Jonathan Spence holds the position of Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University, and is well-known throughout the world for his insightful views on modern China. His books include The Search for Modern China, To Change China: Western Advisers in China, and Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man, among many others. A graduate of the University of Cambridge and Yale University, Spence holds a number of honorary degrees, has served as president of the American Historical Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has held both a MacArthur and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has received the Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George from Queen Elizabeth II.

Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. He is a former Professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of numerous books on China, and is a contributor to many magazines and edited volumes. Schell was educated at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. He worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and has traveled widely in China since the mid-70s.

John Delury is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history at Yale University, where he wrote his disertation on the Ming-Qing Confucian scholar Gu Yanwu. He taught at Brown, Columbia, and Peking University, and was Associate Director of Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations.