This annual award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. It is awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

This year's recipient is Melinda Liu. Ms. Liu was named Newsweek's Beijing bureau chief in September 1998, returning to the bureau she herself opened in 1980. Prior to that, she served as diplomatic correspondent, operating out of Newsweek's Washington Bureau between 1992 and 1998. Liu has reported extensively on international policy, both in the U.S. and abroad.

In the spring of 1989, Liu supervised Newsweek's coverage of the Tiananmen Square student protests. In September 1988 she was the only Western staff correspondent in Rangoon when the Burmese military launched a violent takeover. In 1986 and 1987, Liu covered the fall of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos and unsuccessful coup attempts against President Corazon Aquino, obtaining exclusive interviews with fugitive leaders of the mutiny.

Liu joined Newsweek in 1980 and opened the magazine's Beijing bureau the same year. She returned to New York in 1982 as a general editor for Newsweek International. Prior to joining Newsweek, Liu was China-economy correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review. She was also a Taipei stringer for Newsweek, the Washington Post and CBS News.

Lyman and Morrison will discuss the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independent Task Force Report on the US and Africa. The Report argues that Africa is becoming steadily more central to the United States and to the rest of the world in ways that transcend humanitarian interests. Africa now plays an increasingly significant role in supplying energy, preventing the spread of terrorism, and halting the devastation of HIV/AIDS. Africa's growing importance is reflected in the intensifying competition with China and other countries for both access to African resources and influence in this region. A more comprehensive U.S. policy toward Africa is needed, the report states, and it lays out recommendations for policymakers to craft that policy. The report is available at www.cfr.org.

Princeton N. Lyman is the Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow and Director for Africa Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. Ambassador Lyman served for over three decades at the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), completing his government service as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. He was previously Ambassador to South Africa, Ambassador to Nigeria, Director of Refugee Programs and Director of the USAID Mission to Ethiopia.

From 1999 to 2000, he was Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. Ambassador Lyman held the position of Executive Director of the Global Interdependence Initiative of the Aspen Institute (1999 to 2003) and has received the President's Distinguished Service Award and the Department of State Distinguished Honor Award. Ambassador Lyman has published on foreign policy, African affairs, economic development, HIV/AIDS, UN reform, and peacekeeping. He coauthored the Council on Foreign Relations Special Report entitled Giving Meaning to "Never Again": Seeking an Effective Response to the Crisis in Darfur and Beyond. His book, Partner to History: The U.S. Role in South Africa's Transition to Democracy, was published in 2002. He earned his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University. He serves as the Co-Director of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independent Task Force on Africa.

J. Stephen Morrison is Director of the Africa Program and the Task Force on HIV/AIDS at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He joined CSIS in January 2000 and in late 2001, launched the CSIS Task Force on HIV/AIDS. The task force is a multiyear project co-chaired by Senators Bill Frist (R-TN) and John Kerry (D-MA) and funded by the Gates Foundation and the Catherine Marron Foundation. Dr. Morrison co-chaired the reassessment of the U.S. approach to Sudan that laid the basis for the Bush administration push for a negotiated peace settlement, and in the summer of 2002 he organized an energy expert mission to the Sudan peace negotiations in Kenya.

From 1996 through early 2000, Dr. Morrison served on the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, where he was responsible for African affairs and global foreign assistance issues. In that position, he led the State Department's initiative on illicit diamonds and chaired an interagency review of the U.S. government's crisis humanitarian programs. From 1993 to 1995, Dr. Morrison conceptualized and launched USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives; he served as the office's first Deputy Director and created post-conflict programs in Angola and Bosnia. From 1992 until mid-1993, Dr. Morrison was the Democracy and Governance Adviser to the U.S. embassies and USAID missions in Ethiopia and Eritrea. He serves as the Co-Director of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independent Task Force on Africa.

Professor Park will address the changes that have occurred in the Chinese labor market over the past quarter century, focusing on the extent to which labor market reforms have successfully created a well-functioning market for labor with a high degree of labor mobility. Like other rapidly growing developing countries, China has experienced rapid structural change featuring a steady flow of labor from agriculture to industry, and from rural areas to urban areas. As a transition economy, China has shifted gradually from planned allocation of labor in state-sector jobs to a more open labor market. Although the large magnitudes of these changes are impressive, reform of the labor market has been halting, uneven, and difficult, with much additional reform still required. Prof. Park will look at several dimensions of the Chinese labor market: labor allocation, wage setting, regional differences, and ownership sectors. He will conclude by discussing the key policy challenges that lie ahead.

