Grace Gao

Grace Gao is daughter to Gao Zhisheng – a prominent Chinese human rights lawyer who is best known for his work defending Christians, Falun Gong adherents, and other vulnerable social groups. As a result of his work on ‘sensitive’ cases and his open letters to Chinese political leaders, he was subject to numerous incidences of enforced disappearance and torture before being convicted of ‘inciting to subvert state power’. After three years in prison, he was released on 7 August 2014 with serious health problems, and has been under effective house arrest. Since mid August 2017, he has been missing again. Gao has authored a comprehensive report detailing human rights abuses and related social issues in China in the year 2016. This is the first comprehensive human rights commentary written by a human rights lawyer still living in China and his commentary covers a wide range of human rights abuses, including violations of the right to freedom of religion or belief, abuses in Tibet and Xinjiang and the situation of lawyers and human rights defenders. Grace has worked tirelessly, raising awareness of her father’s situation and wider human rights issues in China.

Angela Gui

Angela Gui is the daughter of the Hong Kong bookseller Gui Minhai who is believed to have been abducted by Chinese agents in Thailand in late 2015. Gui was one of the five men who vanished in a spate of incidents known as the Causeway Bay Bookstore Disappearances.  It is believed he was targeted due to his work as a publisher specialising in books critical of the Chinese Communist Party.  Gui resurfaced months later in a detention centre in China, and was made to publicly confess to crimes on Chinese state television.  There has been no presentation of charges or conclusive evidence for his alleged crimes.  Angela is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, and has been campaigning for her father’s release since he went missing. You can read her article in The Guardian here.

Isabel Hilton (Chair)

Isabel Hilton is a London-based international journalist and broadcaster. She studied at the Beijing Foreign Language and Culture University and at Fudan University in Shanghai before taking up a career in written and broadcast journalism, working for The Sunday Times, The Independent, The Guardian, and the New Yorker. In 1992 she became a presenter of the BBC’s flagship news program, “The World Tonight,” then BBC Radio Three’s cultural program “Night Waves.” She is a columnist for The Guardian and her work has appeared in the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Granta, the New Statesman, El Pais, Index on Censorship, and many other publications. She is the author and co-auothor of several books and is founder and editor of chinadialogue.net, a non-profit, fully bilingual online publication based in London, Beijing, and Delhi that focuses on the environment and climate change.

Ben Bland

Ben Bland is the South China correspondent for the Financial Times, currently working out of Hong Kong. Bland is the author of the recently published Generation HK – an exploration into the youth in Hong Kong, from activists, artists, writers and journalists, and the encroaching threat on their freedom of speech from the mainland. Bland has been a correspondent in Asia for almost a decade. Before Hong Kong he was based in both Indonesia and Vietnam.

Featured photo: A protestor is wrapped up with rope during a march calling for the release of missing booksellers in Hong Kong’s Mighty Current Publishing house, January 10, 2016.

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/americas-shifting-foreign

As Barack Obama enters the second year of his second and final term in office, he faces considerable foreign policy challenges. The US position on Syria and the controversy over the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya are weighing on the president. There is a notable attempt by the Obama administration to make a strategic pivot towards Asia and away from the Middle East.

Join us as we dissect Obama’s foreign policy ambitions, exploring the shifts in focus and how they are playing out. Will he achieve his second term goals? Can he successfully pull focus to Asia or will the conflict in Syria direct attention back to the Middle East?

The Obama administration is making considerable efforts to redefine American power, through domestic reforms that the president calls “nation-building at home” and substantial shifts in foreign policy. We will be looking more widely at the attempts to rebuild America’s global strength.

Chaired by author, journalist and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb. He has worked for NPR and the BBC, and has written for Global Post, the Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The panel:

Kim Ghattas has been the BBC’s State Department correspondent since 2008, and travels regularly with the Secretary of State. She is author of the recently published The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power. She was previously a Middle East correspondent for the BBC and the Financial Times, based in Beirut. Her work has also appeared in TIME magazine, the Boston Globe, NPR, and The Washington Post.

