Committee of 100 Newsletter

From the C100 Chairman

John S. Chen
Chairman, Committee of 100

March 2011

 

 I am pleased to announce that Dominic Ng will be the next Chair of the Committee of 100. He will take over leadership of the Committee in May. Dominic has been a C-100 member since 2000 and is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of East West Bancorp, as well as an active philanthropist and civic leader in Southern California.  

Consistent with our mission to promote the full integration of Chinese Americans, the Committee of 100 proudly endorses the nomination of U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be our next Ambassador to China. On behalf of C-100, I wrote a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to express our support.

Committee Joins Coalition for a National Museum of the American People

 

In January, the Committee of 100 became one of the more than 130 organizations endorsing the establishment of a National Museum of the American People.  The Museum would be devoted to telling the story of the many peoples who have migrated to the United States, from the earliest arrivals 20,000 years ago until the present.  Currently, the coalition is seeking sponsors for a Congressional Resolution to support the formation of a bi-partisan commission to study the establishment of such a museum.  The museum is the vision of Coalition Director Sam Eskenazi, who was previously public information director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Learn more about the National Museum of the American People.  

Honorable Mentions: Recent Awards to C-100 Members—Tu Weiming, Institut International de Philosophie

Tu Weiming, Director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University and Professor of Harvard University, was elected as a titular member of the Institut International de Philosophie (Institute of International Philosophy), representing China, at the organization’s general assembly in Paris on September 17. This global institute was founded in 1937 to honor the world’s most distinguished philosophers and has only 106 members. Tu is considered one of the foremost authorities on Confucianism and its modern applications. You can watch some of his lectures and conversations with noted philosophers on his website. Tu was interviewed for “Faith Matters,” a TV series produced by WGTE of Toledo, which will be broadcast soon.

Ambassador to China Nominee Gary Locke Headlines C100 Conference

 

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, just nominated by President Obama to be the next Ambassador to China, will top an outstanding roster of speakers from the top tiers of business, the arts and government addressing the Committee of 100’s 20^th Annual Conference on May 12 in New York City.

C100 Leadership Scholarship Program Symposium and Awards Ceremonial Dinner

April 25
Beijing, China
Registration:  Committee of 100—Phone (212) 371-6565; Fax (212) 371-9009; Email: mjee@committee100.org; China contact: sucheng@cn.committee100.org; 86-13701009271.

To date, the C-100 Leadership Scholarship Program (LSP) has awarded scholarships to 136 exceptional Chinese students.  Through LSP, the Committee of 100 seeks to strengthen dialogue between Committee members and China’s top academic institutions. 

Symposium
Co-hosted by Tsinghua University
Tsinghua Science Park International Conference Center
12:30 to 4:30 PM

Honorable Mentions: Recent Awards to C-100 Members—John Chiang, The Association of Government Accountants

California State Controller John Chiang was honored by the Association of Government Accountants (AGA) on February 17 in Washington, D.C. He was presented with the William R. Snodgrass Distinguished Leadership Award, which is given to state finance officials who demonstrate “outstanding leadership in enhancing sound financial management legislation, regulations, practices, policies and systems.” AGA, a national professional association of federal, state and local finance professionals, praised Chiang, who was elected Controller in 2006, for “leadership in meeting the challenges of a global recession by not only keeping the state from plunging into insolvency, but also by establishing programs to help everyday Californians weather the economic storm. He has established programs to make the state’s finances fully accountable to the public, reformed the Unclaimed Property Program and aggressively identified waste, fraud and abuse of public funds.”

For more C100 news visit www.committee100.org.

1882 Project Puts Historic Chinese Exclusion Policy in Spotlight

 
The Committee of 100 has joined the Steering Committee of the 1882 Project, a national initiative to educate Americans about the history and lessons of the historic Chinese Exclusion policy, first enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1882 specifically to bar Chinese and, subsequently, other Asians from immigrating to this country. Not until 1943, when China was needed as an ally in World War II, was the Chinese Exclusion Act repealed. An important goal of the 1882 Project is passage of a Resolution in the 112^th Congress acknowledging the injustice caused by the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts and making a commitment to protect the Constitutional rights of all people.

New Member: Richard Y. Lee

Richard Y. Lee is Chairman and CEO of Amsino Medical Group, a company he founded in 1993 to develop, manufacture and market internationally a wide range of disposable medical devices for use in surgery and all aspects of patient care. Amsino’s headquarters, R&D, distribution, and some manufacturing are in the U.S., with three wholly-owned factories in China. As a boy of seven who was re-located with his family to the remote countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Lee was deeply moved by the experience of helping his sister and parents give simple medical treatments at no cost to the farmers who came to their home seeking healthcare. Although not doctors themselves, Lee’s parents had brought their collection of medical books from the city and every time they went to town, they bought medical supplies. “So my dream started from there. I always wanted to be a medical doctor.”

New Member: Dali Yang

University of Chicago Professor of Political Science Dali Yang is an authority on how China has managed its thirty-year transition to a market economy and a frequent media commentator on Chinese political and economic issues. Yang began studying China’s reform process with his path-breaking 1993 Princeton University dissertation that described how the tragedy wrought by the 1959-61 Great Leap Famine motivated the market-oriented rural reforms of the 1970s. His prolific scholarly output includes Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance (2004) and Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine (1996). Many of Yang’s papers and commentaries can be read on his website. 

New Member: Kelly Cha

Kelly Cha can be found everywhere in China—as a DJ on the radio (The ZhaZha Club Show every night on China Radio International); performing her rock songs on the club circuit and in albums; hosting TV shows as diverse as CCTV’s Action English and Harper’s Bazaar TV; and as a Chinese face for international brands like Mercedes-Benz, Apple, and Volkswagen. Cha has turned her bicultural background into a source of creative inspiration ever since she first came to the U.S. at age eight. At age 14, she began to write about her childhood in Buffalo, NY in Looking at America: Memoirs of a Chinese Girl, a bi-lingual English and Chinese book published when she was 18. Cha returned to China for high school and college and came back to the U.S. to earn a Masters in International Business from the University of South Carolina.