Wen Haiming

Wen Haiming is a professor of philosophy at Renmin University. He received his Ph.D. In Comparative Philosophy from the University of Hawaii, and his MA from Peking University. His research interests include Chinese philosophy and comparative philosophy. His works include Confucian Real Meaning Ethics ( 儒家实意伦理学)，Chinese Philosophy, and Confucian Pragmatism as the art of Contextualizing Personal Experience and World. His Chinese Philosophy has been translated into English, French, Spanish, and Arabic.

Patrick Mendis

Patrick Mendis is a Harvard Kennedy School’s former Rajawali senior fellow and a current associate-in-research of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. He currently serves as a commissioner of the US National Commission for UNESCO at the US Department of State. An alumnus of the Harvard Executive Leadership Program at the Kennedy School of Government, he earned his PhD in geography/applied economics and agriculture from the University of Minnesota, MA in international development and foreign affairs from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and BSc in business administration and economics (summa cum laude) from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. A Socrates fellow of the Aspen Institute, he is a former Twenty-first Century Trust fellow at Oxford University and a Coolidge research fellow at Columbia University. An adjunct professor of geography and geoinformation science at George Mason University (GMU), Dr. Mendis previously served as a distinguished senior fellow and affiliate professor of public and international affairs at the Schar School of Policy and Government at GMU where he authored his most recent book, Peaceful War (foreword by GMU Professor Jack Goldstone). He also served as a distinguished scholar and senior expert of the Confucius Institute at GMU. He is currently a distinguished visiting researcher at the National Confucius Research Institute of China in Qufu, a senior fellow of the Pangoal Institution in Beijing, and a distinguished visiting professor of Asian-Pacific affairs at Shandong University in Jinan. He has also previously served as a visiting scholar or a distinguished visiting professor at the Universities of Peking, Zhejiang, Wuhan, Tongji, Nanjing, Guangdong, Xian, as well as the Chinese Foreign Affairs University of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In addition, he has also lectured at over 25 universities in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hunan, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Taiwan, among others, and has visited all but four provinces of China, including Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Macau, Tibet, and Xinjiang. In 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed him as a commissioner to the United States National Commission for UNESCO. He was then reappointed for another term in 2015 by Secretary of State John Kerry. Previously, he was appointed by the George W. Bush administration to serve as a governing board member of the Graduate School of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). His other government and international experience includes positions in the Minnesota House of Representatives, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the World Bank, and the United Nations. Prior to joining GMU, Dr. Mendis served as the vice president of academic affairs at the Osgood Center for International Studies and a visiting foreign policy scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). While at SAIS, he authored two books: Trade for Peace (foreword by Professor Brian Atwood, former dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota) and Commercial Providence (foreword by Professor Stephen Joel Trachtenberg at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and the president emeritus of the George Washington University). Before returning to academia, Professor Mendis served as an American diplomat under Secretaries Madeline Albright and General Colin Powell. Joining the Department of State as a mid-career science and diplomacy fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Mendis served as a foreign affairs officer, chaired US interagency policy working groups, managed US international educational and cultural programs, advised the US Delegations to the United Nations, coordinated science and technology policy with the White House, and served as vice chairman of the Secretary Powell’s Open Forum. He also lectured at the George Shultz Institute of Foreign Service. For his interagency leadership and government service, he was recognized with the State Department’s Meritorious Honor Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, as well as other honors. After his diplomatic assignments, Dr. Mendis worked as a consulting economist at the US Department of Energy’s Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Prior to serving in the State Department, he was a military professor in NATO as well as the US Pacific Command through the University of Maryland, serving in every major American military base in Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. For his teaching, leadership, and service, he was selected by faculty, military officers, and students for the Stanley Drazek Teaching Excellence Award. Professor Mendis joined the Maryland faculty after his teaching and research career at the University of Minnesota, where he established the Edward Burdick Legislative Award, honoring his mentor and friend the late Honorable Ed Burdick, former chief clerk and parliamentarian of the Minnesota House of Representatives. He is a recipient of the Alumnus of Notable Achievement Award from the University of Minnesota. In 2004, Dr. Mendis served as a visiting professor of economics and public policy at the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester at Sea Program and authored a book based on his global voyage, Glocalization (foreword by the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke of the King’s College in London). He also taught at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University and the George Washington University. He was a visiting professor of economics and management at the Leningrad State University in the former Soviet Union and lectured at the Moscow State University. Author of more than 100 books, journal articles, newspaper columns and government reports, Dr. Mendis has received numerous awards and honors for his leadership, public service and philanthropic activities. These include the Hubert Humphrey Outstanding Leadership Award, the University of Minnesota President’s Award for Outstanding Leadership and Service, the United Nations Medal for the International Year of the Youth, the Harold Stassen Award for United Nations Affairs, the USDA Graduate School Outstanding Service Award, and the Exceptional Achievement Award in International Diplomacy. He has lived, traveled, and worked in more than 120 countries and visited all 50 states and other territories of the US. A fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, Dr. Mendis serves (or has served) as an advisor to the Harvard International Review, an editor of The Public Manager, an advisor to The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lankan Diaspora at the National University of Singapore, and as a councilor on the Harvard Kennedy School DC Alumni Council. He has also established the Millennials Award for Leadership and Service at Harvard University and other scholarships in Sri Lanka. Professor Mendis is a former American Field Service (AFS) high school exchange scholar from Sri Lanka to Perham, Minnesota in the 1970s, where he considers his “birthplace” in America. Prior to becoming a naturalized US citizen, he represented the Government of Sri Lanka as its “Youth Ambassador” to the United Nations, and is listed in the “13 World Famous People Born in Sri Lanka,” Who’s Who of Asian Americans, as well as Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.

