This year marked the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, a chaotic decade of Chinese history made infamous in the West through books such as Wild Swans and Life and Death in Shanghai, which describ
Jaime A. FlorCruz was CNN’s Beijing Bureau Chief and correspondent, responsible for strategic planning of the network’s news coverage of China, from 2001-2014.
FlorCruz has studied, worked, and traveled in China for more than 40 years, and he has reported extensively on the country as a journalist since 1980, when he started his journalistic career in China and worked as a reporter for Newsweek magazine. In 1982, he joined TIME magazine’s Beijing bureau and served as Beijing Bureau Chief from 1990 to 2000.
FlorCruz has witnessed and reported the most significant events of China’s past four decades, including the country’s economic and social reforms, the crackdown on the Tiananmen protests in 1989, the death of Deng Xiaoping, and the 1997 Hong Kong handover. He has also covered cross-Straits relations, the Sichuan earthquake, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang.
In addition to his on-air reporting, FlorCruz contributed regularly to CNN.com and wrote a weekly online column, “Jaime’s China,” offering analysis about Chinese society and politics.
FlorCruz is the longest-serving foreign correspondent in China to date. He was a two-term president of the 300-member Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (1988-90 and 1996-1999). He was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 2000.
FlorCruz is fluent in English, Filipino, and Mandarin Chinese. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in advertising from Polytechnic University of the Philippines, a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese History from Peking University, and an Associate degree in Mandarin Chinese from the Beijing Languages Institute. He is the founding president of the Peking University International Alumni Association (2010-present).
He is now writing a book on his personal account as a student at Peking University from 1977 to 1982, to be published in early 2017.
Jeffrey Engstrom is a Senior Project Associate at the RAND Corporation. He specializes in Asia-Pacific security issues and foreign policy. His recent work has focused on Chinese conventional and nuclear capabilities, East Asian force projection, and partnership capacity building. Before joining RAND, Engstrom was a defense policy analyst at SAIC where, in addition to researching East Asian military capabilities, he also developed expertise in war gaming. Prior to his work at SAIC, Engstrom served as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Engstrom received his B.A. in Political Science and International Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a M.P.P. from the University of Chicago.
Michael S. Chase is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and an adjunct professor in the China Studies and Strategic Studies Departments at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C.
A specialist in China and Asia-Pacific security issues, Chase was previously an Associate Professor at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC) in Newport, Rhode Island, where he served as Director of the strategic deterrence group in the Warfare Analysis and Research Department and taught in the Strategy and Policy Department. Prior to joining the faculty at NWC, he was a research analyst at Defense Group Inc. and an Associate International Policy Analyst at RAND. He is the author of the book Taiwan’s Security Policy: External Threats and Domestic Politics and numerous chapters and articles on China and Asia-Pacific security issues. His work has appeared in journals such as Asia Policy, Asian Security, China Brief, Survival, and the Journal of Strategic Studies.
His current research focuses on Chinese military modernization, China’s nuclear policy and strategy and nuclear force modernization, Taiwan’s defense policy, and Asia-Pacific security issues. Chase holds a Ph.D. in International Affairs and an M.A. in China Studies from SAIS and a B.A. in politics from Brandeis University. In addition, he studied Chinese at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China.
Zhenhua Ltd. is a glass-making firm based in Dezhou, a city in China’s northeastern Shandong province. The factory sits amid a cluster of modern residential areas, so when the company failed to limit its emissions of polluted air and dust into the atmosphere, many local families suffered.
Crispin Rovere is a former convenor of the Australian Labor Party’s ACT International Affairs Policy Committee. He is a regular contributor to think tank publications such as The National Interest and the Lowy Institute for International Policy’s The Interpreter, and has authored several journal publications on nuclear policy. Rovere was a Ph.D. candidate at the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. He previously worked in Secretariat of the Asia Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament.
James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and is coauthor of Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (second edition forthcoming in October 2018).
On August 12, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued its annual report card on China’s economy and gave the country mixed grades, finding that its “economic transition will continue to be complex, challenging, and potentially bumpy.” In particular, the report emphasized the need for China to get its corporate debt under control. That sounds sensible enough. But it does not reflect a consensus among or within the China-watching community.
China will allow Microsoft, Cisco, other foreign tech companies to join the influential Technical Committee 260.
Summaries of the consultants’ interviews with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were filed this month.
