Presbyterian College to host symposium on global partnership between U.S.-China
October 29, 2009
CLINTON, SC – October 29, 2009 – Presbyterian College will host “Global Partnerships in the 21st Century: U.S. and China” – a symposium exploring the relation between the world’s superpowers – at a Nov. 6 event on the Clinton campus.
Held in conjunction with PC’s formal opening and daylong celebration of a Confucius Institute awarded last year by the Chinese government, the symposium is open to the public and will feature several prominent experts on Sino-U.S. relations, including a dignitary from the Chinese Embassy to the United States.
Dr. Shaozhong You, the current minister counselor of the Education Office at the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States, will speak at the symposium’s closing session at 4 p.m. in PC’s Belk Auditorium.
A graduate of the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management in Arizona, and Wuhan University in China, You is the former secretary general of the Chinese Education Association for International Exchange in the Ministry of Education.
The symposium will open, however, at 2:30 p.m. with a panel discussion featuring Dr. Mary Brown Bullock, president emerita of Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga.
An expert on Chinese history, Bullock serves as a member of the board of trustees of the Asia Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations; as chair of the China Medical Board of New York; and as a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. In 2007, Bullock joined the faculty of Emory University as visiting distinguished professor of China studies. She also has taught at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and served as the director of the university’s Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China.
She is the author of An American Transplant: The Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College and The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy and China.
A second panel discussion will begin at 3:30 p.m. and will feature Dr. Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations based in New York City.
Much of the New York native’s educational and professional career has revolved around China and Asia. In 1964, Schell graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in far eastern history and has also studied Chinese language at Stanford University and as an exchange student at National Taiwan University. In 1968, he earned his Ph.D. in Chinese history from the University of California, Berkeley.
He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and covered the war in Indochina for Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. He also has written for The New Yorker, Time, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, the China Quarterly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
Schell has written 14 books, nine on China, and is at work on an interpretation of the last 100 years of Chinese history. He is the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorentestien Prize in Asian Journalism.
Schell also served as a program consultant for the “60 Minutes” report “Made In China,” which received both the Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Silver Baton award in broadcast journalism and an Emmy Award.
Other symposium panelists have been drawn from the faculty and administration of the consortium of Upstate schools – Presbyterian College, Clemson University, Converse College, Furman University, and Wofford College – that will partner with the State Department of Education to develop a plan to teach Chinese in primary and secondary schools.
In addition, the Confucius Institute will partner with the Upstate’s Global Trade Consortium/Tianjin Free Trade Zone Administration, the Upstate Alliance, and PC’s exchange partner in China, Guizhou University, to provide outreach programming to the general public and business leaders who are interested in engaging China.
The Confucius Institute, which will be headquartered at PC with an annex at the Global Trade Consortium in Greenville, is led by Dr. David Liu, an assistant professor of political science who joined the PC faculty in 2008.
