Webinar
Thursday, June 5, 2025
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Zoom webinar
Speakers include:
Eileen Chow, Duke University
Gabriel “Jack” Chin, UC Davis
Kaiser Kuo, Sinica Podcast
Mae Ngai, Columbia University
Thomas Kellogg, Georgetown Law
Peter Hessler, The New Yorker
Yangyang Cheng, Yale University
Moderator:
Michael Berry, UCLA Center for Chinese Studies
On May 28, 2025, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed that the Department of State would begin “aggressively” revoking visas of Chinese students in the United States. In this time, when so many of our students are faced with uncertainty, fear, and frustration, the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies is bringing together a panel of experts to address such questions as: How these recent policies fit into a long history of anti-Chinese racism in the United States, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the wave of anti-Chinese violence during COVID-19? How should universities be responding to this assault on their international students? And what actions can our international students take to educate and protect themselves?
Speaker Bios:
Eileen Cheng-yin Chow 周成蔭 is Associate Professor of the Practice in Chinese and Japanese Cultural Studies at Duke University, and one of the founding directors of Story Lab at Duke. She is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for Duke Asian Pacific Studies Institute's East Asian Studies graduate program, and a founding/core faculty member of Duke Asian American and Diaspora Studies.Eileen is also Director of the Cheng Shewo Institute of Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University in Taipei, Taiwan 世新大學舍我紀念館與新聞研究中心, and she co-directs the Biographical Literature Press and its longstanding Chinese-language history journal, Biographical Literature傳記文學. Eileen serves on the executive board of the LA Review of Books, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series, Sinotheory. Eileen received her A.B. in Literature from Harvard and her Ph.D in Comparative Literature at Stanford.
Gabriel "Jack" Chin (UC Davis) is a teacher and scholar of Immigration Law, Criminal Procedure, and Race and Law. His scholarship has appeared in thePenn,UCLA, Cornell, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Libertieslaw reviews and the Yale, Duke and Georgetown law journals among others. The U.S. Supreme Court cited his work on collateral consequences of criminal conviction inChaidez v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 1103, 1109 (2013), in which the Court called his Cornell Law Review article “the principal scholarly article on the subject” and inPadilla v. Kentucky, 130 S. Ct. 1473 (2010), which agreed with his contention that the Sixth Amendment required defense counsel to advise clients about potential deportation consequences of guilty pleas. Justice Sotomayor cited his Penn Law Reviewarticle in her dissent inUtah v. Strieff, 136 S. Ct. 2056, 2070 (2016).
He teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Immigration, and is Director of Clinical Legal Education. He also works with students on professional projects. His efforts with students to repeal Jim Crow laws still on the books includes a successful 2003 petition to the Ohio legislature to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, 136 years after the state disapproved it during the ratification process. He and his students also achieved the repeal of anti-Asian alien land laws which were on the books in Kansas, New Mexico and Wyoming. For this work, " A" Magazine named him one of the “25 Most Notable Asians in America.” In connection with classes with a practical component, he has tried felony cases and argued criminal appeals with his students. Professor Chin earned a B.A. at Wesleyan, a J.D. from Michigan and an LL.M. from Yale
Kaiser Kuo is the host of the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China that has run since 2010. He was Head of Podcasts and Editor-at-Large for The China Project, and previously served as Director of International Communications for Baidu. In his over 20 years in China, his career ran the gamut from rock music to tech journalism to corporate communications. He is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and holds an M.A. from the University of Arizona. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. She is author of the award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021); and coeditor of Corky Lee’s Asian America: Fifty Year of Photographic Justice (2024). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press).
Thomas E. Kellogg (Georgetown Law) is Executive Director of the Center for Asian Law, where he oversees various programs related to law and governance in Asia. He is a leading scholar of legal reform in China, Chinese constitutionalism, and civil society movements in China. Prior to joining Georgetown Law, Professor Kellogg was Director of the East Asia Program at the Open Society Foundations. At OSF, he oversaw the expansion of the Foundation’s work in China, and also launched its work on Taiwan and North and South Korea. During his time at OSF, Professor Kellogg focused most closely on civil society development, legal reform, and human rights. He also oversaw work on a range of other issues, including public health, environmental protection, and media development. Professor Kellogg has written widely on law and politics in China, US-China relations, and Asian geopolitics. He has lectured on Chinese law at a number of universities in the United States, China, and Europe. He has also taught courses on Chinese law at Columbia, Fordham, and Yale Law Schools.
Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, Cairo correspondent from 2011 to 2016, and Chengdu correspondent from 2019 to 2021. He is the author of The Buried, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; River Town, which won the Kiriyama Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Country Driving; and Strange Stones. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011.
Moderator:
Michael Berry is an author and translator who is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has written and edited fourteen books on Chinese literature and cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers(2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film(2008), Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2022) The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan (2022) and Translation, Disinformation and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Trans Pacific Disinformation Campaign (2022). 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 as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong).Berry's book-length translations includeThe Song of Everlasting Sorrow (2008) by Wang Anyi, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, To Live (2004) by Yu Hua, a selection in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read library, and three books by Fang Fang, including the controversial Wuhan Diary (2020). His latest translation project is the dystopian science fiction Hospital Trilogyby Han Song, which includes the novels Hospital (2023), Exorcism (2023) and Dead Souls (2024).
Yangyang Cheng is a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her work focuses on the development of science and technology in China and U.S.-China relations. Her essays have appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, The New Statesman, Made in China Journal, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, and have received several awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA), Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Her literary criticism has received the 2024 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from The Washington Monthly and a 2022 People’s Choice Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a co-host, writer, and producer of the acclaimed narrative podcast series, Dissident at the Doorstep, from Crooked Media. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago and her Bachelor’s from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Pacific Center, Center for Buddhist Studies, Center for Korean Studies