CHINA Town Hall: Society & Culture

    SPEAKERS

Raymond Chang is the baseball operations manager for Major League Baseball (MLB) China, responsible for overseeing MLB China development centers. He is featured in the documentary The Great China Baseball Hunt, which describes his quest to cultivate young Chinese baseball players into the MLB stars of the future.  As a former professional baseball player, he signed with the San Diego Padres in 2005 and went on to play professionally for twelve years with five different MLB organizations:  the Padres, Pittsburgh Pirates, Boston Red Sox, Minnesota Twins, and Cincinnati Reds. Raymond participated in three different World Baseball Classics in 2009, 2013, and 2017, playing for the Chinese National Team, which he was eligible to do as a U.S. citizen as both of his parents were born in China.

Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, he graduated from Rockhurst University with a degree in international business. He is co-owner of the Gold Glove Baseball Academy in Kansas City.

Chef Lucas Sin, Eater Young Guns Class of 2019 and Forbes 30 under 30, opened his first restaurant when he was 16, in an abandoned newspaper factory in his hometown of Hong Kong. Despite spending his Yale undergraduate years in the cognitive science and English departments, Mr. Sin devoted his weekends to running restaurants out of his dorm, known as Y Pop-up.

Prior to joining junzi’s founding team and opening junzi kitchen, a growing fast-casual mini-chain of home-style Chinese cooking, Mr. Sin cooked at Modernist Cuisine in Seattle, Kikunoi Honten in Kyoto, and Michelin-starred kitchens in Hong Kong and New York. Beyond junzi’s daily menu, he curates a collaborative tasting menu exploring the narrative of Chinese culinary history in relation to other cultures of the world, which he calls Chef’s Study. Throughout the coronavirus crisis, Mr. Sin and the team transformed Chef’s Study into a three-course delivery dinner called Distance Dining, served every Friday with a side of Instagram Live.

Janet Yang, president of Janet Yang Productions, is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Hollywood producer with deep roots in China. She is on the board of governors of the Motion Picture Academy and was recently elected to an officer position chairing the membership and governance committee.

Ms. Yang came to prominence through her collaboration with Steven Spielberg on “Empire of the Sun” (Warner Bros). That was followed by a long partnership with multiple Academy Award-winner Oliver Stone during which she served as executive producer on the iconic “The Joy Luck Club” (Disney), and as a producer on the Golden Globe-winning “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (Columbia Pictures).

She is a co-founder of Gold House, a non-profit collective of influential Asian cultural leaders; a long-standing member of the Committee of 100, an organization of prominent Chinese-Americans; an advisory board member of Asia Society Southern California where she is chair of its annual signature “U.S.-Asia Entertainment Summit:” an advisory board member of CAPE, the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment; and a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Ms. Yang was recently granted a presidential fellowship at Loyola Marymount University, and she has taught producing at the Sundance Institute. She received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.

    MODERATOR

Alison M. Friedman joined the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) in October 2017 as artistic director of performing arts. She leads the dance, theatre, xiqu, music and outdoor festival, and learning and participation teams of the performing arts division to ensure WKCDA’s performing arts programs are conceptualized, curated, and implemented, and to realize the Authority’s vision to be a regional and global leader in the performing arts.

Ms. Friedman was a board member of the International Society for the Performing Arts (2013 – 2018), one of the largest international alliances of performing arts leaders. Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Ms. Friedman founded the cultural exchange organization Ping Pong Productions (PPP) in 2010 after studying as a Fulbright scholar in the department of history at Peking University and the Beijing Dance Academy from 2002 to 2003. Prior to establishing PPP, Ms. Friedman held producer and general manager positions at dance and music institutions, including the Beijing Modern Dance Company, and composer and conductor roles at Tan Dun’s production and management company.