Honorable Mentions: Recent Awards to C-100 Members—John Chen, Chinese American Voter Education Committee and Ed Lee!

Honorable Mentions: Recent Awards to C-100 Members—John Chen, Chinese American Voter Education Committee and Ed Lee!

May 2013

C-100 Chairman John S. Chen was honored by the Chinese American Voter Education Committee (CAVEC) for empowering the Chinese American community at CAVEC’s annual gala on February 12 in San Francisco. CAVEC focuses on registration of Chinese American voters, who historically are not well represented in the electorate. Guests showed CAVEC’s political clout, with Governor Jerry Brown, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, and San Francisco civic leader Nancy Bechtle among those present.

 

Nancy Bechtle, President of the San Francisco Symphony, shakes hands with Governor Jerry Brown; Jackson Tai in center.

Long-time CAVEC supporter and C-100 board member Jackson Tai presented the award: “CAVEC is all about empowering the Chinese American community. Tonight, we honor John Chen, who has done much to empower the Chinese American community, first as a role model, and second, in strengthening US China bilateral relationships.”

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Honorable Mentions: Recent Awards to C-100 Members—Yo-Yo Ma, 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom

C-100 Governor and cellist Yo-Yo Ma won the nation’s highest civilian honor on February 15. President Barack Obama gave Ma and 12 other exceptional people the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a ceremony held in the East Room of the White House. Other 2010 Medal of Freedom winners present included President George H.W. Bush, Warren Buffet, and Maya Angelou. Ma, who played at Obama’s inauguration in 2009, was celebrated as “one of our nation’s most acclaimed and respected artists. His music has bound us together and captured our imagination, and the United States proudly honors this prolific cellist and ambassador for the arts.”

Ma founded the Committee of 100 with I.M. Pei and several other distinguished Chinese Americans in 1989 to give Chinese Americans a strong voice in U.S.-China relations and Asian American affairs.

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New Member: Yuan Yuan Tan

Yuan Yuan Tan, Principal Dancer since 1997 of the San Francisco Ballet, is the first dancer to join the Committee of 100. Time has described the Shanghai-born ballerina as “the most critically acclaimed dancer to emerge from China,” and she remains the only native Chinese principal dancer in an international dance company. Tan was first spotted by San Francisco Ballet artistic director Helgi Tomasson in a 1992 international dance competition in Paris and joined the company as a soloist at age 18, speaking no English, in 1995. Since that time, Tan has contributed to making the San Francisco Ballet’s last two decades the most celebrated of its more than 75-year history as the nation’s oldest professional ballet company.

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Chinese American Hall of Fame: Ed Lee, Interim Mayor of San Francisco

 

C-100 members aren’t the only prominent Americans of Chinese descent breaking barriers and making headlines.

In this column, we salute other extraordinary Chinese Americans.

Chinese America’s long-time “capital,” San Francisco, finally has a Chinese American Mayor. On January 10, Edwin M. Lee was sworn in as San Francisco City and County’s 43^rdMayor, filling the final year of the term of former Mayor (and now California’s Lieutenant Governor) Gavin Newsom. Lee had been San Francisco’s City Administrator since 2005 and worked in city government since 1989. He previously was managing lawyer for the San Francisco Asian Law Caucus and graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. He was born in Seattle, Washington. One of Lee’s first official duties was attending the state dinner for President Hu Jintao at the White House on January 19. TheSan Francisco Chronicle reported that Lee’s appointment as the first Asian American Mayor of San Francisco has been big news in China. Lee’s daughter, Brianna, wrote about her feelings at his inauguration in a PBS blog : “As I sat in the rotunda next to my 85-year-old grandmother, who raised six children as a garment worker, it was hard not to witness this seemingly sudden shift through generationswithout a sense of incredulity.”

