Sun in April 2005.&nbsp;</p> <p>Mr. Chen is also chairman of the board and CEO of TideTime Sun, which operates broadcasting, publishing, and other media-related businesses. It also holds 30 percent ownership of Sun TV, the first independent broadcaster serving Chinese audiences across Asia.</p>

<p><strong>Bruno Wu</strong> is the co-founder and chairman of the Sun Media Investment Holding Group of Companies, one of China's largest privately held media groups, with investment interests in 20 media-related companies and a portfolio of over 60 media brands and products. Wu served as co-chairman of SINA Corporation from 2001 to 2002 and as the Chief Operating Officer of ATV, one of the two free-to-air networks in Hong Kong, from June 1998 until February 1999. Wu received his Diploma of Studies in French civilization from the University of Savoie, France, in 1987. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration-Finance from Culver-Stockton College in Missouri in December 1990. He received his Master of Arts in International Affairs degree from Washington University, Missouri in 1993 and a Ph.D. in the International Politics Department of College of Law, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 2001</p>

<p><strong>Cai Guo-Qiang</strong> was born in 1957 in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China, and lives and works in New York. He studied stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute from 1981 to 1985 and attended the Institute for Contemporary Art National and International Studio Program at P.S. 1 in New York. His work is both scholarly and politically charged. Accomplished in a variety of media, Cai began using gunpowder in his work to foster spontaneity and confront the controlled artistic tradition and social climate in China. While living in Japan from 1986 to 1995 he explored the properties of gunpowder in his drawings, leading to the development of his signature explosion events. These projects, while poetic and ambitious at their core, aim to establish an exchange between viewers and the larger universe. Since September 11th he has reflected upon his use of explosives both as metaphor and material. &ldquo;Why is it important,&rdquo; he asks, &ldquo;to make these violent explosions beautiful? Because the artist, like an alchemist, has the ability to transform certain energies, using poison against poison, using dirt and getting gold.&rdquo;</p>

<p><strong>Barry Naughton</strong> is a Professor of Chinese Economy at the University of California, San Diego. Naughton is an authority on the Chinese economy, with an emphasis on issues relating to industry, trade, finance, and China's transition to a market economy. Recent research focuses on regional economic growth in the People's Republic of China and the relationship between foreign trade and investment and regional growth. He is also completing a general textbook on the Chinese economy. Recently completed projects have focused on Chinese trade and technology, in particular, the relationship between the development of the electronics industry in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the growth of trade and investment among those economies. His book, <em>Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform</em>, 1978-1993, which was published in 1995, is a comprehensive study of China's development from a planned to a market economy that traces the distinctive strategy of transition followed by China, as well as China's superior growth performance. It received the Ohira Memorial Prize in 1996. Naughton was named to the Sokwanlok Chair in Chinese International Affairs at UCSD in 1998.</p>

<p><strong>Ai Weiwei</strong>, born in 1957, is the designer of Beijing National Stadium (colloquially known as the Bird's Nest) and an outspoken advocate of political reform in China. Ai regularly speaks out against the one-party state and the lack of political reform in China. During the Cultural Revolution, his family was sent to Xinjiang. Ai returned to Beijing in 1976, and founded the avant garde art group &quot;Stars&quot; in 1978, which disbanded in 1983. Ai spent time in New York City, from 1981-1993, at the Parsons School of Design. In 1993, Ai returned to Beijing to be with his ailing father. He helped to establish Beijing's &quot;East Village&quot; and put together a series of books on China's underground art movements: the <em>Black Cover Book</em>, <em>White Cover Book</em>, and <em>Grey Cover Book</em>. Ai is currently working on a project to find the names all the people who lost their lives in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. &nbsp;</p>

<p><strong>Deborah S. Davis</strong> (Ph.D. Boston University, 1979) is a Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her primary teaching interests are historical and comparative sociology, inequality and stratification, contemporary Chinese society, and methods of fieldwork. Davis is currently a member of the National Committee on US China Relations and in 2004 helped launch the <em>Yale China Health Journal</em>. At Yale she has served as Director of Academic Programs at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Chair of the Department of Sociology, Chair of the Council of East Asian Studies, Director of Graduate Studies in both East Asian Studies and Sociology, Member of the Publications Committee for Yale Press, co-chair of the Women&rsquo;s Faculty Forum and Member of the Tenure Appointments Committee for the Social Sciences. Past publications have analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, social welfare policy, consumer culture, property rights, social stratification and occupational mobility. In 2008 Stanford University Press will publish <em>Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-Socialist China</em>, co-edited with Wang Feng. Currently she is completing a monograph entitled <em>A Home of Their Own</em>, a study of the social consequences of the privatization of real estate in urban China.</p>