Our Leadership

James B. Cunningham​

Chairman

James B. Cunningham served as ambassador and deputy permanent representative to the United Nations (1999 -2004), consul general for  Hong Kong and Macau (2005-2008), ambassador to Israel (2008-2011) and deputy ambassador and ambassador to Afghanistan (2011-2014).  He is currently a consultant, an adjunct faculty member at Syracuse University's Maxwell School and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. ​

Mark Clifford

President

Mark L. Clifford is the author of Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. An honors history graduate of the University of California Berkeley and a Walter Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University, he lived in Asia from 1987 until 2021. Previously, Clifford was executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council, the editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), and publisher and editor-in-chief of The Standard (Hong Kong). He held senior editorial positions at BusinessWeek and the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and Seoul and has received numerous prizes and awards for his books and journalism.

Perry Link
Board Member

Perry Link is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature/Chinese at the University of California at Riverside where he also holds the Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines. He previously taught at Princeton University  and UCLA. He has published in the fields of modern Chinese language, literature, popular culture, intellectual history, art and politics. Among his books are Liu Xiaobo's Empty Chair, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System and Two Kinds of Truth: Stories and Reportage from China. He is a contributor to the New York Review of Books.

Brad Hamm
Board Member

Brad Hamm is a professor and former dean of Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. He has served as a trustee for the Poynter Institute and as a judge for the Scripps Howard National Journalism Awards. He served as an independent, non-executive member of the Board of Directors for Next Digital media company of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Hamm started his career as a newspaper reporter. Hamm holds a PhD in mass communication research from the University of North Carolina, a M.A. in journalism from the University of South Carolina and B.A. from Catawba College in North Carolina.

Board of Advisors

Ai Weiwei

Bennett Freeman

Wang Dan
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Wu’er Kaixi