Albert Park is Associate Professor of Economics and Faculty Associate of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. He is also a research affiliate at the Population Studies Center and chairs the faculty steering committee for Michigan's China Data Center. Dr. Park has been a visiting professor and researcher at Harvard University and Peking University, as well as other research institutions in China and Taiwan, and has served as a consultant for the World Bank on several projects analyzing economic development issues in China, including the Bank's current China Poverty Assessment project. Dr. Park earned a Ph.D. in applied economics from the Food Research Institute and Department of Economics at Stanford University in 1996. His research interests include economic development, economic transition, labor, applied microeconomics, and the Chinese economy. He is involved in numerous collaborative research activities in China, including several large survey projects to study labor market developments in urban areas, and rural education, health, and labor outcomes. He has published over thirty journal articles and chapters in edited volumes, and is the coeditor of a forthcoming volume titled Education and Reform in China. At Michigan, he teaches a graduate course on the microeconomics of development and an undergraduate course on the Chinese economy.

This series is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.

Minxin Pei is a senior associate and director of the China Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1991 and taught politics at Princeton University from 1992 to 1998. His main interest is U.S.-China relations, the development of democratic political systems, and Chinese politics. He is the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Harvard University Press, 1994) and China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

His research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy and many edited books. His op-eds have appeared in the Financial Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and other major newspapers.

Based on recent work in Guangzhou, Xiamen, Taipei, and Hong Kong, this talk will address the relationship of NGO's to political transformation. It will focus in particular on three problems: the relation between state and society under various Chinese regimes, the relation between official and unoffical organizations, and problems of scaling up civil society organizations.

Taiwan/China Seminar Series

Nick Hope will consider the extent to which China has moved closer to the goals of an efficient enterprise system and a functioning banking system, and give his views on what is still needed to atttain both objectives. After China decided to implement the "socialist market economy" in a landmark decision of the Party Congress in November 1993, economic policy makers were challenged to introduce sweeping reforms that affected all aspects of the Chinese economy. Despite the apparent need to advance on all fronts simultaneously, enterprise reform and financial system reform lagged noticeably. But in the new millennium, China has been better positioned to tackle the problems of both enterprises and banks and has approached those problems with more urgency and greater purpose.

Masahiko Aoki, Senior Fellow, Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center will moderate.

This series is co-sponsored with the Center for East Asian Studies at Stanford University.

China's high technology companies are experiencing a significant shortage of senior and mid-level talent to support the development of their enterprises. Professionals who can operate at world class levels are in very limited supply--and this talent constraint is limiting the growth of the technology sector. How should leading companies in China address this talent shortage?

Heidrick & Struggles and the Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) have interviewed over 80 C-level executives in China's knowledge-intensive industries--semiconductor, e-commerce, computer hardware/software, and telecommunications. The result is a view into China's leadership and talent issues, and a playbook on how Chinese companies can accelerate the development of key talent.

Today, China's base is manufacturing, but to drive its economy in the decades ahead, China must rely in part on more knowledge-intensive industries. How successfully Chinese technology executives address today's talent shortages will help to define China's development path.

The profile of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong has changed in significant ways since Hong Kong's reunification with the People's Republic of China in 1997, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and the SARS outbreak of 2003. Several changes have also appears, the most striking of which is the influx of about 90,000 Indonesian domestic workers and the relative decrease in the number of Filipinas. Another change is the tenor and scope of the workers' activism.

Drawing from recent migrant worker protests (including the anti-WTO protests of December 2005,) Dr. Constable considers the increasingly global and transnational aspects of foreign domestic worker activism and the increased breadth of their networks and affiliations, as well as the implications of such activism in relation to newly generated and displaced meanings of citizenship and human rights within and beyond the context of the self-ascribed "Asian World City" of Hong Kong.

Nicole Constable received her MA and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose interests include the anthropology of work; ethnicity, nationalism, and history; gender, migration, and transnationalism; folklore; and ethnographic writing and power.

Her geographical areas of specialization are Hong Kong, China and the Philippines. She has conducted fieldwork in Hong Kong on constructions of Hakka Chinese Christian identity and on resistance and discipline among Filipina domestic workers.

Her current research involves Chinese and Filipino immigrants to the U.S. and U.S.-Asian correspondence marriages.