Committee of 100 Newsletter

Honorable Mentions: Recent Awards to C-100 Members—David D. Ho, Avant-Garde Award, the National Institute on Drug Abuse

David Ho’s pioneering combination anti-retroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS patients changed the dire prognosis for those diagnosed with HIV/AIDS when it was introduced in the mid-1990s. Today, Ho is at the forefront of another AIDS game-changer, with his exploration of a new combination treatment that requires administration only once a month instead of daily. On August 12, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) announced that Ho was recipient of its 2011 Avant-Garde Award to “stimulate high-impact research that may lead to groundbreaking opportunities for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in drug abusers.”

The Committee of 100 4th Greater China Conference

December 4-5
Island Shangri-La Hotel, Hong Kong

"Common Ground: Building Trust for a New Era" is the theme of the Committee’s Greater China Conference this December. The conference roundtables and topics mirror the 20th Annual Conference in New York City in April, with tentative topics including the impact of China’s ever more affluent consumers on the global economy, the internationalization of the Chinese yuan, China’s burgeoning investments abroad, and educational partnerships with the U.S. Conference Co-Chairs Ronnie Chan, Tony Chan, Victor Fung, and Ya-Qin Zhang are currently planning the December 4 gala dinner and the full day conference on December 5. For registration information, go to http://committee100.org/ .

Newsmakers: Links to Members in the News—Leroy Chiao

On July 8, as NASA’s Atlantis Space Shuttle waited to lift off for the last time, CNN interviewed former astronaut Leroy Chiao, veteran of the Columbia, Endeavor and Discovery shuttle missions and six and a half months on the International Space Station. The historic end of thirty years of American shuttle missions coincides with the beginning of commercial space exploration and even tourism, Chiao told Vanity Fair in a lively interview on June 30:

Two years ago, I was a member of a White House appointed committee called the Review of United States Human Space Flight Plans Committee. We were charged to examine the NASA space flight program and formulate several option paths for the new administration to use as a basis for a new space policy. One of our sub-options was stimulating commercial companies to take over the task of ferrying civilian astronauts to and from lower-Earth orbit. . . .

Roundtable: Sustainable Cities: Building Blocks and Stumbling Blocks

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg  set the stage for this roundtable by declaring that “You’re going to see China leading the environmental movement more than in America . . . because they accept that they’re hurting the environment. Their question is when should they move from economic development to spend some of their capital in trying to clean up the air and the water?” Bloomberg bases this assessment on his experience as Chair of C-40, the Climate Leadership Group, 40 large cities (including Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong) working together to pursue sustainable growth practices. Of the 17 cities with over 10 million people today, 11 are in Asia, Bloomberg said. And, most people on earth live in cities, which are responsible for 70% of the earth’s greenhouse gases.

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg. 

In China, cities are now home to half the population, said Lu Mai, Secretary General of the China Development Research Foundation. Lu remarked that sustainable urban growth is an urgent issue in China, because Chinese people want cars and larger homes, and more and more are moving into cities. Some of these Chinese cities, such as Foshan in Guangdong, said real estate developer and roundtable moderator Jonathan Rose, are “new names on the map,” part of the global shift of urban growth from the developed to the developing world.

Committee Members Welcome Jiangsu Delegation to Bay Area

Luo Zhijun, Governor and Party Secretary for Jiangsu Province, and his economic development delegation were hosted at a dinner in the home of H&Q Asia Pacific Chairman and Founder Ta-lin Hsu on July 17 in Atherton, California. A number of Committee of 100 members and members of Congress, and other special guests, attended. The delegation, representing the one of the wealthiest Chinese provinces, included members of the Jiangsu government as well as Jiangsu-based entrepreneurs including the CEO of the solar energy company Suntech, Shi Zhengrong. Governor Luo gave a brief talk introducing Jiangsu’s economic advantages, which was extensively covered in the Chinese press.  

Committee of 100 Responds to Distorted Op-Ed in Wall Street Journal

The Committee of 100 has responded firmly to an opinion piece by Charles C. Johnson in the July 29 Wall Street Journal entitled “The New Chinese Exclusion Act; Self-appointed civil rights defenders support rules that keep Asian kids out of top schools.”

Johnson asserts that there is “deep irony” in U.S. Representative Judy Chu’s sponsorship of the recent Resolution calling on Congress to acknowledge and express regret for the sixty years that Chinese in the U.S. suffered under the national Chinese Exclusion policy (1870-1943) [see C-100 Issues Update for details]. He then goes on to say that Chu “supports the most harmful form of anti-Asian discrimination in the U.S. today: racial preferences in hiring and university admissions,” in other words affirmative action.

Chairman Dominic Ng wrote in response:

Mr. Johnson's piece does not speak to the substance of that resolution, which has had broad bipartisan support in both houses. Mr. Johnson’s piece focuses on other issues, such as the voting record for a single supporter and should not be seen as a critique of the resolution itself.

Roundtable: Forging New Markets—Linking Up or Going It Alone?

Moderator Stephen Roach, Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and a Senior Fellow at Yale University, staged this roundtable discussion by observing that “common ground is the perfect metaphor to depict what China and the United States offer each other.” Cross-border trade flows, said Roach, are an obvious case in point. “Over the years, the U.S. has consistently been China’s largest export market, surpassed by only the 27-country Euro Zone, and now China is America’s third largest export market.” On the other hand, he pointed out, foreign direct investment (FDI) is unbalanced. Multinational companies see China as an offshore platform both for “efficiency solutions as well as garnering toe-holds in the world’s most populous nation.” In contrast, Roach said, China has lagged in its investments abroad, with only $230 billion invested overseas, less than 1½ % of total global FDI. In the U.S., Chinese investments have been “puny,” amounting to less than one-half percent of the total FDI here.  

Pro Bono: Committee Members Contributing to the Greater Good--Walter Wang

Africa was once again the destination of JM Eagle CEO Walter Wang, who traveled this July with Columbia University Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs to observe the fruits of their joint Millennium Villages Project, which aims to supply clean drinking water to 125,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa. Wang has been donating plastic water pipe and funds for engineering and design since 2008, with nearly 500 miles of pipe donated to date in Africa. Committee Bridges in 2009 covered Wang’s first trip to Africa to inspect his first Millennium Villages project in Senegal. This year, Wang and Sachs visited Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya.

Wang and Sachs with Rwandan officials inaugurating a new water kiosk in the village of Gakindo.

The innovative economist Sachs heads the United Nations-commissioned Millennium Project and introduced Wang to the scope of Africa’s water crisis. As the largest manufacturer in the world of plastic pipes, JM Eagle was in a good position to help the Millennium Villages scale up their safe water drinking infrastructure.

Even though Africa is the continent with the lowest supply of water in the world, Wang said: “In learning more about the landscape I realized something—Africa is not entirely water deficient, there must be a good water source somewhere—it’s infrastructure deficient. No matter how far it may be, it can be piped to those in need.”