Henry Rosemont, Jr.

Henry was born in December, 1934, in Chicago, the eldest son to two significant rank-and-file labor activists, Sally (Janiak) and Henry P. Rosemont. His mother was a jazz musician and his father belonged to the Chicago Typographical Union No. 16, the union shop of Albert Parsons, among the Haymarket martyrs and husband of Lucy Parsons, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. Henry Rosemont, Jr. was a life-changing teacher. He began his teaching career at Oakland University in 1967 and brought his students to study in China for a semester that year. Perhaps guided by his experience in Korea, Henry supported his former student, Michael K. Honey, in his petition to the Boston draft board for alternate service rather than fight in Vietnam in 1969. Sponsored by Unitarian Universalist Association, Honey served for six years in the American south during the Civil Rights Movement, an experience that would greatly inform the Guggenheim Fellow’s celebrated scholarship. Beginning in 1982, Henry began teaching at Fudan University and attained the rank of Senior Professor there. It was during his first years at Fudan that he wrote his “Shanghai Journal” for In These Times. Henry’s reportage from Shanghai is indicative of his commitment to social change as demonstrated by his other writings published in the Resist Newsletter, Anarchist Quarterly, Z Magazine, and Social Anarchism. At the age of eighteen, after several years of hitchhiking west on Route 66 and with the education that a string of undistinguished jobs provides, Henry volunteered to be sent to the Korean peninsula as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, serving from 1952 until 1955. It was in Korea that he first encountered “East Asia” and learned the insanity of war. He earned an honors AB at the University of Illinois and was awarded in 1967 the PhD in Philosophy at the University of Washington for his dissertation on logic, language, and Zen. He then completed postdoctoral training in Linguistics with Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1969 and 1971. Their friendship sustained for more than four decades. Consistently and in the care-full manner of the Confucian sage, Henry sought to emulate what was best in his teachers. From Chomsky he found “living proof that intelligence could serve conscience as well as abstract theory.”Henry, himself, is often described by those who know him as embodying the junzi (君子), which he and Roger Ames translate, in their Philosophical Translation of the Analects (1998) as “exemplary person.” Socially and politically engaged, the Confucian tradition characterizes the junzi as being trustworthy and calm (Analects 8.6), both deferring to others on matters they don't understand and not being careless in their attitude toward what is said (13.3). The junzi are on the side of the needy and the poor, rather than making the rich richer (6.4), they don't associate with the unkind (17.7) and are consummate in their acts and align what they do with what they say they will do (15.19). Henry made good on what he said he would do. Henry is a model for collegiality, which he demonstrated not only by the admiration of his peers and associates but also by his commitment to celebrating what is excellent in those for whom he cared and with whom he worked. He contributed to a number of volumes celebrating the careers of a range of excellent scholars including: Herbert Fingarette, Huston Smith, Eliot Deutsch, and Nathan Sivin. Henry edited the volume honoring A.C. Graham in 1991 (he also memorialized Graham in the pages of Philosophy East & West in 1992, his memorial serving as a model for mine to Henry). In 2005, with Ewing Chinn, Henry was responsible for the book celebrating David L. Hall. Henry also edited, with significant help from Michael Nylan—although she declined the credit—the recent (2014) collection of David N. Keightley’s writings on Early China. Henry published his Against Individualism: A Confucian Rethinking of the Foundations of Morality, Politics, Family, and Religion (Lexington Books, 2016) not as a missive against celebrating particularity, but rather to honor and encourage the growth of the relationships that make “us” particularly-us. “Who we are” is the sum of the relationships we perform and are born into, as he would often tell us. Through meaning-generating relationships I become individuated: I am the son of Sally, Steve and Michelle, I am the husband of Karen, father of Pendleton, brother of Stanfield and Jennifer, the student of so many excellent teachers, the neighbor of Jyotsna and of Marvin, the uncle to Nora and Henry, I am now the teacher of my own students. Each of these roles have proscribed how I ought to act at times and, as I have come to demonstrate suitable virtuosity in performing these roles, I have been granted more and more relative autonomy within my lifetime. Now I am in a position to reflect on and model for others how we can best perform our roles.