China Connections – Chinese Encounters with America: Profiles of Changemakers Who Shaped China 

Terry Lautz, co-editor of Chinese Encounters with America: Journeys that Shaped the Future of China, is the author of Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic and John Birch: A Life. He is former vice president and secretary of the Luce
Foundation, and has served as board chair of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Lingnan Foundation, and Yale-China Association. After retiring from the Luce Foundation, he was a visiting professor and director of Syracuse University’s East Asia Program. He is a past
director of the National Committee on United States-China Relations and an advisor to its Public Intellectuals Progarm. Terry is currently a fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Dr. Emily Wilcox is Margaret Hamilton Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures/Chinese Studies at William & Mary and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Dance Studies. Wilcox is core faculty in the Program in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and affiliate faculty in the Program in Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies and the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Wilcox is also a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, where she was previously tenured Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Studies before joining William & Mary in January 2021.

Wilcox earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard University, her MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Wilcox has been a visiting graduate student and Fulbright Scholar at the Beijing Dance Academy, an international postdoctoral research fellow at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, and visiting graduate faculty at Minzu University of China. At Michigan, Wilcox directed the PhD program in Asian studies and was Associate Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. At William & Mary, Wilcox served as Interim Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and Director of the Chinese Studies Program.

Elizabeth Knup is currently a member of the USCET Advisory Council. She is also a senior advisor to China Focus at The Carter Center and senior advisor to the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the board of directors of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, where she co-chairs the Program Committee.

She completed her decade-long tenure as regional director for China at the Ford Foundation in December 2023. In that role, she oversaw Ford’s operations in China and its programmatic strategies focused on U.S.-China relations, understanding the impact of China’s political and economic power in the world, and strengthening China’s domestic philanthropic sector. Elizabeth first moved to China in 1998 to be the American director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies after serving 10 years at the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. She then spent 11 years in the private sector as president of Pearson Education China; chief representative of Pearson PLC; and managing director of Kamsky Associates. While at Pearson, the company owned the Financial Times newspaper and Penguin Books, in addition to its core education publishing, testing, and technology companies.

Scott Tong joined Here & Now as a co-host in July 2021. Before that, he spent 16 years at Marketplace as Shanghai bureau chief and senior correspondent. Scott has reported from more than a dozen countries, including Venezuela, Ethiopia, Burma, and Japan. During COVID-19, he reported a series of features on the pandemic and long-term innovation. At Marketplace, he investigated baby selling in China’s international adoption system, slave labor in Chinese brick making plants, and in Washington, D.C., the doctoring of Environmental Protection Agency science findings on the risks of fracking. Scott has reported from the 2011 Japan tsunami, the 2011 famine in the Horn of Africa, and the economic suppression of Uyghur Muslim minorities in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. 

Prior to Marketplace, he worked as a producer and reporter for the PBS NewsHour, where he joined a team covering post-invasion Iraq in 2003. Scott served as a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in 2013-14. Tong is the author of A Village with My Name: A Family History of China’s Opening to the World (University of Chicago Press, 2017). It takes a long view of China’s economic opening, told through the lives of five people across five generations in his own family.