Professor Michael Cox is founding co-director of LSE IDEAS and professor of International Relations at LSE. He has held appointments at The Queen’s University of Belfast, California State University at San Diego, The College of William and Mary in Virginia, the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth, The Catholic University of Milan, the University of Melbourne, and the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies in Canberra, Australia. He is general editor of two successful book series Rethinking World Politics and Cold War History. He is author, editor and co-editor of several books including The Rise and Fall of the American Empire: From Bush to Obama, US Presidents and Democracy Promotion, US Foreign Policy and Soft Power and US Foreign Policy.

Dana Allin, is senior fellow for US foreign policy and transatlantic affairs, and editor of Survival: Global Politics and Strategy at The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He is professorial lecturer at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C., and adjunct professor of European studies at the SAIS Bologna Center. He is author and co-author of five books including, most recently, The Sixth Crisis: Iran, Israel, America, and the Rumors of War and Weary Policeman: American Power in an Age of Austerity.

Nick Schifrin is a foreign correspondent for ABC News based in London. Previously he was the ABC News Afghanistan-Pakistan correspondent and bureau chief based in both Kabul and Islamabad, from 2008 until 2012.

With a panel of experts and journalists we will be examining the political realignment taking place in the Middle East and North Africa.

We will be asking what the shifts in Arab world mean for Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia: What is Israel’s likely response to the emerging democracies that are replacing autocrats who held onto power in the name of “stability” in the region. How will countries like Egypt respond to Israel in the future and how will the balance of power change?

We will be looking to at how Iran and Saudi Arabia respond to the changes taking place and the role of the Arab League in the future.

In association with BBC Arabic

Chaired by Sam Farah, the lead presenter of BBC Arabic’s flagship interactive programme Nuqtat Hewar (Talking Point).

With:

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst;

Abdel Bari Atwan, since 1989 he has been the editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a major independent pan-Arab daily newspaper published in London and author of The Secret History of al-Qa’ida and A Country of Words, his memoir.

William Morris, Secretary General of the Next Century Foundation, formerly a journalist and publisher he has been involved in the Middle East for more than 30 years. As Chairman of the International Media Council he has led press delegations to Iraq, Palestine, Israel, Egypt and Syria.

Picture credit: Bahrain Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Writing on the Foreign Policy blog Thomas E. Ricks suggests we should start reading newspapers like reporters. His simple, but misguided, point is that we should simply follow the writers we like, look for the bylines we know and love, read those articles and pretty much ignore the rest of the paper. Here’s his take,

OK, so it’s not How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. But the secret of reading a newspaper like a reporter is to pick stories by bylines. I’ve mentioned, for example, that I will read anything Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post  writes about Iraqi politics, or life in Iraq. Another go-to reporter is C.J. Chivers of the New York Times. I’ve never met him, but I keep an eye out for his reporting from Afghanistan. link

I have favourite writers, I have favourite publications, but I can’t imagine scouring for bylines of the egos I most like to stroke from within the pages I most like to turn. And I’m not sure I know any other reporters who do that. While my journey might start at a particular news organisation, it rarely ends there and normally ends up somewhere I’ve never heard of before. The only way to read the news like a reporter these day should be with RSS, keywords and custom search engines. That doesn’t appear to be the norm yet which is why I enjoy teaching this course so much. Byline driven news reading…?? no thanks.

Photograph of Tehran newspapers by birdfarm.

How will President Barack Obama tackle the Middle East and the United States relationship with the region? That’s the question up for debate tonight at the Frontline Club. We start at 7pm GMT / 11am PST tonight Tues 27 Januray. The event is sold out. If you can’t make it to the club in person, you can catch the discussion live on the Frontline Club live channel.

Taking part will be Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, from the War Studies department at King’s College London, Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi, executive director of the Transatlantic Institute, Sadeq Saba, BBC’s Iranian affairs analyst, Zaki Chehab, political editor for the London-based broadsheet Al Hayat and a Senior Editor for the Arabic TV channel LBC and Dr Rosemary Hollis, director of City University London’s Olive Tree Israeli-Palestinian scholarship programme. I hope you can come and join us. More details below,

As Obama prepares to take office as the 44th US president, he is set to face huge challenges in the Middle East. Will the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that he is proposing with the region pave the way for improved relations with Iran and prevent them from developing their nuclear programme? Will he be able to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace process where every US president before him has failed and how will he balance his commitment to Israel with his desire to build peace with the Palestinians? Who are his new panel of advisors and special envoys to the Middle East and what will they mean for the region? And will the man famed for his rhetoric be able to make his vision a reality? link