New Member: Ge Li

Ge Li is Chairman and CEO of WuXi PharmaTech (NYSE: WX), among the world’s largest pharmaceutical R&D service companies and a pioneer in the field. Li founded WuXi in Shanghai in 2000 to speed the drug discovery and development process and improve its rate of success by allowing multinationals like Pfizer and Merck and smaller biotech firms to outsource early-stage research, clinical trials, manufacturing and commercialization for new drugs and medical devices. Now with nearly 4,800 employees in the U.S. and China, 4,000 of them scientists (Li says WuXi is the largest employer of chemists in China), the company, which went public in 2007 and has a market cap of $1.2 billion, sells most of its services to American, European and Japanese companies. Among the products that WuXi has helped develop is Telaprevir, a highly effective hepatitis C drug by Vertex.

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Coming Soon: Members to Watch For

Cheng Li

February 2, New York City

Bloomberg China Investment Strategies

New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building

Registration information: contact Tracy David, 212-647-6530 or by email.

As part of this day-long seminar on China’s trade and economic picture, Brookings Institution Senior Scholar and Thornton China Center Director of Research Cheng Li will be a panelist speaking on “Western Brands and Consumer Demand in China.”

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Newsmakers: Links to Members in the News

 

Dominic Ng’s East West Bank made two celebrated lists this holiday season, Fortune’s “Ten Best Stocks for 2011” and Forbes’ list of “America’s Best Banks.” Fortune credited East West’s quick response to the financial crisis and its prosperous and saving-oriented Asian American customers for its excellent prospects: “That helps explain why East West boasts a return on equity four times higher than the median regional bank, and why its shares seem likely to appreciate.” Also noted was that East West’s financial strength allowed it to buy two distressed banks from the FDIC last year. For the full article, go here.

Forbes in its “America’s Best and Worst Banks” (December 20, 2010), ranked East West Bankcorp as number two in the “Best” category: “It is the largest bank in the U.S. focused on serving the Asian-American community. Assets have increased 64% over the past year, and its return on average equity was 16.6%, fourth-best among big banks.”

Read America's Best and Worst Banks article

C-100 Member Ta-Lin Hsu named Chairman of Give2Asia

Press Release - SAN FRANCISCO, January 12, 2011 – Give2Asia, a leading provider of services for philanthropy to Asia, announces today that Dr. Ta-lin Hsu has been named as Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

Dr. Hsu is the founder and chairman of H&Q Asia Pacific. His work as a venture capitalist has led to the launch of numerous successful enterprises in the region, and has helped bring large brands to new Asian markets, such as introducing Starbucks Coffee to China and MTV to Japan. He has been a member of Give2Asia’s Board of Trustees since January 2009.

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Members: Of Note

San Francisco Asian Art Museum Director Jay Xu is co-curator of an original exhibition at New York City’s China Institute, “Along the Yangzi River: Regional Culture of the Bronze Age from Hunan.” Xu, an international expert on ancient Chinese bronze culture, will give the Curator’s Lecture in conjunction with the exhibition’s opening on January 27. The exhibition was organized by the China Institute and Hunan Provincial Museum and features unusual bronze vessels produced in the south of China and rarely seen outside of the country. A prolific writer and popular speaker, Xu is co-author of a prize-winning 1996 book on a huge bronze foundry in Houma, Shanxi province.  Information on the China Institute exhibition can be found here: www.chinainstitute.org

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New Members: Dazong Wang

 

Dazong Wang, President and CEO of Beijing Automotive Group Corp. (BAIC), is probably the only American citizen running a large state-owned enterprise in China. If China becomes competitive in the world automotive market, Wang’s role and his expertise gained in 21 years as an engineer and executive for General Motors will surely be credited. Wang aims to make the huge BAIC (59,000 employees and 1.5 million vehicles) into a global success, building on its strong commercial vehicle production that leads the world in the volume of trucks, buses and vans sold (almost all in China). In the coming months, BAIC will release its first branded passenger vehicle and is planning mass production of all-electric vehicles in 2011. Since Wang took over the slow-growing BAIC in 2008, he has revived sales, which have grown 2.3 times, and profits, 7 times higher. BAIC under Wang’s leadership has completed such cross-border mergers and acquisitions as the 2009 purchase of key SAAB assets from GM.

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