Matt Schiavenza is the Senior Content Manager at Asia Society. Previously, he worked as an editor and writer at The Atlantic, where he launched and oversaw The China Channel. A graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, Schiavenza lived in China from 2004 to 2010. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, and numerous other publications.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is a writer and historian of modern China. She is a graduate of Saint Joseph’s University (B.A., 2004), Yale University (M.A., 2006), the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies (graduate certificate, 2008), and the University of California, Irvine (Ph.D., 2014), as well as Chinese language programs in Beijing and Hangzhou. She is now working on the manuscript for a book about children’s cartoonist Zhang Leping.
Cunningham was the Editor-in-Chief of The China Beat, a blog based at UC Irvine, between 2009 and 2012, and Associate Editor of ChinaFile during a fellowship at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in 2011-2012. From 2014 to 2016, Maura served as a Program Officer at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, where she co-directed the Public Intellectuals Program; in 2016, she became the Digital Media Manager at the Association for Asian Studies in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a writer, her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. She is the co-author (with Jeffrey Wasserstrom) of the third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press in 2018.
Maya E. Rudolph is a filmmaker and writer based in Beijing and New York City. She has contributed writing and visual media to dGenerate Films and to Pangbianr, of which she is also a co-founder. She is the director of Iceberg,a narrative film about a Beijing rock band. Maya holds a B.A. in English and Film from Columbia University.
Massoud Hayoun is a news producer for Al Jazeera America who lived and worked in the Greater China Region for close to three years. He speaks four languages and has written for The Atlantic, Time magazine, and a host of Chinese and North African publications.
Merle Goldman is a Professor Emerita of History at Boston University. Her specialization is in Chinese history. She is the author of a number of books on modern Chinese history and culture. Her last two books, China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (1981) and Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China (1994), were selected by the New York Times Book Review as among the notable books of their respective years. The latter book was also selected by the American Association of Publishers, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, as the best book on government published in 1994. She also has edited five books ranging from a discussion of Chinese culture in the early decades of the twentieth century to Science and Technology in Post-Mao China.
Professor Goldman’s latest research is on “From Comrade to Citizen in the People’s Republic of China: The Struggle for Political Rights in Post-Mao China.” She has published over fifty articles for scholarly journals and also has written for the New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Center. She was a member of the United States delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights (1993-94) and a member of the Presidential Commission on Establishing Radio Free Asia. In 1982, she received the Radcliffe Graduate Award for Distinguished Achievements.
Professor Goldman received a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an MA from Radcliffe College, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Mary Kay Magistad was, for the past decade, China correspondent for the PRI/BBC radio program The World. She traveled widely throughout China and the region, reporting on the implications of China’s transformation on ordinary Chinese and on the world. Her 2007 series “Young China” won an Overseas Press Club award; her 2009 series on China’s quest for greater innovation, “Created in China,” won a Sigma Delta Chi Society of Professional Journalists award.
Magistad also opened NPR’s Beijing bureau in 1996, and served as its China correspondent from 1995 to 1999, initially from a Hong Kong base. Previously, she was NPR’s Southeast Asia correspondent (1993-95), after several years (1988-92) as a regular contributor from Southeast Asia for The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, NPR, CBC, and other media. While based in Southeast Asia, she especially focused on Cambodia’s civil war and the plight of Cambodian refugees, the Burmese junta’s crackdown on pro-democracy forces and ethnic minorities, and Vietnam’s quest to emerge from its post-war isolation. She also covered the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and has reported more recently in Zambia, Rwanda, and Congo, on the impact of China’s rise.
Magistad has an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Sussex (UK), and a Bachelor’s in Journalism and History from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. She has been a Nieman Fellow and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
Michael Anti (Jing Zhao) is a Chinese journalist and political blogger, known for his posts about freedom of the press in China.
Born in Nanjing, Anti became famous when Microsoft deleted his blog at the end of 2005. His case made headlines around the world and contributed to ongoing debates about the role of Western companies in China’s censorship system. Anti himself, while angry at the deletion of his blog, argued that the Chinese are better off with Windows Live Spaces than without it.
Anti has broad experience with both American and Chinese journalism. He worked as a Researcher at the Beijing Bureau of The New York Times. He graduated from Nanjing Normal University in 1995, where he majored in Industrial Electrical Automation, but turned to newspapers in 2001. He has been a Commentator for the Huaxia Times, Correspondent of the 21st Century World Herald, War Reporter in Baghdad in 2003, Researcher at The Washington Post’s Beijing Bureau, Columnist for Southern Metropolis Daily, and Publisher of the Far and Wide Journal. He is a recipient of a Wolfson Press Fellowship at Cambridge University and the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University.
Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, LA. He is the author of Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (2009), Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (2014), Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2021, 2022), Enter the Clowns: The Queer Cinema of Cui Zi’en (2022), Voiceover: Conversations with Sinophone Filmmakers (2024), and Between the Lines: Conversations with Contemporary Chinese Writers (2025). His most recent monograph, Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary (2022), explores the intersection of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, disinformation campaigns, and Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary. He is also the editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader in Taiwan History and Culture (2020, 2022) and co-editor of Divided Lenses (2016) and Modernism Revisited (2016).
He has contributed to numerous books and periodicals, including The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, A Companion to Chinese Cinema, Electric Shadows: A Century of Chinese Cinema, Columbia Companion of Modern Chinese Literature, Harvard New Literary History of Modern China, and The Chinese Cinema Book. He is also the translator of several books, including Wild Kids (2000), Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (2002), To Live (2004), The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2008), Remains of Life (2017), Han Song’s “Hospital Trilogy” (2023, 2025), and Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary (2020), The Running Flame (2025), and Soft Burial (2025).
A Guggenheim Fellow (2023) and a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow (2008, 2021), Berry has received Honorable Mentions for the MLA Louis Roth Translation Prize (2009) and the Patrick D. Hanan Book Prize (2020); he has served on the jury for the Dream of the Red Chamber Prize (2012-2018) and has served as a Jury Member for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse Film Festival (2010, 2018) and the Fresh Wave (2013, 2022).
Qiaoyi (Joy) Zhuang is the New York correspondent for Caixin magazine, the Americas editor for Globus, and a guest host of the podcast “IAmElection.” A graduate of Syracuse University, Zhuang majored in International Relations, concentrating on U.S.-China Relations and NGO management. Zhuang previously interned at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, at the United Nations, and at the American Enterprise Institute. As a Chinese citizen, she is particularly interested in Chinese civil society and stays connected with Chinese NGOs.
Pu Zhiqiang, an executive partner at the Beijing Huayi Law Firm, is a pioneering free speech lawyer and civil rights activist. His other areas of practice include finance, real estate, reputation protection, bankruptcy, unjust competition law, antitrust law, and private housing loans.
His clients have included the investigative journalists Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, whom Pu successfully defended against a defamation suit arising from their best-selling exposé of local corruption in the Chinese countryside published in English as Will the Boat Sink the Water? (PublicAffairs, 2006), as well as, more recently, the artist Ai Weiwei.
He writes frequently in Chinese on a wide range of issues related to law and freedom of expression. His work in English has also appeared in The New York Times and the China Media Project.
Pu studied history at Nankai University and law at the China University of Politics and Law and was a visiting scholar at Yale University Law School. He lives in Beijing.
